ohOn my first birthday I got a charm bracelet and over the years various friends and relations have given me little charms to put on it: a small tennis racket, a dog that looks a bit (but not a lot) like us didn’t seem like a key for my 21st birthday. Once I earned my own money, I would occasionally buy a charm and add it to the bracelet – and it slowly grew into a miniature record of my life. When it was stolen in a burglary, I felt I had lost not only the physical object, but my life story.
Clothes tell our lives in a similar way, although unfortunately you can’t fit them into a small box. They are an autobiography in dust, gathering emotions and memories like a non-rolling stone. When it comes to Proustian triggers, clothes can give the madeleine a run for its money: a rifle through the wardrobe can slide you back down the corridors of time. It’s no wonder that throwing out a beloved dress can feel like burning a diary. It’s like giving away a part of yourself.
You can make a charm bracelet out of your clothes by playing a sartorial game Desert Island Discs trying to capture your life in eight pieces of clothing. Mine would include a pair of navy blue corduroy Levi’s that I wore so constantly in the sixth form that I felt naked when they were in the wash. Also our red school hat, so identifiable that people would call the head teacher to report us for eating on the street, leaving me with a lifelong inability to wear anything red. And a wet-look white skirt with braces (it was the 70s, but I still don’t know how I convinced my mom to buy it for me). I remember how devastated growing up I felt I had to look into it, even though pictures suggest otherwise.
You may have noticed that all these choices date back to growing up and this is due to a phenomenon known as the “memory bump”: the fact that people over 40 remember more of their adolescence and early adulthood than any other other part of their lives. It is a time when our bodies change and we form our identity and learn to express it through what we wear. It’s not always a smooth handover from getting dressed by our parents to dressing ourselves, and many of us will remember a hormonal showdown over a particular item of clothing – often a mini dress or a pair of high heels, but today just as likely ‘ a piercing or a tattoo.
There are also more recent charms (or chips, if you prefer) in my selection. A pair of long, black boots made from some kind of stretchy neoprene-type material that will make you look sharp even in a bag; the khaki jumpsuit, usually covered in clay, that I wear to sculpt; and the beaded gold above-the-knee dress I got married in bought second-hand at a consignment store two days before. I bought the shoes from the same place and they were almost impossible to walk in – as their previous owner of course also realized. I know it’s traditional to wear “something old” but maybe “everything old” has overdone it…
The symbolic power of clothes is writ large in the garments we wear for important occasions such as weddings, life rites of passage. “I haven’t opened the box with my wedding dress 31 years after I got married,” says Laura, a graphic designer. She had been divorced for half of that time. “At first I was too sad to take it out and figure out what to do with it and then I just didn’t get around to it,” she tells me. “It represented my happiness on my wedding day and all my hopes. When I finally got it out, I found a note from the dry cleaners underneath saying that there were marks on the fabric that they couldn’t guarantee to remove without damaging it, so they left it. I just laughed. I idealized this thing and it turns out it was spoiled a long time ago. It felt like a huge weight had been lifted and I made it to the charity shop painlessly.”
Our clothes collect a lot of their emotional moss from everyday life, but the important events, whether happy or traumatic, seem to be stuck on. A friend remembers exactly what she wore when she heard she would need stem cell treatment for her cancer. Another had to throw out the handbag that had been with her back and forth to the hospital when her mother was dying. And a widow who lost her firefighter on 9/11 packed away all the clothes she wore with her husband because “that was my life with him”, and it was over.
What we wear can be an outward manifestation of inner turmoil, as Shakespeare shows us King Learand in my opinion, the trend for distressed clothing, such as ripped jeans and frayed hems, tells a story of cultural unrest about the world in which we live. In Judaism, this connection is ritualized: mourners express their grief by cutting or tearing what they wear. “You have to wear it every day for as long as the shiva lasts,” explains Rachel, a social worker, speaking of the seven-day period when members of the community come to your home and prayers are offered. “So I choose something that can be washed overnight, although you’re not actually meant to wash it. I also choose something I don’t like, so I can throw it out later.”
Our relationship with our clothes is more intimate than with any of our other possessions. They wrap around us, touch our bodies, take on our scent. They go out into the world with us on good days and bad days, protect us and project us; they are with us when we laugh and when we cry. We don’t need pictures to remind us of our clothes because we literally know them inside out. You might look at a photo and say, “I forgot that party,” but it’s unlikely you forgot the outfit you wore. There is no photographic record, thank goodness, of the ill-conceived white satin trouser suit I made on my sewing machine when I was 17. But I remember perfectly the synthetic slip of the fabric against my skin and the red wine that spilled on it. The party itself: who gave it? Where? I have no idea.
Clothes are such good storytellers because they are a visual language. It is estimated that somewhere between 50% and 90% of human communication is non-verbal, and what we choose to put on our bodies is part of that. We’re fluent in clothes even if we don’t know it: it can reveal where we were raised, how we vote, how extroverted we are (or aren’t), who we sleep with, what god we worship and how much we earn. We read them in a nanosecond. But clothes are not necessarily plain talk. They express how we want to be seen as well as how we are: as with any language, there can be a gaping gap between the signifier (a revealing dress, say) and the signified (the shy girl wearing it).
Clothes tell you story even if you are not interested in it. My father was not – he referred to Marks & Spencer as “my tailor” – but what he wore expressed his life so perfectly and poignantly. Pictures tell of a thin schoolboy lost in an oversized uniform and then a smooth-haired young man in army fatigues. After that I don’t need the camera: I remember the long years when he dressed in business suits and ties on weekdays and wore his tattered old clothes on weekends – covered in engine oil, splattered with paint and repaired with duct tape – while he repaired a neighbor’s gate fixed or opened the drains or made things in his man cave. When he retired, he gave his suits to Oxfam and swore he would never wear a tie again. And as far as I know, he hasn’t.
Next I see his wardrobe: there are yellow Post-it notes on the shelves that say “T-shirts” or “pants”, which my mother put there to help him remember. Before long his clothes were a mess and never on the right shelf, and as Alzheimer’s took hold of him, you might as well find a cold cup of tea in there. He began to put on his clothes from back to front or inside out and then could not dress himself at all. In his last days the nurse told us to choose what he would wear to his own funeral and I finally realized he was dying.
My father’s clothes are just one version of his life. As with any biography, I could tell it differently, pick out different elements, choose different charms. I can give you his CV, a list of dates and places, qualifications and career moves. But it would be a much drier and more two-dimensional narrative. To capture the essence of a life story, clothes are hard to beat.
Life, Death and Dressing: How to Love Your Clothes… and Yourself by Rebecca Willis (New River £14.99). Buy a copy for £13.49 from guardianbookshop.com
