The excerpt of prose poems below is taken from a larger work I have completed. The entire collection, entitled Costumes of the Living, is forthcoming by Snuggly Books. My attempt is to look at clothes/fashion as a language and to identify what I would like to call ‘clothing sites’: spaces where clothing lies at the heart of a narrative; or, clothing from which narratives unfold or are, at times, even painfully stitched together. Clothes often assume properties of the body: they fall sick or even carry the body’s weight (its burdens).
In my writing process, I often referred to Roland Barthes’ The Fashion System. Barthes applies his semiotic method to fashion and in that sense, looks at fashion as bearing a particular grammar. I have touched upon this perspective in one of the pieces below: by altering certain rules of their syntax, what will these misshapen clothes, this irregular vestimentary grammar, say about us and our bodies.
Another developed from the influence of Rei Kuwakubo’s Body Meets Dress collection. By virtue of technology, such as excessive padding in unexpected places, Kuwakubo allows our “dress” to make a comment on the human experience; for example, by making clothes that explicitly demonstrate pregnancy.
There is one piece inspired by a comment Lacan makes in one of his lectures, alluding to a story of a parrot and Picasso. It seems that she nibbled at Picasso’s shirt, and at the lapels of his jacket. Lacan took this act to suggest that the bird was in love with the artist; it struck me that somehow in the midst of this interaction the clothes he was wearing were not altogether an unimportant detail. From this reflection I wanted to explore how clothes keep secrets, as tapestry-like capes that conceal affairs.
In yet another one of the poems, there is an element of transfer, ideas of interest to me that I have literally adorned onto the fabric of these written clothes. Walter Benjamin’s theses on history somehow made me think of clothes that are perhaps ill-fitting or go against the grain of our bodies, as if by the use of a tiny pair of scissors — by literally fragmenting our jeans — we might be altering or changing the course of history.
While writing, I often felt that I was making clothes — and in some ways have tried to mirror my verbal style to sartorial ones. The frills of language likened to the frills of a frock — clothes that exist only in words, for at first it would be ostensibly difficult to liken real clothes to these written ones, for one would be comprised of verbs, subjects and predicates, and the other of fabric and color. Perhaps, however, there will come a point where these materials would bleed into one another, so much so that it would not be clear anymore as to whether we were really speaking of fabric or of grammar, of clothes or of the person wearing them, a time that produces mutant beings like these, clothes that are written.
The Poems
She kept nothing on her person after a long sweaty day. Her secrets, she used to say, and all that emotional baggage she had to carry lay heavily on the fabric of her oversized dresses or by now had gradually settled deep into the black corduroy jacket she wears in the winters.
***
The clothes she chose to wear had very little to do with the image she presented to the world. More than anything else, they concealed certain realities she was hesitant to reveal. Although she appeared arrogant and standoffish, she wanted one man’s attention. She wanted him to look at her clothes when she walked by; they worked together and both looked forward everyday to the prospect of meeting each other in their clothes. She liked it when his top button was open so she could peer at the hair of his chest, or that one time when he came to work in his shorts, she couldn’t take her eyes off his legs. Although she knew from the very outset that this long-drawn entanglement would come to nothing, she took pleasure in dressing up just for him and sending him photographs of the new dresses she bought for herself; she thought she remained hidden from everyone else’s gaze by wearing large tapestry-like capes she imagined concealed the whole affair.
***
For someone who was so driven to look at herself in the mirror, she had a plain-clothes husband whom she constantly cheated on, if not physically, at least in her mind. It must have deeply disturbed her that he was always so shabbily dressed, and she never quite liked the shape of his head—she always feared for her progeny— although she would never have admitted this kind of thing to her well-dressed lovers with whom she would say that her husband was beyond such frills.
***
She wore her beautiful dresses only at home, for she did not want to attract the attention of passers-by outside; apart from her impractical fairy-tale like house that looked like it had been put together by a dressmaker, she found that it was here, inside these ornate dresses she made her hiding places.
***
This writer could not stop herself from borrowing clothes from her friends and began dressing up because she wanted passers-by to not notice her, but to look at her clothes, instead, so much so that she slowly lost interest in writing and spent most of her time thinking of what to wear.
***
Later on in life, he would blame his parents for the drab clothes they dressed him in as a child, clothes that made him look later on like a dull, middle aged man.
***
She kept all her secrets—not to mention her money and important documents – hidden in her underwear. Even when she was homeless, she felt that when she wore her dresses, she was inside a house.
***
This three-piece suit broke all the rules of its own grammar, for its lines were crooked and the loops for the belt had come off and were now painfully stitched diagonally across the legs of the trousers; for the shirt buttons there were holes that only reminded one of buttons, rendering it impossible for the shirt to close. The wearer, as a result, would always end up walking with his arms tightly wrapped across his chest, forcing the two sides of his torso to close in on him.
***
Even later when I started wearing better clothes, I thought at the time that I put myself well out in the world by being well-dressed, and the truth was that I truly was. But now I realise how others must have looked at me in those clothes that were admittedly nice but not tailored well enough to fit me. My pants were always a little too tight and my shirts, though of a soft material, never quite fit my torso. It would have perhaps been far more respectable to have worn clothes that were never intended to look good, in the first place.
***
The city in which I live in now has become polluted. We walk about town in circles, not noticing that over the years our clothes have accumulated so much dust that it has ruined our overall appearance.
***
Already as a young child, he had developed his own sense of style in respect to his attire and was not just something his mother – from all the stray clothes lying unfolded in the cupboard – put haphazardly together.
***
The sleeves of that kind of shirt would have normally extended all the way down to her wrists, should her ams have been pointed downwards. Instead, she had the tailor finish off the sleeves somewhere mid-way on her forearms, leaving an impression that the sleeves that would normally have covered her arms were incomplete; it was precisely this slight imperfection that made this shirt stand out.
***
Because they already knew then they would always be wandering, they made sure to adorn their garments not only with glass—a means to reflect the gaze of those they would encounter along the way – but by intricate embroidery that chased along the bordering edges of all their clothes, a single undisturbed line woven into the fabric that not only spoke of their perpetual migration but was also a reminder of where they came from. Who would have known that their past would soon begin to resemble the future.
***
It would have been expected to think that early explorers to the Arctic donned their garments as merely a means to keep warm and while they would have hardly dared dub their garb as fashion, they were, as a matter of fact, concerned not only about the function of their clothes but also what they looked like wearing them, even at the edges of the world, even almost at the brink of disappearing.
More of these excerpts can be read at Body Literary Journal.
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