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.