Last night I had the pleasure of seeing the stage adaptation of Love, Loss and What I Wore a monologue-style play by Nora and Delia Ephron adapted from Ilene Beckerman's book of the same name. My girlfriends and I sat in the audience, at turns nodding, laughing, and tearing up as we listened to stories that seemed like a universal consciousness.Don't we all we all have stories about clothing items that were with us during a pivotal moment in our lives? A graduation outfit, the first item we bought with our own money, a wedding dress or tuxedo, a special colour or style a grandparent always wore? I am always excited when I visit a client's closet for the first time, and am greeted with a bounty of these stories. Clothes are a special breed of personal history.
The clothing we aspire to wear, that which we love or despise, the colours we love and loath, all just might stem from experiences we have had with clothing throughout our lives. Sometimes we hold on tight to them, just so we always have the same feeling we had at that time. Clothes might be tangible manifestations of our memories of the past, but it is the feeling that they gave us that we can translate and bring to life again in a new way that's right for the present or future.
Dressing each day is an opportunity for us to greet the world in just the way we want to be seen. With the right clothes, we can feel confident, playful, intelligent, capable, secure, trustworthy, calm, flirtatious, creative, mysterious...the essence of who we are defined, just by a few meters of cloth. No small thing, is it?
