Remembering clothes
"Why are these clothes so etched upon my imagination, as if history can be pieced together by a patchwork of this stuff? When I try to get things straight in my head - to tell the story properly, as stories should be told - it seems impossible to un-jumble; though maybe memory is not a jumble, but a kind of loom, shuttling through the warp and weft, weaving together a whole."
Justine Picardie, My Mother's Wedding Dress: The Fabric of our Lives, Picador, London 2005, p.21
posted by Solveigh Goett at 9:44 am
1 Comments:
The power of memories attached to items of clothing always takes me by surprise.
A couple of weeks ago, I rediscovered a fisherman's jacket which I had bought on one of my many holidays by the ocean when I was 17 years old.
Waves of memories came back as I was holding it: cycling on the beach, eating apple turnovers at the little bakery shop and the smell of the shop, the house where we used to stay with my friends ...
I gave the jacket yesterday to one of these friends who is going back there next week.
The weaving of memories remind me of Penelope weaving memories of her husband during the day and unweaving them at night to keep away the other men asking for her hand.
The same theme came back in another film I watched a few weeks ago: the woman weaves a piece of cloth very slowly, because she knows that when she finishes it, the man she loves will leave for good.
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