When You Meet a Man, You Judge Him By His Clothes. When You Leave, You Judge Him By His Heart.

I'm reading a book entitled "My Mother's Wedding Dress: The Life & Afterlife of Clothes". I'd been searching for this book for months, but it was out of print and I couldn't find a copy. Last year, I started writing a very similar book. My working title was "My Life in Shoes", but the theme of the book was very similar. The clothes that we wear evoke certain memories that remind us of a time or place. Even if your not a so-called "fashionista", most of us can recall what we were wearing to certain events at certain times in our lives. This book that I am reading will cause me to re-work my own. It is written by Justine Picardie, a former features editor of British Vogue. She writes with such a lovely style that it causes me to re-read what I have written and cross out and delete. But that is beside the point...




In "My Mother's Wedding Dress", the author describes her mother's wedding dress. It is a black couture dress with french lace...extremely chic. She feels it was representative of what her mother wanted to be, as opposed to who she really was. The dress was "gone and disappeared, lost like my parents' marriage, yet it lives on in my memory". This reminded me of my first wedding dress, worn when I was barely nineteen. It belonged to my favorite aunt, who felt that bestowing it upon me was a huge honor. I took one look at the beautiful dress and knew in my heart immediately that it was not for me...not my style,,,though at 19, I had not quite developed what one would call a "style"....But at 19, I was certainly not willing to say 'no" to such a generous offer. My only hope was that it would not fit, but as fate would have it, it fit like a glove. My mother and my aunt were beside themselves, thrilled with the prospect of seeing the gown worn again. I was quietly distraught, but would not realize until years later that you have to speak up when things don't feel right. And sometimes you are allowed to hurt people's feelings when it involves your own life. But that is a story for another day...



When I think of all of the people close to me in my life, I picture them in clothes that are meaningful to me...not necessarily them. Early on in my life with The Husband, before he was The Husband, he showed up to work on a Saturday morning wearing khaki shorts, a green t-shirt and brown leather boots (the short JCrew kind). I can still remember seeing him across the building, walking up to his office, and thinking "That is a very handsome guy". And to this day, that green t-shirt is my favorite thing for him to wear. He looks good in almost everything, but the green t-shirt just carries the good feelings...



My mom had an ochre dress that she wore with a purple scarf...it sounds hideous when I describe it, but when she wore it, I thought she was the most beautiful lady in the world. After she died, I scoured her closet looking for that dress, but it wasn't there. So it will just have to remain a memory, which is probably a good thing, because the dress itself probably would not have held up to the memory...


I have absolutely no memory of anything special my dad wore except a Cubs baseball cap. This in itself speaks volumes about my dad...because he could have cared less about clothes...a point of contention for he and my mom all through their life...


The kids are easy...for Big Sister, it was her Punky Brewster hairstyle early on, and later in life, her lovely wedding dress. For The Rebel, her Snow White costume on Halloween. The Boy appears in my mind in every baseball uniform he has ever worn...and for Little One, it has to be the little red french jacket that Grandma brought back from Paris....

I don't know what my own would be...I guess that is for others to decide. When I married The Husband, the dress was not perfect since it was a product of time, money and environment. We were married over-looking a beach in Jamaica...so this required something a little different...I ended up with a black off-the-shoulder dress with a cream collar. At the time, I wasn't overly crazy about it, but when I look at pictures...it seems to fit not only me, but the occasion.

I know they say that clothes don't make the person, but there is no getting around the fact that clothes are an expression of who we are. Each time we put the effort..or don't put the effort...into what we wear, we show others a little piece of ourselves. Who we are...who we aren't...or who we want to be...

So until tomorrow, when I will remember that what I am wearing today may be what someone remembers about me years from now...