Week Eleven of Why So Many Clothes: The Best of Clothes, The Worst of Clothes
From Paris to the London riots, this has been a strange week (8th – 14th August).
Last Dance in Paris
Green, silk chiffon, midi-length dress, with a ruffle that runs from the tip of the hip, the hinge of the bottom, round the thigh to the bend of the knee. Simple, vest neckline, and adjustable, narrow straps. My favourite dress of all time, beautiful in design, to touch, in colour (2003, Jigsaw). Saved for the Wolf’s and my last day in Paris, with an old Liberty shirt to throw over (charity shop).
The photo is from Belleville Park. Belleville is one of Paris’ poorer areas; we have been staying just on the borders, looking forwards, into central Paris, the Eiffel Tower that sparkles on the hour after dark. We’ve passed groups of young people, old people, ramshackle cafes, artist studios, rehearsal rooms, estates and strawberry pink town houses, broken glass, a few looks, police, to get to Belleville Park. An old man shouted from a bench: ‘If you want to get somewhere, there is somewhere that way!’. The park, like the area, is busy with local people. Young children of different backgrounds are doing free craft activities under a gazebo, making windmills from bottle tops and plastic straws, by an infinity pool that looks out, to the tower, and the rest of the city. A waterfall drops between geometric puddles. One of the puddles is dry, and has been filled with pictures from a spray can. People pass, nod and laugh as we take photos.
Long Journey Home
The beige vest dress is for comfort. I like to think I don’t beige, but a long coach journey is an exception. I try to brighten it up and shape it a bit with the green wrap. We get a slightly earlier coach on Tuesday 9th August, hoping to arrive in Victoria, London before evening falls. As we drive through Peckham, we see the shops shuttered and boarded. There is hardly anyone around. On a corner, a few people stand with their pints outside a boarded-up pub. A friend has said that yesterday, she would have advised us to stay in Paris, but today, people are getting together and cleaning up the streets, and the mood is very different because of that, safer. We get back before the dark. A taxi refuses to take us, because a number of riot vans have just gone to my street. A cyclist coming from that direction tells us it’s fine, they were passing through. I feel like an idiot, with all my bags and my coach clothes. At the bottom of my street, a crowd of police are buying their tea from a takeaway that was recently at the centre of a different, big news story; a couple more police officers are at an ice cream van. I think they must be from out of London.
Everything feels off.
Wednesday
Today the streets of my home city feel alien and I want to hide, to stay indoors, but a girl’s gotta eat. My wardrobe is getting sparser, and I was eager to find the clothes I could hide in most easily, to avoid drawing attention. While growing up in London, my slightly eccentric dress sense – then, an obsession with the sixties – got me spat on and set fire to on a bus once, and shouted at and kicked on a tube another time, by other young people, who I’d never met. Now, as then, I decide I’d rather not squash myself away. We got over that in Week One of this experiment, so with a stubbornness not unlike my teenage years, I wear one of my most dreaded items: the baggy, floral, crinkle-pleat culottes, with elasticated waistband. They were 10p in the local jumble sale, and I bought them when I was about three stone lighter than now, imagining a slightly kooky, sexy vintage look would come with them. They are very wrong. They create illusions of bulbous pockets of cellulite in improbable places. They suck in and blow out erratically. The waistband is chunky. The pattern isn’t very nice.
The big, white blouse with small, embroidered flowers is one I’ve been wanting to wear since it was given to me, again as a thank you from work, in Thailand in 2000. I thought it made me look fat, because it was big, which is plainly ridiculous. It looks like a big shirt. Finally wearing it, I feel comfortable and like myself. The culottes will have to go, but the blouse will stay.
Hoarding – Against What?
The blue butterfly skirt in Thursday’s photo has a broken zip, yet I’ve been keeping it on a hanger, not even in the bag of clothes for mending. The tights are another laddered pair, kept in the drawer regardless. Only the blue tunic is a keeper, as the colour and fabric are so lovely – even though the fit doesn’t do what I’d hoped it would when I bought it in a charity shop in Hackney six years ago, being a bit, well, pajama-ish.
The blue pumps, a gift from mum, are oceanic and lovely, and will keep until they, like all my pumps, wear right out.
Mum’s Gifts
Friday I use another of my mum’s gifts – to wear bright, luminous, welcoming colours when the mood is dark. From the comments that come by all day, at work and in public, the bright orange and pink silks are cheering other people up. Keep both, although it’s taken about five years to find a way to wear this skirt…
Moving On
Poor old Saturday’s things. Cheerful and whimsical as both the skirt and patterned top are, neither feel like me. They both belong to a concentrated phase, where I was coming out of a shell, and they were the closest thing to bright and pretty I could manage. That was five odd years ago, and the hippyish, unconventionally shaped clothes, while they fit, don’t fit. The delicate white silk vest, however (the white version of a black one I wore two weeks ago) is perfect.
Sunday’s red, silk shirt is, like the turquoise tunic, comfortable, striking and a deeply tactile fabric, so for the Keep box. The black velvet trousers are very high quality, but just too short on my ankles, so, rather than hoard them to wear with over-knee boots, I’ll relinquish them. The shoes are knackered: half of the platform of one foot crumbled away, but kept anyway, till now.
Hoarding is an odd thing. If I’m offered clothes, I say yes to them, and always have. I have always, until recently, struggled to give them up. One of my favourite bits of art is Michael Landy’s ‘Break Down’. He inventoried everything he had on an Excel spreadsheet, then destroyed it on a conveyor belt in the old C&As on Oxford Street, open to the public. I value this as it hits on my greatest fear: to lose all my things, all the objects which hold together the fact that I am really here. I grew up with my glorious mum, who raised us to feel safe and part of a community although her income was below the poverty line. You can never have too may clothes, because you will never know when you need them. In 2003, we lost everything she’d held together over those long and difficult years, to domestic violence. We were homeless as well as poor, and I was careful to pack each and every thing of my own, because it was all evidence to say that once, I had been home. I, and all my loved little things, had been safe. When I got back to Bristol university, to my temporary place there in a first, debt-doomed, attempt to escape poverty and associated lack of opportunity, I sold my flute, and bought the green, silk chiffon dress I wore on Monday.
It was a symbol of hope; the dress said: there will be happy times, when it is right to wear me.
Now I am sure . Here I am: in the green dress, in love, under another unlikely Paris waterfall, at a stage where the lack of confidence brought by poverty – to become what I want, to live for something that feels like me although that means an ongoing struggle with money, rather than living for a happiness measured by what it cost, and who approved it – is slowly getting chipped away. That dress has its place in my life.
By Sara Nesbitt Gibbons
