My Favourite Outfit: Sarah
Welcome to a new blog series! I decided that I needed to make more of the style portion of my “graphic design and style” blog. In this series, I ask the contributor to share an image of their favourite outfit – maybe a pair of pants they wore every day, maybe a special party dress – and write about where they were in their life and why this outfit has such significance. Today we welcome Sarah to the blog. Sarah and I went to the same elementary school, became besties in junior high/high school over sour cream and old movies, and have stayed friends ever since. This is her favourite outfit.
When I try to step outside of myself and look at this picture as a stranger, I don’t think there’s much that would inspire even a particularly creative person to a thousand words. The concepts conveyed by the image aren’t complex – two young people, in love, dressed up with somewhere to go. If anyone has a photo of themselves that they like, it’s probably similar to this one.
But I’m in the picture, so I know better. I know that inside the house that serves as the backdrop of the photo, my mom is sleeping upstairs, and she is dying. I know that I’m experiencing the worst year of my life and that it’s only about to get worse. Everything is going to change, and I am desperately trying to ignore that fact. I know that the man in the photo is my last connecting thread to sanity and now, seven years later, I’m unspeakably grateful that he is there in the photo, and here, in my life.
I purchased the red dress in Italy on a choir tour. The trip was a noisy tumble-dryer of emotional highs and lows fueled by countless bottles of red wine, singing, and my tears of guilt over the fact that I had left my family at home to deal with the very short and shocking timeline my mom had been given just before I left. At a Venetian market I bought her a raw-silk scarf, knowing she’d have mere weeks to wear it before it was mine again. One day, the man in the picture and I were returning to our hotel after a walk through Rome, and we passed a store that was total bait for my nostalgic taste – it was filled with 1950s-silhouetted cocktail dresses. Walking away from that store was agonizing, but rehearsals called. The next day, I returned with the man in the picture and another (male) friend to the store and, bless their totally bored and patient hearts, tried on dresses while they waited. I bought the red – a girl in love is inclined to buy red – as well as a black and white number. I couldn’t wait to get home and show them to my mom and tell her how, for just a moment, I had fancied myself Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday.
I wore the dress to a concert (the Glenn Miller Orchestra, where we were the youngest attendees by about three decades) the summer we returned from Italy, which is when this photo was taken. The funny thing is, when I look at this picture now, knowing all that I know, I still see life, and I smile. I see hope and anticipation and I want to hug those two people as if they’re beloved relatives that I haven’t seen for years. I know what they’re going through and all they’re about to endure. All of these feelings are folded up in the pleats of the red cocktail dress I’m wearing, the curls of the hair I tried to make fancy, and the shoes which I knew were too small, but I bought anyway. I am not a hopeful person by nature, but in this photo I see an expression of hope that I don’t think I was aware of at the time. Sometimes a dress is more than a garment for social posturing or an expression of taste. That dress, for me, is tangible beauty in a moment where the tangible love I’d never been without was being stripped away from me.
My favourite thing about time, and even photographed moments in time, is that you forget certain things and then rearrange the details into a more satisfying memory than the reality you experienced. In this case, I’ve spent the last seven years with the notion in my head that my mom took this photo. I only realize now, looking at the date it was taken, that this would have been impossible. I think, knowing that she would look at me in this picture with complete love, that I can only imagine my mom capturing this moment. I imagine her with a smile, straightening my hem and pushing rogue bobby pins back into my hair, then telling me to move my chin up or down to create the perfect head position that, I’m sure, only she was capable of seeing.