I’ve never been a fashion maven, despite growing up under the influence of an elegant mother with a seamstress’ touch; a mother, who, in her ’70s, still receives compliments for her sartorial style.
Like the flair and patience for sewing, having an eye for cut, silhouette, and a nose for upkeep, aren’t skills I’ve inherited. I’m the type who ends up in the garden in my good clothes, because somehow the alarmed call of a weed-choked dahlia bed has finally grown too insistent just as I’m popping out a bit of laundry on the line in the half hour before work meetings. Alacazam, there go the blue silk skirt and satiny floral top: pollen-stained, cobwebbed and snagged by thorns and brambles. I’m also the type who has held on to a decades-old winter coat which is now more textured with woollen pills than a table-tennis bat is bobbled with short-pips. The coat is warm, it fits, and ditching its serviceable hide for the latest trend would surely just add to the degradations of fast fashion: worker exploitation, environmental pollution.
So, late this past spring, when I set myself the task of culling my side of the wardrobe, I thought it would be simple. A matter of deciding what fits, what’s faded, and what’s been colonised by webbing clothes moths. (Nature’s lace-makers, they flicker in the wardrobe gloom like bits of straw or tiny stray pale golden stars.)
I’m not a deliberate hoarder — except of books. I’m off-trend in my decision to expel old clothes. (Isn’t Marie Kondo so two years ago?) The resolution was brought on, actually, by my chic mother’s generosity. She had recently given me so many hand-me-downs (for complex, difficult reasons) that I couldn’t find anything. The coat hangers were jammed in worse than sardines (at least sardines, well-oiled, can be prised out with a fork).
I reminded myself to be practical, and skip her recent gifts: those items were in excellent nick, so definitely not for the biff-pile. Just dig up the rest of the dross, I told myself, and chuck it out.
But it wasn’t long before I saw many decisions wouldn’t be based on size, frayed cuffs, fading patterns, necklines that looked, mysteriously, mouse-nibbled. There were clothes I couldn’t throw out even if they didn’t fit, or I was unlikely ever again to have the right occasion for them: not even taking into consideration the pressures to conform to a certain figure, and assumptions about what’s "too lamby" for an older woman.
The reasons I’ve clung to some outfits form a whole complicated braid of hope, memory, loss and denial.
There are, initially, also obvious items for the "keep" pile: things that anyone would guess could trigger a surge of emotional associations. There’s a green velvet sheath with deep V-cleavage and long central row of cloth-covered buttons: my wedding dress, which I shopped for alone in Covent Garden, when I lived in London. A string quartet busked below the balcony-level store, playing Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, and it didn’t even feel as if I was in some wry, bumbling romantic comedy: it just felt glorious, serendipitous. This was the dress I forewarned my maternal grandmother, Dorothy, about; knowing that she held tenaciously to the superstition that marrying in green brings bad luck. At my wedding, she gripped my wrist, whispering in a tone that melded a scolding and a sense of scandal, "You told me it was green, but it’s nearly black!". I laughed this off, pointing out that my colour choice didn’t mean I loved my husband any the less. Within a year, both Dorothy and my father had died.
I imagine her now, clutching my elbow as tightly as she can with the crooked, spindle-like fingers that fascinated me as a child, whispering, "See? What did I say?".
The deep, drowning, forest-pond green of the fabric brings back my granny, her high, light voice, the trilling whoop of her laugh, the crepe-papery, cushiony crumple of her skin, the way she managed to seem both infinitely kind, yet — although she was ensnared by things like wedding dress folklore — also pertly intolerant of fools. The dress stays.
Another self-evident short-cut to nostalgia: the small collection of baby jerseys knitted by my mother-in-law and my mother. Even a glimpse of their patterns where they peep out from a high shelf brings back the warm, solid weight of my robust baby boys as they balanced on my hips. I can see the tight-as-wood-shavings blond curls of one, the straight floss of the other; the mango-soft rounds of their cheeks. I can hear the exploratory breath and bubble of their first words, remember the chafed noses, flushes, and wails of fevers, sobs of overtiredness and first disappointments, alongside the tenderness of them "nuddling" (a baby word from one) into me for safety.
The casual clothes, too, bring a gaggle of reminders. There is the blotched, holey T-shirt I’ve had since I was 14. Printed with Shakespeare’s head, it bears a slogan in mock 16th century fountain-pen font. "Will Power". The genie that leaps out of this time capsule is my father: his resolute, all-decades moustache; his banter, his love of puns. It may well have been Mum who bought me the shirt, but Dad excelled in corny word-play, when in a gambolling, St Bernard-pup-on-holiday mood. It’s a keeper. It’s been a keeper for 40 years!
T-shirts, in fact, are a problematic category. There’s one I "earned" at a book festival by composing a rhyming couplet on the spot; I sometimes wonder if its slogan, "Well-versed", lays claim to knowledge I don’t have. I dither: but keep it, again, for the word play. Then there’s a pale, foxglove-pink top with a silver, asemic cursive decal, which also bears the ghost of a tarry scuff-mark from a toddler’s sandal. I can still remember the day the stain appeared. In a moment of mutual frazzlement I scooped up our first son in my arms: his furious instinct was to kick and climb. He dug a stinging, bruising shoe-heel into my stomach as he wailed, and I had to will myself to stay calm, trusting that equilibrium would pour from me to him, belly to belly, a kind of spiritual osmosis. Somehow, through whisper and touch, that’s what happened. The shirt carries a kind of birthing scar: a day when we broke through a storm of disarray and distress together. It’s a keeper.
Or there’s another. My assertive, tender-hearted, irreverent Irish friend once took great offence on my behalf about a literary matter, sending me a customised white T-shirt that reads, in jaunty runner-bean green: "I write poems, not f------ pretentious existentialist crap!". I’ll never wear it in public: but each time I unearth it, it brings back her satirical sense of humour, her engaging volubility, the musical lilt of her accent. It makes me laugh: it stays.
The skirts remind me of how many layers of innocence we shed in a lifetime, and how even after loss and disillusionment, we can carry yet another skin of assumptions, of misplaced faith, and of idealism. If I throw these out, do I also finally jettison that young woman’s optimism?
Then, there is the totally impractical candy-pink skirt with matching jacket, which I wore to a 1960s-themed birthday held in the Woodhaugh Gardens. Friends went to so much trouble to dress in theme: there were multiple hippies, Go-Go girls, a moon-landing astronaut, our 7-year-old in vintage black velvet smoking jacket and John Lennon glasses; a 1969 shaped pinata for the children. Two months later, I was pregnant with our second child, so the only other time that pink skirt and jacket were worn was seven years later, at a cross-dressing party our then-14-year-old wanted. My husband wore it, along with a pink beanie and sunglasses. He looked like a very tall, lean, bogan grandmother. It’s a wonder his party nickname, Granny Danny, didn’t stick long term. I’ve tried before to donate that get-up: but he cries out that I can’t when he sees it in the toss pile. It’s as if entire scenes and conversations have somehow seeped into its boxy shape, the cotton daisy trim.
The last dilemma, and perhaps the toughest of all, is the decision over what to do with a sky-blue dress, its diaphanous, fine net layer woven over with leaf-shapes in silver thread. I bought this for performing in the Auckland Readers and Writers Festival one year. It reminds me of the shopping trip with my whip-smart, witty friend Vanessa, and my mum; a second-honeymoon feeling with my husband, as we travelled to Auckland, just the two of us; meeting the writer George Saunders; and yet also, of being condescended to in the most spectacularly brazen way by another writer. It was a turning point, I suppose, when I realised that I’d finally pivoted on the old sexist-and-ageist dime: spun from the days of being catcalled by random men, to being patronised and put down by a younger woman. The dress glints with warning: telling me to be wary of conflating the art and the artist. For how I had been intrigued by the young writer’s work, and yet how our encounter felt like the pointedly ominous betrayal of parable or fairy-tale. The silver-woven dress reminds me that perhaps I could do with sporting a tad more internal armour. I decide to hang on to it: for its doubleness; the way it gathers intimate memories, yet also the lingering sense of moral fable I need to assimilate.
It seems to me that some outfits set an even more potent series of associations in train than photos do. I suppose because fabric has texture, weight, and scent, there is not only a richer sensory link to time past, but also a fuller range of impressions we can call on to imagine a future self: all of which is even more emphasised when we slip into the clothes again. Standing in our toggery, our rooms take on all the magic of theatre and dream as we conjure up that potential, those convictions, those longed-for scenarios, different selves.
I’d had no idea how many garments would bring sharply delineated events rushing back into view. My wardrobe is less clothes storage than a shelter for memories: bright, patterned, plain, unflattering, or even ugly, the years in their plumage variously roost, whisper, rustle, mourn, sing.
