On my first birthday I was given a charm bracelet and over the years various friends and relations gave me little charms to put on it: a tiny tennis racket, a dog that looked a bit (but not very) like ours, a key for my 21st birthday. Once I earned my own money, I occasionally bought a charm and added 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’d lost not just the physical object but my life story.
Clothes narrate our lives in a similar way, though unfortunately you can’t fit them into a tiny box. They are an autobiography in fabric, 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 whisk you back down the corridors of time. It’s little wonder that throwing out a beloved dress can feel like burning a diary. It’s like giving away part of yourself.
You can make a charm bracelet out of your clothes, playing a sartorial Desert Island Discs to try to capture your life in eight garments. Mine would include a pair of navy corduroy Levi’s trousers that I wore so constantly in the sixth form that when they were in the wash I felt naked. Also our red school hat, so identifiable that people would phone the head teacher to report us for eating in the street, and which has left me with a lifelong inability to wear anything red. And a white wet-look skirt with braces (it was the 70s, but even so I still don’t know how I persuaded my mother to buy it for me). I remember how devastatingly grown up I felt I must look in it, although photographs suggest otherwise.
You may have noticed that all of these choices date from the growing-up years and that’s because of a phenomenon known as the “reminiscence bump”: the fact that people over 40 remember more from their adolescence and early adulthood than they do from any other part of their lives. It’s a time when our bodies are changing and we are shaping our identities and learning to express that through what we wear. It’s not always a smooth handover from being dressed by our parents to dressing ourselves, and many of us will remember a hormonal showdown over a particular item of clothing – often a miniskirt or a pair of high heels, but today just as likely a piercing or a tattoo.
There are also more recent charms (or discs, if you prefer) in my selection. A pair of long, black boots made of a sort of stretchy neoprene-type fabric that would make you look sassy even in a sack; the khaki jumpsuit, usually covered in clay, that I wear to do sculpture; and the beaded, gold, above-the-knee dress that I got married in, bought secondhand from a consignment shop two days previously. I bought the shoes from the same place and they were nearly impossible to walk in – as their previous owner had obviously realised, too. I know it’s traditional to wear “something old” but perhaps “everything old” was overdoing it…
The symbolic power of clothes is writ large in the garments we wear for landmark occasions like weddings, life’s rites of passage. “I didn’t open the box containing my wedding dress for 31 years after I got married,” says Laura, a graphic designer. By then she’d been divorced for half of that time. “At first I was too sad to take it out and work out what to do with it and then I just didn’t get round to it,” she tells me. “It represented my happiness on my wedding day and all my hopes. When I finally did get it out, I found a note from the dry cleaners underneath it saying that there were marks on the fabric that they couldn’t guarantee to remove without damaging it, so they had left them. I just laughed. I had idealised this thing and it turned out it had been spoilt long ago. It felt like a great weight had been lifted and I let it go to the charity shop without a pang.”
Our clothes gather much of their emotional moss from everyday life, but the momentous events seem to be superglued on, whether they are happy or traumatic. A friend recalls exactly what she was wearing when she heard that she would need stem cell treatment for her cancer. Another had to throw out the handbag that had been back and forth to the hospital with her when her mother was dying. And a widow who lost her fire-fighter husband on 9/11 packed away all the clothes she’d worn 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 in King Lear, and to my mind the trend for distressed clothing, such as ripped jeans and frayed hems, tells a tale of cultural unease about the world we live in. In Judaism, this connection is ritualised: mourners express their grief by cutting or tearing what they are wearing. “You have to wear it every day 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 said. “So I choose something that can be washed overnight, although you’re not really meant to wash it. I also choose something I don’t like so I can throw it out afterwards.”
Our relationship with our clothes is more intimate than with any of our other belongings. They wrap around us, touching our bodies, taking on our smell. They go out into the world with us on good days and bad days, protecting us and projecting us; they are with us when we laugh and when we cry. We don’t need photos to remind us of our clothes, because we literally know them inside out. You might look at a photo and say, “I’d forgotten that party,” but you’re unlikely to have forgotten the outfit you had on. There is no photographic record, thank goodness, of the ill-advised white satin trouser suit I made on my sewing machine when I was 17. But I remember perfectly the synthetic slither of the fabric against my skin and the red wine that was spilt on it. The party itself: who gave it? Where? I have no idea.
Clothes are such good narrators because they are a visual language. It’s estimated that somewhere between 50% and 90% of human communication is non-verbal, and what we choose to put on our bodies is a part of that. We are fluent in clothes even if we don’t know it: they can reveal where we were brought up, how we vote, how extrovert we are (or aren’t), who we sleep with, which god we worship and how much we earn. We read them in a nanosecond. But clothes are not necessarily plain-speaking. They express how we want to be seen as well as how we are: as with any language, there can be a yawning gap between the signifier (a revealing dress, say) and the signified (the shy girl wearing it).
Clothes tell your story even if you’re not interested in them. My father wasn’t – he referred to Marks & Spencer as “my tailor” – but what he wore articulates his life so perfectly and poignantly. Photos tell of a skinny schoolboy lost in an oversized uniform and then a young man with slicked-back hair in army fatigues. After that I don’t need the camera: I remember the long years when he put on business suits and ties on weekdays and at weekends wore his beaten-up old clothes – covered in engine oil, spattered with paint and mended with duct tape – while he fixed a neighbour’s gate or unblocked the drains or made things in his man-cave. When he retired he gave his suits to Oxfam and swore he’d never wear a tie again. And as far as I know, he didn’t.
Next, I see his wardrobe: there are yellow Post-it notes on the shelves saying “T-shirts” or “trousers”, put there by my mother to help him remember. Before long his clothes were all jumbled up and never on the right shelf and, as Alzheimer’s took hold of him, you might find a cold cup of tea in there, too. He started to put his clothes on back-to-front or inside out and then could no longer 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 realised he was dying.
My father’s clothes are only one version of his life. As with any biography, I could tell it another way, pick out different elements, choose different charms. I could give you his CV, a list of dates and places, qualifications and career moves. But that 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 & Getting Dressed: How To Love Your Clothes… and Yourself by Rebecca Willis (New River £14.99). Buy a copy for £13.49 from guardianbookshop.com
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