Is it really only a week since I conclusively dissed the snood? It is. Revenge was the snood’s, for not two days later, I found myself on a plane with Grey Gardens, a film in which the snood gets a starring role alongside Drew Barrymore and Jessica Lange. Including the flight back to London, I watched that film eight times. Imagine the treat in store now that I’ve ordered the 1975 documentary on which the Barrymore/Lange HBO vehicle is based, and which, inevitably, people keep saying is so much better than the movie I spent the best part of 15 hours watching.

I’d like to say I first stumbled across Grey Gardens, a 28-room mansion in East Hampton, Long Island, in a 30-page Norman Mailer article about social dislocation in America. But I came to it through a fashion shoot, “inspired” by the two Edie Bouvier Beales in American Harper’s Bazaar.

Little Edie and Big Edie, the chatelaines of Grey Gardens, were a mesmerisingly eccentric mother and daughter who had both been society beauties in their day and were relatives of Jackie Kennedy. America first became obsessed with their story in the early Seventies when the Suffolk County authorities tried to evict the women from their home. Deserted by their family, the formerly lovely Edies had run out of money, friends and running water. What they did have was 80 cats, sundry racoons peeing and defecating over the wrecked shell of the once beauteous Grey Gardens, and a 5ft mountain of trash in the dining room. Jackie, married to Onassis and shamed by the tabloid pictures of her aunt and cousin’s squalid living conditions, stumped up the money for a draconian clean-up.

Then came the cult documentary, in which Little Edie revealed her array of ingeniously pinned together skirts, flea-bitten furs left over from the Forties, and those snoody headscarves which, after she developed alopecia, she was never seen without. Although they lived as recluses, both Edies never looked less than arresting.

Weaving a fashion story around them might be considered bad taste: they were practically destitute when they evolved the rag-bag chic that the likes of Bazaar and the Olsen sisters find so stimulating. But then when did squeamishness ever stop fashion appropriating a fashion moment? If Eva Peron were around today, you can guarantee there would be a steady stream of “Why Not Steal Her Look After All She Did” stories in the celebrity mags. Arguably, with her trademark oversized chinchilla, even Anna Wintour could be said to have supped at the Edie altar. And in The One Hundred: A Guide to the Pieces Every Stylish Woman Must Own, Nina Garcia lists the 1975 release of Grey Gardens as one of the “Great Moments in Brooch History”.

There’s a serious point here somewhere. Squeamishness does stop fashion from trying to ravamp Nazi uniforms, and rightly so. Because while most people manage to reconcile their hatred of fascism with their love of, say, Wagner or Ezra Pound, wearing fascist uniforms would indicate a worrying degree of identification with the doctrine. Like it or not, we are what we wear. And Little Edie was a trooper.

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