Connecting threads
IT was the “ur-dress,” Justine Picardie tells us: a black sleeveless sheath cut just above the knee, corseted with bones and lined in silk with a satin bodice and a mohair skirt. Her mother was 21 when she bought the dress for 60 pounds in London for her wedding. Picardie waited until she was 18 to appropriate it for slightly wilder use.
Yet a dress like this is more than just a dress; it is a wellspring of memory. In “My Mother’s Wedding Dress: The Life & Afterlife of Clothes,” Picardie -- editor of the Observer and a longtime contributor to British Vogue -- uses it to bring back not just her own childhood in London, Oxford and Cardiff, but also the subconscious of her family. That is where black dresses and white dresses and red shoes and feathers and gold rings live; not in the quotidian, the everyday. No, clothes occupy the surfaces and the depths, the society pages and the fairy tales. The rest is just finding the money to pay for them (and their upkeep).
A first dress is “like a first kiss,” Picardie writes, remembering the “fairy dress” she wore at 3 to her own birthday party. Hers was a bohemian childhood: Her father was a slightly depressed Marxist academic (he was later horrified when his daughter became an editor at Vogue), and her mother a hippie from South Africa who ran an antiques stall, sewed her own clothes and shopped at trendy spots like Biba and Vivienne Westwood’s. The couple fought and separated, gave it another go, separated and finally divorced. Clothes provided the connective fiber, the through-line that life appeared to lack. “[W]e cling on to the smaller things that have somehow survived the years,” Picardie explains, “against all the odds, when other stuff is lost: believing that a wedding ring (or a wedding dress) will remain one’s own, in a way most other property does not ... talismanic reminders of who we once were, and what we hope to become.”
How does this happen? “Do clothes have ghosts, or do ghosts have clothes?” the author asks. It’s a question she might well have asked many of the designers she profiles in these pages -- Karl Lagerfeld, Helmut Lang, Claude Montana and Donatella Versace -- although, in Picardie’s story, these designers are on the wrong side of the seam. They are all extremely tense, over-managed and far from the valley of dreams where Picardie’s mother’s wedding dress, as well as the black jacket from the Gap that belonged to her dead sister Ruth, guard the memories of the people who wore them. History depends on objects. These fragments lead to questions, and from these questions a life is stitched together.
Picardie’s method, to allow her thoughts to move from object to memory to culture, fits her madness perfectly. She muses on the terrifying nature of the white dress (think of Emily Dickinson housebound for decades, or Jane Eyre in shades of gray); on the color red and its tendency to lead to fun or adventure; and, of course, on the power of wearing black. She includes lists of the best-dressed characters in literature (Pippi Longstocking is at the top), “Disappeared Clothes (A Familiar Lament)” and “How to Wear Red Lipstick (The Gospel According to Chanel).” She hops; she skips; she jumps .
“[I am] aware,” the author admits, “that the semiotics of a little black dress can seem grotesque in its irrelevance. And that’s one of the problems of attaching importance to any particular fashion, as well as fashion in general: it’s easily swept away, by weightier matters.” And yet, who doesn’t want to be swept away at times? So often, the dress or the shirt or the sweater opens the doors of memory, without which we float aimlessly on the surface and have no context, no story, no history. *
