red dress

When you find a piece of clothing you really love, it becomes more than just 'a piece of clothing.' When it's invested with desire and significance, it becomes something that can transform you into another person. I think I've spoken about this before in relation to lusting after it-bags - you see so many images of cool girls with PS1s or Balenciaga Cities or whatever that you start to think 'if I had that bag I could be a certain kind of person. My life would be different and I'd move in a different way.' Of course, logic would suggest that if you save your pennies and buy that bag or that dress, you will be fundamentally the same person, just with a fancier bag on your arm. But fuck logic. When I put on my favourite new dress, I become the girl with the dress, who shimmers through the city leaving a trail of glamour in her wake, who turns heads and catches eyes and is the centre of everything. I am fabulous and wonderful and my hair is enviable and everyone will want to get to know me. I become a character in a story. Isn't that why we all blog and keep diaries and so on? The obsessive need to make our everyday causal events into a story worth telling?

Eventually, though, the novelty wears off a little. The first time you wear the dress, it transports you. But soon it becomes a well-worn part of your wardrobe, slotted in alongside a dozen other dresses and skirts and so on. Putting it on doesn't have that same effect. It's just another option to consider when you're deciding what to wear. The cycle continues, you look for another lust-worthy dress in the shops to focus your wild imagination on. But by then the old dress become invested with something else: memories. It's yours. It's the dress you wore when you met a boy, or got a job, or danced all night with your pals. It might not let you become some weird fictional glamourous character anymore, but that's because it's an extension of you now. It seamlessly becomes a part of your past, your future, your identity. It's your story.

images via jak & jil