I love the work this dancing does with the morning routines of gendered dressing. There’s an undercurrent of violence and intimacy to the patterns that develop through the piece–so powerful.
Now that I ‘dress’ each day for work (rather than defaulting to my ‘Mom’ uniform of jeans and a tshirt), I give clothing much more attention than I used to. And lately I’ve been thinking of clothing as an ‘evocative object‘ of past times and feelings. There’s the dress I’m wearing today that calls memories of a special evening in Brussels this summer, the jacket that hangs on a peg in my entryway that I sometimes bury my face in to remind me of someone that I miss most when I walk in the door in the evening, the texture of a starched white shirt that pulled me back more than three decades ago when I encountered it recently (a father-memory buried so deep), and the clicking of the heels of my black pumps on the sidewalk last night as I walked home in the dark…such a sophisticated sound.
Last month I realized that I no longer wanted the clothing that I wore when I was married. So I’ve cast away almost all of it now (despite the fact that I typically keep many of my clothes for decades)–loving the exercise of an afternoon as I culled it all from my closet and into a large black trash bag. I don’t want those memories to linger any longer next to my skin.
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A couple of years ago, the actress Ellen Barkin auctioned off the jewelery she had acquired during her marriage to billionaire businessman Ron Perelman. It was a sudden and nasty break-up (her 2nd marriage and I think it was his fourth(!)). Anyway, she sold those most absolutely gorgeous pieces – dozens of them – and many were antiques from the finest jewelers in Europe. I believe the collection sold for over $20 million (one diamond ring alone brought over a million dollars). When asked why she was selling all of it, she replied, “Why would I want to wear those memories?”