Braided beauties and botox at the Brad Ngata party

Brad Ngata, centre, and entourage

Brad Ngata is one of those hairdressers who gets profiled by Vogue. I’m on the invite list for a party at his new Crown Street salon. I dream Brad himself will catch sight of my hair – which is thick, coarse, black and falls in glossy waves beyond my waist – and will want to make my head his magnum opus. Maybe he’ll fall in love with my hair and want to revolutionise it. Maybe.

The party has a big sponsor logo-splashed board out the front where two name-checking sentinels stand. Inside, there’s a blunt-fringed cutie, a rare man with magical pastel dream-hair. I say, “You’re here to get me drunk!” and relieve him of a glass of champagne.

Thus hydrated, I start talking with a stranger. This is talking in the loosest sense possible. My mouth moves, then his does, then mine and so forth. As an exchange of information this is a bit of a failure. It’s too loud. Too crazy for pedestrian things like conversation. In any case, I’m grateful to have someone to wave my gums at. This is keeping me from my usual wallflower ways: cling to the wall, scoff the canapés, attempt an awkward compliment, repeat steps one to three. I’m better as an observer, not a schmoozer.

The disco balls are glittering near the bar with its choice of two flavours of boozy slushy: the pinkish one happens to be vodka, peach schnapps and cranberry juice and it’s delicious and potent. Ah, peach schnapps. I have it from Jeffrey Eugenides that “babes love it”.

I’m in a well-dressed, well-coiffed crowd. Some of them are even worth capturing on film. I’d like to be a slick shooter with a Terry Richardson-worthy SLR who can sidle up to a braided beauty and ask to get a picture of her coif; I can’t do this. Can’t shoot to save my life. Had to try this recently for work and for reasons unknown the soft setting was on and all the shots looked like the lens was thick with Vaseline, like we were trying to capture the cast of Days of Our Lives in their dewy youth, no wrinkles allowed.

In the end I grip my goody bag (travel-sized L’Oreal hair dryer, pamphlet advertising Botox (oh please), pointer to the Brad Ngata app that advertises his services for $20 for a fringe trim up to $250 for a style cut) and I walk off into the night in shamefully flat shoes.

I, wannabe preppy

1981 polo players in - duh - Polo Ralph Lauren. Image via Vanity Fair

She's the sort of woman who is uniformly honey-coloured - tanned of limb and blonde of hair. Also at once lithe and muscular, like someone credibly sporty, she is reclining in pristine tennis whites. The sort of gear you can't possibly wear because real people can't wear white.

I wish I could show you this image which was somewhere in VanityFair.com's image galleries. It is a campaign shot for a high-end athletic wear label and it is beautifully, impossibly preppy. It's so preppy it's poetry. Somehow it's even preppier than the rows of granite-jawed college men with Brideshead Revisited hair who adorn the walls any given Ralph Lauren store.

In my dreams, I am this preppy. I too am of the American leisure class. I am of a world that might not ever have existed for it is so pastel-coloured and sun-soaked and romanticised. It might be less real than my fantasies of how Paris is supposed to be.

In my dreams I have a collection of Lilly Pulitzer sundresses and old-money parents who understand the importance of seersucker and the appeal of improbable names - Bitsy, maybe, or Muffy, or similar. In my dreams I have a country club membership, lacrosse-playing skills and a full wardrobe of J Crew woolens in sorbet colours.

But, wouldn't you know it, it is not to be. There's a couple of reasons (not blonde, not moneyed, no particular athletic gifts to speak of). Beyond this, I have trouble even aping the style. Polo shirts mostly do not agree with me. The athletic, classic, all-American sportswear look is difficult to do - as a friend of mine puts it, it can look nerdy. Being somewhat nerdy at the best of times, the look on me is tempting fate. I appreciate the clean lines, the simplicity but I also feel underdone when I try to do it - there's no statement, sometimes just a mild blandness. I would like to do it with the aplomb of fictitious preppies like Aspeth Montgomery in Curtis Sittenfeld's novel (titled Prep, but of course). Aspeth with her pastel striped bikinis and rich-girl shampoo. Like Lee Fiora, the girl hero, I am caught up in the dream-scape of preppyness.

Ironically enough back in college someone did call me preppy (was it because of the fake Tommy Hilfiger shirt I had on at the time? Perhaps, perhaps). And at the time I thought she meant peppy, as in full of energy and verve. That isn't a bad description of me. Preppy, no. Peppy, yes, always.