In line with my desire to live more lightly in various ways, I
have been cleaning out my closet, literally, though the Eminem song Where's my snare? Is playing in my head. My entire
vintage wardrobe, along with several Vivienne Westwood numbers has been snapped
up by anonymous bidders. They were very snap happy for Viv. There have been
mishaps. I sent my flowery Doctor Martens to someone who was expecting a camel
coloured wool coat and vice verse. That took some time and expense to unravel,
and unravel I almost did as I messaged back and forth praying that each
disgruntled punter would play ball, or boot as the case was. Happily each agreed
to send to the other. Thus my past has been passed around the UK, and, in the
case of a seventies halter-neck dress, last worn to a music industry party
during the rise of Oasis - to the US.
Each item of clothing that has been
packaged and sent had a story behind it. The 60's and 70's dresses worn to gigs
and parties or on stage during my fleeting singing career in 90's Camden. Or
the designer stuff I have from my modelling days prior to that. Before that, I
had been collecting vintage clothes since I was a teenager. I used to go to
Diagonal Street in Johannesburg and rummage through piles of clothes in
basements until I emerged with winkle pickers and sixties suits that I would
take in on my mother's sewing machine and later wear to the clubs I was way to
young to be at. If those clothes could speak...and they do, imbued as they are
with memory. Who will wear them now? I have been surprised at how hard they
were to actually give up, even though I had determined to.
Which isn't to say that my glad rags were
all bad news. Oh the fun we had! It's just that for me it is important not to
dwell on the past but to live fully in the present. We do have photographs
after all, though those can sometimes be fraught too. My father passed away
nearly two years ago. He was not around when we were growing up. I only met him
when I was twenty-one and thereafter on only a few occasions. After he died, my
sister and I went to collect his things, including a large box of his
photographs many of which were taken in nightclubs and parties in his heyday as
a singer and actor and general charmer. I haven't been through the
photographs yet as there was an exhibition that they were needed for and they
were only recently returned. I intend to and want to, but the box has a mark of
the Pandora about it. I have often found nostalgia a tricky emotion to manage
given my peripatetic and sometimes fraught childhood. The
clothes that speak of the many lives I have lived, the photographs speak of
what was and what might have been. The clothes have travelled on to adorn other
lives. The photographs have arrived from Portugal, and what a route they have
taken, those potent squares of reminder.
