Do you dream of textiles? Clothes, in particular, form a routine focus of my dreams. In a dream, I might find myself wandering through the streets of an unknown city, and, arrested by a window display, be drawn inside to browse a whole collection of imaginary garments in an imaginary store. Dreams also frequently involve my selecting a particular outfit from a wardrobe, or admiring the fabric or style of someone else’s clothes. The clothes my dreaming mind conjures up usually have no specific referent in reality, but they are nonetheless palpable and vivid. I can call particular outfits I’ve dreamt about immediately to mind, and the colours and patterns of dream-clothes certainly affect my everyday design work as well as what I like to wear. Waking from such dreams, I often think my brain must be some sort of freaky jumble sale, continually sorting through piles and racks of clothes and textiles.
The hues and textures of my own and others’ clothes are the focus of my very earliest memories too. One garment that particularly sticks in my mind is one worn by another child, a yellow jersey, with a brown bear on the front. The bear was formed from a sort of raised transparent plastic, and it squeaked when pressed. I recall the child’s appearance but not her name (she spent a few weeks only at the reception class of my primary school, before leaving) and I also remember the feelings of affection I felt towards her, her yellow jersey and its brown bear. I was four years old. I wonder whether I can see her jersey so clearly because I loved this garment so very much, or because it and its wearer were such fleeting presences. That is, I wonder whether my childish feelings of loss of a new-found friend discovered their material correlative in my memory of her jersey, and that I am now only able to remember the wearer (and such feelings) via the vivid recollection of what she wore.
The powerfully redolent effect of clothing on our memories and identities is the subject of Claire Wilcox’s brilliant Patch Work: A Life Amongst Clothes (2020) Wilcox has spent most of her working life at the Victoria and Albert Museum as a fashion and textiles curator, and in this book finds an intriguing means of exploring who she is and what she does via her memories of the garments she’s encountered. Through groups of lucid and lyrical short prose pieces, Wilcox carefully catalogues a collection of textiles and garments that together make up the archive of her own identity, as someone who loves, wears, repairs, and cares for clothes. For Wilcox, clothes are the tellers of our stories, repositories of desire and longing, and perhaps, most of all (in their making and their wearing) material expressions of what it means to be human. Even in the apparently de-personalised language of the accession catalogue, clothes express their own human agency:
We talk of shattered silks — when the brittle fabric splits, often down an old crease; fugitive dyes that have faded through time, leaving behind a curiously unbalanced palette where blues become green and reds become brown. We notice signs of erosion, where a fabric has rubbed against a stronger element such as a metal buckle and isolate perished objects that reek of chemical degradation (we have a collection of mackintoshes with rigor mortis.) We remove tired pieces from display, speaking of their need to rest.“
Thinking about clothes in this book is, for Wilcox, a way of comprehending not only her own experience of familiar markers of human time – births, deaths, unions – but life’s many incidental moments and brief encounters whose meaning might only be fully understood through retrospection. Reading this powerful and deeply personal book was like wandering through someone else’s dreamscape. I loved it.
Wilcox’s book called to mind another lively and lyrical memoir I really enjoyed reading recently, Michel Pastoreau’s The Colours of our Memories (2012) Pastoreau is a historian of colour, and this book is his own personal history of a relationship with shades and hues that began in very early childhood, and went on to play a central role throughout his life and work. The book’s first section focuses on Pastoreau’s memories of clothes, and there’s a wonderful account of his adolescent discovery of his own “chromatic hypersensivity” in relation to a blazer he was forced to wear to a wedding that was quite obviously the “wrong” shade of navy blue. Pastoreau deftly weaves together personal recollections with broader narratives of social and cultural memory, and on matters of French taste he is very astute and often very funny. Writing of “Mitterand beige” Pastoreau speculates (with his tongue only slightly in his cheek) about how many votes the left lost in the early 1990s due to the peculiarly abhorrent neutral shade for which the suits of the president of the republic became notorious:
“Their [the suits’] shade of beige was disastrous: both too pale and too flashy, like that of some petty provincial miscreant, and with a suggestion of mouldy mustard that was really unpleasant . . . a nasty beige at once out of date yet too new; a provincial beige or the beige of some shady district; a vulgar beige like something out of a 1940s novel, clumsily reintroduced as fashionable after excessively thorough treatment at the cleaners. In short, a “Simenon beige” that had become a “Mitterand beige.”
One of my favourite sections in this book concerns Pastoreau’s vivid childhood memory of eating mandarin-flavoured sweets, which he’d buy from snack dispensers on the platforms of the Paris Metro. He recalls the dispensing machines as being painted a particular shade of orange, but he later discovers (from old photographs) that these machines were never, in fact, orange at all, but rather grey, or yellow.
“Had I projected onto the sweet dispensers the colour of the sweets themselves? The fact is that I do not remember ever having obtained from these dispensers anything other than those round, sugary, garishly orange mandarin-flavoured sweets. So had I, in my memories, coated the machines themselves in the colour orange?”
Pastoreau’s synecdochial attribution of the colour of the sweets to their dispenser provides a vivid illustration of the way that human memory might make (and remake) what we experience as material reality. This mutually defining relationship between the “real” material world and the world of human memory is the subject of Veronica O Keane’s recently published The Rag and Bone Shop: How we Make Memories and Memories Make Us (2021). This wonderful book (which I read at a sitting, unable to put down) takes its title from the final line of W.B Yeats’ The Circus Animals Desertion, in which the poet, bereft of inspiration, resigns himself to the discovery of a theme from his own memory, the “rag and bone shop of the heart.” While poking about among the detritus of personal recollection is something Yeats regards with tired resignation, for O’Keane, memory’s rag and bone shop is rather the locus of the most inspiring, the most creative, the most marvellous and often the most troubling aspects of the human brain. In exploring the fascinating subject of how our brains make up the world, O’Keane brings together recent advances in neurological research, the history of psychiatry, the literature of memory, case studies drawn from her own practice, and her own personal experiences, with a deftness and lightness of touch that makes for a peculiarly engaging read. This is a beautifully written, deeply empathetic, and hugely evocative book in which O’Keane pulls many different strands of philosophic and scientific thought together to elucidate the mutually-constitutive sense-making relationship between our minds and the material world. I can honestly say that I never thought I’d regard the interplay between the pre-frontal cortex, the insula and the hippocampus with such awe, or be so startled by the mechanisms our brains use to recall place with such remarkable specificity, but O’Keane elucidates such matters for the reader with an immediacy and sense of wonder that’s palpable and gripping. Because the experience of psychosis and different forms of amnesia have a lot to tell us about the operations of memory, there are a lot of difficult human experiences in this book too, but O’Keane opens out the complexities and perplexities of such experiences with a combination of generosity and tenderness in which sight of the whole person is never lost.
I read (and have read) a lot of books about the brain and, as someone with personal experience of acute brain injury as well as severe psychiatric illness, I am perhaps peculiarly sensitive to the experiences they describe as well as the place from which they are written. There’s often a tedious and predictable kind of masculine ego behind the writing of such books, alongside an equally tedious tendency of such writers to objectify or tacitly exploit their female patients, so I found it particularly refreshing to find O’Keane writing so clearly and so thoughtfully from a woman’s subject position, and that so many of the formative experiences she carefully explores and shares are specifically those of women. I also loved the emphatically Irish cultural context of this book (drawing on the work of many of my favourite Irish writers from Samuel Beckett to Paula Meehan) and the fact that this is a book that makes one feel peculiarly hopeful about age, ageing, and the remarkable creative work of one’s own individual rag and bone shop.
In The Rag and Bone Shop, O’Keane relates one of her own earliest memories, which combines a hand-knitted cardigan and a button with her childish awareness of an adult matter that she did not understand – which turned out to be the assassination of John F Kennedy. It interests me that it is a cardigan and a button that provided such a powerful hook for the memory, their tactile materiality defining O’Keane’s early sense of her own separateness from the adult world, as well as a seismic political event. Anyway, I’m obviously thinking a lot about clothes and memory at the moment, and would be very interested to hear if your early memories are similarly attached to clothes and textiles? If you are happy to share your thoughts I would love to hear them.
Titles discussed:
Claire Wilcox, Patch Work: A Life Amongst Clothes (Bloomsbury, 2020)
Michel Pastoreau, The Colours of our Memories (Polity, 2012)
Veronica O Keane, The Rag and Bone Shop: How We Make Memories and Memories Make Us (Allen Lane, 2021)
If you are interested in reading these titles, please seek them out directly from the publisher, your favourite independent bookseller, or your local library!
KDD & Co 
What a beautiful post! Clothing and fabric have long been deeply important to me as they were to my mother and my grandmother and it’s certainly more than just being “stylish“. You have captured so much of that magic here! ♥️🧵🧶⭐️
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I remember sitting on the floor of what I now know to be the kitchen of the house we left when I was 3 and a half, looking up (and it seemed a mountainous distance) to the closed curtains which were mustard yellow with flowers on them. The fabric has a slight grey hue in my memory and they are waving a little in the wind.
My mother still has the fabric of the curtains (she’s 93) and the flowers are far brighter than in my memory; cobalt blue, bright red and hunter green for the small leaves. I imagine I don’t see the colours as they really were in my memory of them because the curtains were closed and I was a long way down?
So many textiles in my early, early memories!
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What an interesting subject! Color is very important to me, and I cannot bear to wear a color that I feel is wrong (for me.) My mother’s palette was yellow, beige, taupe, and many other shades of brown, with an occasional red, and that is how she dressed me. But once my father took me shopping, and we came home with a purple wool coat. I loved that coat and it was handed down to many of my cousins. Now I wear blues, purples, wine, grays, and black. Those colors are “home” to me. It’s lovely that they happen to look great with gray hair.
My mother was an avid seamstress and sewed curtains, a bed flounce, and chair cushions for my room when I was little in a fabric that was white with red roses. When I was seven, I had to give up my room to my grandmother, and I remember longing to have it back. I still have a scrap of the fabric. I hope I acted generously to my grandmother, but that’s a memory I no longer have!
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I have so many memories associated with clothes – especially texture and colour. My mother made a lot of our clothes in our younger years and this was another way for an English immigrant with a ‘plummy’ accent to stand out in her new Australian primary school. Other kids were in shorts and t shirts while I was wearing hand sewn corduroy overalls with a white skivvy. Later we had to wear school colours. To this day I still dislike maroon and have an abhorrence for rolled neck skivvy style tops. I remember vividly a Christmas present from a family friend when I was 7 or 8 of a beautiful ruffled skirt in a lovely silky white fabric with clusters of colours. It was so lovely and just the thing other kids would be wearing.
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This is such an interesting trio of books, and so many amazing comments connecting memories, materiality, textiles, tactility… The most vivid textile dream I remember was when I first learnt how to felt wool. I dreamt I was making a felted blanket that looked like the landscape as seen from an airplane and woke up determined to realise the vision in felt, and with a plan of how to do it… In the dream it was to be a gift for one of my oldest friends, who is often in my dreams and connected with clothes. As teenagers we continuously shared, swapped and competed with our outfits and on some level these formative experiences seem still to enter my dreams inasmuch as cloth or textile dreams seem often to feature her, too. The felt is interesting: I wonder if it was in some way also about learning a new process, as I had similar dreams involving leaps of innovation when learning how to develop photographs in a darkroom; and how to handspin wool. My earliest memories of childhood are deeply bound up with my mother’s clothing. She had contributed a lot of very exciting 1970s clothes to my “dressing up box” and I was obsessed with these clothes and with trying to place my mum as the young women who once wore them. Also, I remember she went to Austria with my Dad, as something to do with his medical work, a trip for which she created an amazing capsule wardrobe which included a blue dress with tiny little white stars on it. Even a piece of that fabric found somewhere around the house nowadays fills me with indefinable emotions. I have a tendency, before International trips, to whip up some sort of outfit or garment at the last minute. I wonder now if this is connected to the potent memory of my mum going to Vienna, and making that dress? She didn’t sew very much otherwise, but had also made her own wedding dress out of a bluish patterned silk and this, too, was an object of total childhood obsession.
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What an interesting and personal subject to read. I do have many memories where clothes are important.
First day in school (no uniforms here.), first ball, important job interviews……
As a four year old girl I left home to find my real mother. (I was sure, the one where I lived could only be my stepmother.) And of course I dressed in my most beautiful dress, all white with little blue velvet dots and a velvet belt, lace socks and black Mary Janes. I packed a small red cardbord suitcase with my favourite book (butterflies) and some colour pencils.
As a teenager I wanted an orange raincoat, while everybody was wearing yellow. My mother bought me a green one. I do not like green and have never worn this piece. I worked during school holidays and bought a red one. I have had a red raincoat ever since.
I could write a long list of such situations. I can remember family gatherings and almost see what people were wearing.
My father loved and mostly wore grey. And although I always loved colours, I can distinguish many grey shades from light cement to dark anthracit……
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Lovely to read all of the memories of clothes and textiles, some good and some not so good. When I thought about composing a reply, the first memories I thought of were rather negative, e.g. hand knitted navy blue, school socks held up with elastic garters which left their imprint on my legs, but not on my soul, as I still wear hand knitted socks but they are knitted from the fabulous, colourful sock yarns available these days.
However, the sense of smell is also very important in memory. At the age of 5 , I was a bridesmaid and wore a lemon yellow, nylon bridesmaid dress which I loved. Combined with the memory of the dress, I had a posy of sweet peas and to this day, 70 years later, when I smell these flowers I am transported to Paisley Abbey walking down the isle in my
lovely lemon yellow dress.
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I also have a great interest in clothes, materials and textures up to this day. As a child, it had a lot to do with my mother’s idea of clothes and the person I wanted to be: my mother sewed me and my brother together matching practical clothes made of corduroy or practical cotton. They were different from all the clothes the children wore to school – yet I would have loved to be like them. And above all: girly. I loved velvet, shiny fabrics, princess dresses … I still love velvet today, but today I also love being different. I love colours and I like to play with materials. I dress how I feel and I love to look at other people’s clothes.
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I don’t remember many dreams of textiles, but clothing and fabrics loom large in my memories. One less pleasant memory was fifteen years ago, when I was in a terrible car accident. I was in shock and have only fleeting memories of vague sensations, but I remember a blanket, oatmeal-colored and woven, very vividly, as well as a particular shade of purple. I found out later that, while the top of the car was being cut off to get me out, an EMT was sitting with me under that blanket, holding my hand and wearing purple gloves. (Other memories include being cold, and the sound of the helicopter. Also, the EMTs were worried I wouldn’t make it and were trying to get a message for my family, but I just asked them to look after my shoes – red Mary Janes that I adored. One of them dutifully delivered the shoes the next day and was relieved to hear that although my injuries were serious, I would make a full recovery.)
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Thank goodness for that EMT, Kate, and that you are ok! It’s funny how, in moments of crisis and physical danger, we focus on the things about us that we love – I had similar concerns to you about your Mary Janes about the coat I was wearing when I had my stroke.
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Thank you! I was very lucky. A small skull fracture and multiple fractures of the pelvis, but I was out of the hospital and back to uni within ten days. I had chronic pain issues for some years, but that is now managed.
And I had forgotten about the coat! I was wearing the most beautiful long black coat with faux-fur trim. Sadly, it came back to me in small pieces – all my clothes were cut off my body. For years, I searched for a replacement, and never found one. (I’ve just been watching the 2017 adaptation of Howard’s End and loving the long black coat with buttons that the main character wears in many scenes. Perhaps it’s time to look again for my dream coat?)
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Thank you for this wonderful post. When I was young ,perhaps between the ages of about 8 and 11, I had a recurring dream about wearing a beautiful dress made of very fine flowing fabric. In my dreams I would birll and each time I birlled the dress would change colour. I used to try and force myself into the dream at night, but it it came when it came!
Strange thing is I was not at all and I’m not, at the age of 71, what I would call a girly girl but I have the secret hankering to be one :-)
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Marg, this is just wonderful!
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Some of my earliest memories seem to be of texture, colour and material. The cot I slept in: yellow steel with acrylic glas sides. And later in the larger cot I remember a duvet cover with a very coulourful, naive rural scenery printed on slightly coarse woven cotton. It bugged me that everything was off scale, the geese being just as tall as the apple trees … Every once in a while I try to find a picture of these duvet covers online to validate my feelings towards the print from an adult perspective but to no avail.
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I have enjoyed all the “fabric memories” both good and less so. My own best memory, going back over sixty years, is of the remarkable coat and waiscoat that adorn the last pages of “The Tailor of Gloucester”, which was given to me at the age of six. I still have my falling apart copy and remember sitting with the page open at the embroidered waistcoat, going over the design with my finger and dreaming of “cherry twist”–talk about thread envy!
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I have the words “no more twist” tattooed on my arm
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In reading this post, I am in awe of the combination of your scope of reading and your prolific designing. Wherever do you find the time?
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I love reading, Joan, and I enjoy reading anything on any topic that interests me (mostly non-fiction). Sometimes it’s even possible to combine reading with knitting and designing with an audiobook!
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Now I’m feeling ever so slightly odd because I have very few memories or dreams remotely related to clothing and textiles, and indeed would have said for much of my life that I was uninterested in clothing beyond the need to wear some. But I suspect that was partially down to the difficulty in finding clothing to suit my non-standard-sized body and the associated dislike of shopping. Since becoming a knitter, and especially a knitter of garments that fit and please me, thoughts about clothing do occupy a larger space in my brain, though still entirely the creating of them sort of thoughts.
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What a lovely post and what heart felt comments. Some have made me cry.
I have so many memories, good and bad, associated with clothing. Clothes made for me by Mum or bought for school or special occasions. My love of certain fabrics coming from dresses that were made for me or cardies knitted for me . They were made with love. Even now Mum still buys me clothes or wool for knitting.
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I am at the moment reading Iris Apfel accidental icon, or in her words Musings of a geriatatric startlet, very much about clothing and fabric feel texture and color, if you have not seen it kate it is a marvelous book and so differently written,not like anything i have seen or read before. I think you would like it and marvel at the way it is written. I cannont describe it ,part child books part art book ,but it is an autobiography with many drawings/paintings poster pages you name it it is here,very intriguing and a visual delight. I had never heard of her until i bought the book ,but had to have the book when i saw it.see if you are abel to see it anywhere harper collins publishers published in2018 isbn978-0-06-240508-1 enjoy
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this sounds fantastic, thanks Elizabeth
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I loved this post and will search out these books. Thank you for beginning such a stimulating discussion. The comments are fascinating, as is the story about the bear top.
I loved clothes from a very young age and was always attracted to luxurious fabrics, maybe inspired by my paternal grandmother, who was similarly inclined. I recall her tailored silk dresses and furs as if it were yesterday!
My mother was a frugal woman, so getting her to buy me new clothes was a battle. I had clothes handed down from neighbour children or friends, and my brother and I often shared knits. My mom hated to sew, but I recall her agreeing to make a dress for me for a school event, complaining the whole time (and the end product was a blue wool disaster with a crooked bubble skirt that we have laughed about on many occasions! It is why I eventually taught myself to sew.)
My strongest clothing memory though is a different one. My dad became terminally ill when I was about eight. When he was still in the early stages of his illness, we moved and I had to start a new school. I remember being at a shopping mall and my dad pulling me aside to ask if I would like a new outfit for my first day at the new school. I still remember that pair of pink pants and the pink and white striped jersey, not for the clothes of course but for the way that my dad understood what I was experiencing. That clothing provided me with a little bit of extra courage, and a feeling of becoming visible in the world, which is how I have often viewed clothes ever since.
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Thanks for sharing this, Stephanie – the perfect example of how clothes can so powerfully embody human care.
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Thank for this piece Kate. Most of my memories relate to clothing, what I or others were wearing at the time is how I remember thngs. But its always been a bit of a joke amongst family and friends – I’m so glad to know that its not just me and that it has nothing to do with vanity! And thank you for giving me a phrase I can now use to describe how it is for me – the fabric of memory. xxxx
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absolutely nothing to do with vanity, Helen – it just means your brain is doing its job really well!
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This post was so timely and interesting. The last few days I have been sorting 65 years of photographs by houses we lived in to work on a quilt and the first thing that I noticed in the photos were my favorite clothes and how much I enjoyed bright colors and animal prints until I aged and gained weight and started wearing baggy, dark clothes to hide the weight. I look forward to reading these books and getting some insight into clothing and choices. As always, your articles and books are so inspiring and thought provoking, Kate. Thank you!
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Yes, I think of textiles all the time and they often show up in my dreams, too…when I was a kid, my mom sewed me a lot of jumpers (pinafores) with rickrack and Raggedy Ann buttons. I was not always happy with my mom’s sewing choices, but I loved how free my body felt in those outfits. I had surgeries as a toddler/preschooler for kidney birth defects, and I suppose those outfits felt most comfortable as I healed. Recently I have returned to the same loose swing type pinafores (100 acts of sewing) and wool& swing dresses –it does feel like revisiting another time of my life, one without blue jeans or tight waistbands.
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I am the second of six children, first three girls, then the boys. We never had much money, and my mom did a wonderful job of clothing us by making our clothes out of anything she had at hand. I remember lining up between my sisters, awaiting my turn for fitting. Our clothes were all made out of the same fabrics, but with special individual touches for our different personalities. I have a very distinct memory of lining up for red and white dresses one year, made out of what could only have been heavy weight tablecloths, with the oldest of the boys, a toddler at the time, at the end of the line in tears because there was no dress for him.
A few years later, when I was seven, I talked my mother into allowing me to wear my first 100% made-by-me garment to school: a skirt made out of discarded curtains in an obnoxious green, purple, and gold paisley brocade. My teacher referred to me as Scarlett for a week, and it was years before I figured it out.
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Your mother must have been so resourceful, Kate.
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I have an uncomfortable memory to share: when I was about five I was chosen to present a bouquet to someone important..I don’t recall who. My sister, only 18 months older, was not chosen. Was I ‘sweeter’?
A special dress, or ‘frock’ was bought for the occasion. In the shopI fell in love with a bright orange dress with a sticking out skirt covered in tiny orange bows . I have never coveted a garment so much since! But my mother chose fir me instead a dress if dull slubby green, unornamented , not a frillor a bow to be seen. Such a fuss was made about this dress as it was made of silk. I was rigid with fear in case I spilt something on it. I associated the dress with trauma, and the loss of the dress of my dreams.
The green silk dress was reverently put away, and, in due course, my own little girl grew in to it. Again I was warned not to spill anything on the precious silk dress, not to allow my daughter to play in the garden wearing it…to keep it for ‘best’
The denouement of this tale is that when I checked the label to be sure to care for it properly I discovered that it was 100% polyester.
Oh it is an uncomfortable memory in so very many ways .
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this is fascinating, Felix – that non-silk green dress carried so much with it!
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I recall vividly my life in clothes, from a very early age, some my own, some my sister’s and some the garments my mother made as a seamstress with tailoring skills. The added bonus was her sister who knitted with the most perfect of tension I’ve never achieved! As soon as we were able we were making our own, adapting patterns or copying London designs to be ahead of the provincial ‘in crowd’. It is the depth and detail of these hundreds of memories that is sensational! I use this word because each memory is almost as if my senses are being stimulated. I feel the weight and the hang of the fabric, whether it has a nap or any texture, print or weave. I see the colour, repairs and alterations. I hear the sound of the material as I move or strain. I smell the difference between fabrics. I taste the dry threads and wet wools. Yet there is more. For every item I recall there will be at least one tale to be told, one moment in time for me and my frock! Many of my photographs are in black and white but I can see the colour the film could not. There are also instances when I recall what I was wearing but cannot identify the situation or event, even though all the minute detail surrounding me is present. Not surprisingly when I suffered a severe reactive clinical depression 30 years ago although I can recall some detail with doctors, there are no clothes to be seen! I appear to be invisible or naked but since my senses were dulled …… At good old fashioned jumble sales [ remember them?] I had a fabulously successful technique. Never needing to look at what I was grabbing, I simply stretched out my arms ‘for a feel’. If it felt right, as in natural fibre, then it probably was going to be of use. It is said memory would play false and there again that due to the choices we make we fabricate our own lives. However I have the testimony of my 99 year old mother to corroborate some of mine and the odd photographic evidence too. I’m only grateful that I don’t dream of them all as well. The wardrobe of my mind is bursting at the seams!
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How interesting (yet not surprising) that your capacity for such vivid, sensory recall is lost for the period of your depression.
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I sewed my own clothes for many years starting in the 70’s. My mom kept the fabric scraps and used many of them to make a patchwork quilt. Whenever I see the quilt I remember the seersucker dress I made, the blouse and all the other articles of clothing connected to those scraps. I also kept many of the Vogue patterns I used back in the day. Many of my memories are about what I wore to significant events and the flurry of sewing that took place prior to the event!
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My mother made a patchwork quilt for my 21st birthday…the patches go all the way back to my first ever school uniform . It is a true labour of love, an heirloom
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I don’t so much dream of textiles, clothing and outfits as daydream of them. I find concentrating on the construction and styling of an imagined knitted or sewn garment helps to keep my worries at bay. I often do this to get to sleep, or during wakeful periods in the night. I often don’t remember these fantasy clothes, and sometimes when remembered they turn out to be absurdly complicated and unworkable, but occasionally I can bring them to reality.
As for memories, clothes that my mother made for me provide the most vivid and treasured: a pink party dress worn for a birthday (3rd maybe) when I received a bright green plastic toy motorcycle and immediately rode it round and round the back yard; or the capsule wardrobe made in purple to match a pair of polyester jeans that were thought to be blue in the store, but once in daylight were purple. There was a popcorn stitch poncho in purple, pink and white, and a lilac gingham smock top which were particular favourites.
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My dreams are always full of colour. I vividly remember one dream where I was sailing on a pirate ship. The ship had sails striped in orange and a very bright pink and we were battling another pirate ship with purple and red sails. Wonder where that came from! Shortly afterwards we were discussing dreams at school and my teacher told us that we dream in black and white. I told her that couldn’t be true, why would I otherwise have crazy dreams with pirate ships with orange and pink sails? This was certainly a colourful dream. I dreamt it when I was around 15 years old, now I’m 40 and I still have that vivid memory of orange and pink sails etched in my brain. Curious place that brain…
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Your teacher got it so wrong, Stina! Surely one of the best things about dreams is the colours? Your pirate ships sound amazing!
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I’d like to add: Kate, I love your posts that share your reading experiences, with links ;) . They broaden my world, pandemic or no. Thank you!
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I remember the joy of getting a new dress for Christmas. One in particular stands out. It was made of a very smooth cotton with a deep yellow skirt and a white bodice. I used to love getting into my mother’s wardrobe and gazing at a couple of cocktail dresses (50s) she had. To me they were just wondrous. And I’ll never forget the bright multi-coloured long dress my mother made me for my first ball when all the other girls were wearing pinks and blues. I was the only one to wear a truely 60s dress 😀.
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So many memories and emotions attached to clothes! But here’s one that I imagine many of us share: my sister and I were 15 months apart; when we had those rare events to attend, my mother would dress us identically. She didn’t make those dresses, either! I often felt sorry for my younger sister, because she’d not only have to wear this dress for this wedding (or whatever), but would continue to wear it for years, as she grew into mine!
I’m 64 and my sister has been dead for 36 years. In my memories, we are often dressed in the same clothes. After her death, I wore her sweaters until they were no longer wearable. That, I understand, is common – but felt like a private thing.
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thanks for sharing this, Robyn
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This post really chimes with me. I remember so clearly many of the clothes my mother bought and made me from the age of 10 -18. I had very definite opinions and she was very understanding! I would love to regain the certainty I felt then on my fashion sense – something to aim for? When did uncertainty set in?
It has swished about in my mind to do some sort of project book based on this, as calligraphy and art is another hobby, but I can’t quite visualise it yet. Sadly, I think mum probably threw away the fabric scraps years ago! Thank you Kate for bringing the idea back to the front of my mind.
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I love the idea of your project book, Jane
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I have always been sensitive to colours, have made my own clothes from a very young age, and have very vivid memories of them throughout my life – sometimes to the detriment of remembering other more important things!
Thank you once again for a most interesting read and the pointers to more reading on the topic.
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My daughter had a blanket that she was incredibly attached to for many years. It had a silk border, which I was constantly sewing that border back into place. She would rub her face and hands on the silk border. I think many children have blankets or clothes that they become attached to. It’s a comfort thing. I am that way with my bathrobe. It is in such tatters, but I have had it forever and it is so comforting. I just keep mending it.
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Jumping back in to say I’ve discovered that O’Keane’s book will be published in the US by Norton in May of this year, with the title changed to “A Sense of Self: Memory, the Brain, and Who We Are”. I would prefer the Yeats quote as title, but perhaps the Norton editors thought that too few readers would get the reference?
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this does seem a shame – I love the Yeats quote as the title – and even the ‘rag and bone’ phrase evocative to me (the local rag and bone man being a feature of my childhood!)
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What a misstep by the Norton editors! Who is going to be drawn to the title they’ve chosen, and who wouldn’t be drawn by curiosity to a book titled The Rag and Bone Shop, with or without a working knowledge of Yeats? Ah, if only we ran the world….
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Do I dream of clothing and textiles? Do I remember them? Just *all the time* – don’t get me started! ;) But thank you for recommending these three books. I’m off to track them down now!
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I don’t dream about textiles, but some of my strongest memories concern clothes, my zip front shift dresses in purple and bright green (very 1960’s) and my mom sewing patterns of stars and moons on them to make them less plain. I remember beautiful clothes, pink dresses, blue trouser suits, hand knitted jumpers, and then the clothes other people work, my grandads flat caps and donkey jackets, dad’s leather jacket and grease stained overalls, and the fabulous clothes inherited from older cousins. Even when I see black and white photos I know the colour of the clothes and how they felt on that occasions, for instead the crinkle of the petticoat from my blue party dress. I have things that were knitted and made for me as a child and sometimes I unpack them to touch them or smell them and they invoke very strong memories. Thank you for this lovely article which made me think about this again.
I was interested to read I know how Heather’s memories of the fur coat, as a child I was stroking the fox stole a lady sitting in front of me on the bus wore, it had it’s head, paws and tail still – then I asked my mom why the lady was wearing a dead dog – exit one very embarrassed parent with her child, but I remember it’s eyes watching me and how soft it felt but at the same time not quite right.
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I remember a similar incident with my sister many years ago – asking why the lady was wearing a dead cat!
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I often think that’s what children are for to embarrass everyone with the total honesty of their view of the world:)
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Such a thought provoking post Kate. I don’t know if this is common, but sometimes my memories and dreams get all churned up, to the point where I can’t remember if if I’m recalling a dream or something that actually happened. It’s almost like a deja vu experience, but not that exactly. The Rag and Bone Shop sounds amazing. I will see if I can find it here, and if not, I’ll kindle it.
Thank you for a post that got my wheels turning.
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I know exactly what you mean, Meredith – and I think O’Keane would argue that if you experienced something (whether apparently in your mind or in ‘reality’), it *did* actually happen . . . precisely because you experienced it!
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Wonderful blog post. Hope I will have the opportunity to read these books. And ”mackintoshies with rigor mortis”….
When I was a little girl, my mother made me a summer dress of white seer sucker cotton with blue dots. And at Midsummer Eves celebration I played with my pals, gliding down the slope on my stomach. I can still remember the look on her face when I showed up in my green stained dress.
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I loved this piece, and I’m grateful for your vivid dreams that work to our benefit! These are fascinating subjects and thank you for bringing those books to our attention. I look forward to reading them. Another book I’ve read which touches on the themes of how our choices of things we have in our home and what we wear, what are tastes become and how these are informed by the socioeconomic groups we grow up in, is; ’ The Vanity of Small Differences’ by Grayson Perry, the book accompanying one of his exhibitions. It contains essays by him and others on these themes.
I’ve also been watching for some time, how Instagram colour palettes change, with the seasons, with the mood of the country, with the pandemic. It’s often different to what you’d expect, when you look back at times in history when the decorative world responded to international events and has been studied in the light of those times. It’s a very fleeting thing these days. Like a murmuration. No doubt distorted by algorithms and shortened attention spans. It’s all fascinating stuff!
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Thank you for interesting reading!
I would not say my early memories are specially fabric/garment-centered, they are of many different kinds. But I do remember how I had very definitive negative opinions on some things and as adult, I still have them, the same ones. Like when I started school I was very aware that some of the things we were learning were completely pointless and really unsuitable for children’s minds (like learning by heart lists of very random facts). And I also very intensely disliked my grandmother’s knitting. She loved complicated two-colour patterns and used poly/acrylic yarns with very saturated colours. These things felt so very “chemical”! I hated to both see and touch them and of course wasn’t happy when I had to wear them. She recently passed away and my mother asked me if I wanted some of her knitting stuff. I gladly took all the needles but the yarns were exactly as awful as I remembered them!
And yes, I also have “garment shop visit” dreams and they are always pleasant even if I don’t buy fashion anymore in real life (I sew or swap). And I also have “being horribly late for something” dreams in which everyone has already left and I’m still looking for clothes I need (either packing them or putting them on). I think these may stem from childhood memories when we had to be ready for skiing and there was just too much stuff to gather and often in pairs (inner socks, outer socks, inner gloves, outer gloves, skis, poles…) which made matters even more diffucult of course :)
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I am now 67, but when I was 10, and living on a small farm an hour from Seattle, Washington, my father got the flu. My parents had season tickets to the Seattle Opera and so my mother decided to bring me with her, because she said I loved opera the most, out of my three sisters. I was so excited! That night we drove in and I remember nothing of La Boheme, except trying to stay awake, but on the way out, walking to our car, we walked on a pedestrian walk way over the street and to the parking lot. The woman in front of us had a fur coat on! I couldn’t stop stroking it, until she finally turned around, not too pleased, and my mother had to explain to her that I was an unusual child who had started sewing at the age of four and loved textures of all kinds. The woman finally smiled at me. That is my clearest memory of seeing La Boheme at the age of ten.
I love your blog posts, Kate, and own many of your books. I prayed for you when you were not well several years ago. But this post really hit home for me as s I love textiles so much. Thank you for the love and care you put into every post.
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thank you, Heather
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A very evocative piece, Kate. Brought back so many childhood (and adulthood) memories. why I dislike green (school uniform) to the clothes my mother bought me (what was she thinking?) or wouldn’t buy me. What I was wearing on significant dates. How my significant others commented. Dressing for them and, most of the time, dressing for me. Why I find it so difficult to let go of certain pieces of clothing. And dreams of clothes.
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I don’t have a story about memory, but I do have one about textiles and dreams. My mom and I were looking for a sweater project to knit at the same time, since I’d recently moved away, but our tastes are very different. One night I had a dream of myself at the beach in a sweater with a tree-like fair isle pattern of teals and blues and neutrals. The next day, my mom called me and said “I found the sweater!” It was an Alice Starmore pattern with a tree-like motif (Oregon Autumn) in a Vogue Knitting magazine. I did mine in the colors from my dream.
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