Two days ago, we had an English Department Happy Hour, with an injunction to wear our finest vintage leisure wear. I am someone to whom the mere suggestion of a fancy dress challenge is catnip (that is, my past includes (a) a Bad Taste party where I went as a set of flying plaster ducks (b) a Decadence Party where I appeared as Gérard de Nerval, complete with a large plastic lobster on a ribbon, and (c) a Suppressed Desires party where I dressed as a llama.). So I went into the inner closet of my closet, and pulled out a plastic crate or two, and to my distressed grief, all my favorite old clothes - the kind I've carried from house to house, country to country, like a sartorial diary - were being eaten by hungry, fluttering moths. I spend yesterday morning photographing, bagging, and quietly weeping - losing these clothes was a metaphor for so much more.
But I managed to salvage four or five objects - all a bit moth-chewed, but I threw them in the washing machine, and hope ... One is this shiny rayon (but still, in places, apparently tasty) housecoat, which belonged to my maternal grandmother. In fact, it's one of the things I would have been sorriest to lose, because it's quintessentially her. She would wear it, day in, day out, shuffling around the house in a pair of very pale beige flat shoes, and this, with, I think, a camisole underneath, and with a Players No. 6 cigarette dangling from her lip - until she was 70, anyway. Having smoked since she was a nurse in WW1, she never stopped, despite chronic bronchitis - until that milestone birthday, at which point she stopped, cold turkey. I'm so pleased that I still have this - it's unwearable, of course, but that's not the point.
The English department party? I just went in the Olafur Eliasson t-shirt from Tate Modern that I had on to start with, and I don't think anyone was checking costumes, anyway.
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