Friday open thread: remembrance of things past

[dolorosa_12]

The first four days of my working week were frantically busy (delivering between 4-6 hours of training each day, a sudden deluge of researchers realising the pandemic would continue to keep them out of the lab and therefore pivoting to doing systematic reviews, with the subsequent realisation that they didn't know how to do systematic searching and asking me to do it for them, etc). This was somewhat deliberate on my part, however: working from home gives me a lot more freedom in managing my own time, and I've taken to cramming in as many commitments as possible into the first four days of the week, and keeping Fridays relatively free.

All that is by way of preamble to explain why this week's open thread is being posted so early in the day.

This week's prompt comes from bruttimabuoni, and the question is
do you keep any clothes/accessories that have particular memories or associations for you?



I used to be much, much worse about this, especially when I was a child. (I have a vivid memory of being asked by my mother, when I was around twelve years old, to go through my sock drawer and discard any pairs of socks which were worn out, and getting really distressed because I'd worn those socks during important moments of my life. I was an exhausting child and teenager, generally going through life from a very early age with this perpetual sense that everything I'd already experienced was Deeply Formative and Important, and any associated trappings of said Deeply Formative and Important Moments therefore needed to be kept as mementos.)

One of the last remnants of this ridiculous attitude was a miniture can of a limited edition Impulse deodorant (for those of you not from Australia, basically this was the cheap, spray deodorant of choice for Australian teenage girls in the 1990s, who used it more as perfume than deodorant, and reeked of the stuff; I was given this can of deodorant as a freebie because my friends and I attended the opening night launch party of an underage nightclub in our home town when we were fourteen). For whatever reason, I decided that this specific can was too special to be used in an everyday way, and I had to save it for important occasions. I decided, with the solemnity of an extremely socially awkward fourteen-year-old, that this meant Year 10 and Year 12 formals (i.e. high school proms), and any dates I would go on. For literal years I stuck to this, and I was still carting this ghastly can of Impulse around with me on dates in my early twenties, when I had moved to Sydney, and I actually took it with me to the UK when I emigrated at age 23. By that stage it had become more like a talisman, something I couldn't get rid of because it would mean cutting a link between that ridiculous, solemn teenage girl I'd been, and the (still pretty ridiculous and solemn) woman I'd become. I think I only finally threw it away a couple of years ago!

That being said, because I have moved house so many times in my life (including one month when I moved house three times), I have become a lot better at limiting my possessions to things which serve a current utilitarian purpose. (That purpose might be simply 'look pretty' — I still have framed art on the wall and vases for flowers and so on — but the object in question has to be something I actually use.) It wasn't just moving house and country so often that reined in my previous tendencies, it was witnessing my mother and her three sisters having to help their frail and ageing parents move out of the family home (where they had lived since the 1950s) and get rid of six decades' worth of accummulated clutter. My mother, after doing this, ruthlessly decluttered her own house because she was so horrified at the thought of her own adult children having to do this on her death. These experiences really stuck with me, in addition to the fairly regular experience I've had as a librarian of random people getting in touch with our library and trying to dump all their deceased academic parents' out-of-date academic books on us. Bereaved people are not in the best frame of mind to make ruthless decisions about their relatives' possessions, and I've come to feel that it's almost selfish to put your next-of-kin in that position.

This has taken a rather morbid turn, so I'll finish up talking about the one item of clothing that doesn't fit my current mentality: my wedding dress. I got married more than three years ago, and for obvious reasons have only worn that dress once. I deliberately chose a dress that was knee-length, partly because I wanted to be able to move on the day and not risk getting mud all over the hem, but partly because I had vague ideas that the dress could later be transformed into something that could be worn again. I don't want to donate or sell the dress, I definitely don't want to throw it away, but obviously it's been three years and I haven't taken any steps to alter it. I don't even know what could be done — the obvious option would be to dye the skirt part blue or mint green, or replace it entirely with a different coloured fabric. I can't sew, and I don't want to risk a dyeing disaster: hence, my current inertia.


What about you all? Do you have significant accessories or items of clothing?

Comments

[lirazel]

Bereaved people are not in the best frame of mind to make ruthless decisions about their relatives' possessions, and I've come to feel that it's almost selfish to put your next-of-kin in that position.

Agreed.

I do think wedding dresses are the kind of thing you can keep even if you don't intend to ever wear them again. I had fun as a kid pulling my mom's out of the closet and occasionally wearing it myself.

I tend to hold on to clothes for a long time not because of nostalgia but because I dislike clothes shopping (even though I like clothes!) and if I find something I like, I want to wear it forever. So I have things I have been wearing for more than a decade. I will wear things until they get holes/lose their shape/start to look truly terrible.

[dolorosa_12]

I think you're right about wedding dresses — it's just so removed from the norm in my family. My parents never got married, my father and stepmother aren't married, and of my mother's three sisters, one never married, one is divorced, and the other only married her husband when their children were teenagers, in a registry office ceremony where they wore everyday clothes. (It's a similar story for my father's two sisters: one never married, and the other got married in a tiny backyard ceremony.) So I'm kind of the odd one out for having a biggish wedding and a special white dress! We are not really a wedding ceremony kind of family, hence the lack of old wedding dresses in our storage cupboards!

I'm like you: I hold onto clothes for a long time because I hate clothes shopping (I don't mind doing it online, but I'll only buy clothes online if it's a company I've bought from before), and I also think it's better to buy a smaller number of better quality/more expensive items, rather than constantly replacing lots of cheap clothes that wear out quickly. I also have things I've been wearing for over decade: I own a denim jacket that my younger sister bought when she was fourteen and then passed on to me. She was fourteen in 2003. I kind of like owning and continuing to wear things like that.

[corvidology]

I've been getting better and better about donating things to get them out of the house but I do have a small pile of clothing that has sentimental connections for me... and I'm not a very sentimental person.

I've decided I'm going to make a crazy quilt out of pieces of the fabric for my study chair else they're never going to leave the house.

[dolorosa_12]

Oooh, I like the quilt idea! Having crafting skills is so useful in situations like this: if you can't bear to part with something, at least you can repurpose it once it's no longer useful.

[trepkos]

I'm a bit like you were - keeping lots of stuff for sentimental reasons. But I have no children to plague with sorting through my stuff, and our friend who is our executor LOVES going through people's stuff, so I feel no guilt.

[dolorosa_12]

It sounds like you've got the perfect situation with your executor, so I certainly see no problem in you keeping loads of sentimental items!

[bruttimabuoni]

I realised I'd missed this, so came back to check for the Friday thread. Your memories of clinging to things are very, very familiar. I had quite a few talismans like that - including a Charlie perfume which I hated the scent of but was horrified at the idea of throwing away, till I started moving house regularly... wonderful how that changes your mindset.

I've been where I am now for 15 years, which is plenty of time to accumulate, but I don't have a lot. I do have a nice skirt from my 30th birthday which is both something I'd dream of wearing again and also the only size 12 item I've fitted as an adult. Since I'm not getting married, maybe that's my wedding dress. I also have a slinky red dress which is actually mum's and whose top is hopeless but whose skirt looks amazing, which I've been meaning to Do Something with for far too long. And I have a locket with runes on which was my grandmother's as a teenager when she was nordically obsessed - but I think that's a keepsake rather than clothing, really.

Otoh one reason I was interested is I have some clothes which have a wildly negative memory for me - the things I wore to my cousin's funeral when he died at 29 in a stupid accident. I haven't deliberately kept them, they are just useful black and grey things. But it is extraordinary how you can't forget wearing something for one very bad day. I now just have the jacket left, but every time I move it along in the wardrobe, I think of that day.

[dolorosa_12]

Moving house regularly absolutely changes your mindset, although in my case it took far too many moves for this to really set in. (When I was eighteen, my sister and I ended up being almost entirely responsible for packing up the family home — a massive three storey house with four bedrooms, a study, separate laundry room, two living rooms and a separate dining room — in preparation for a move to Sydney, where we would be moving into a three-bedroom flat. This experience scarred me for life in terms of acquiring new things, but it didn't cure me of my sentimental hoarding of talismanic items from my childhood and teenage years. What really cured me in that regard was a) moving overseas, and spending the first three years of that time moving from one short-term rental to another and b) the stuff about my mother needing to pack up her parents' house, as discussed in the above post. My husband's parents being massive hoarders and completely incapable of getting rid of even the most useless items also influenced my thinking.)

It seems to me that most of the things you're holding onto — the skirt, the red dress, and the locket — are each meaningful in their own way, so I can understand why you're reluctant to let them go.

It's really interesting to know the reason that sparked this prompt. I don't know if I'd be able to hang onto clothes like that, although as you say the black clothes worn to funerals are unfortunately useful things to keep around, even if they have terrible associations. I don't really have clothes like that per se (I'm fortunate in that I have not been to many funerals in my life), but I am a terrible digital hoarder and still have emails (which I can't look at again) that are reminders of some truly awful moments in my life. I've had two of my email addresses for over twenty years, which definitely has allowed for a lot of memories to accumulate.