Packing and Unpacking: Fashion as Emblems of Memory
Have you ever had recurring dreams? Well, I have. In a recurring dream, I realized that I had left my clothes in some school dorm, hotel or apartment closet. The remorse and fear of forgetting something was so real that I couldn’t tell if I had actually left my clothes in a closet once.
As a person who has left home at a very young age, I moved through school dorms, hotel rooms and apartments in different cities, and now, I travel internationally. A advanced transportation has the ability to get anyone to any continent on the planet in a dozen hours, but it also makes me feel lost sometimes. One day I’m in a small, calm border town in southwestern China, the next I’m in the busy, noisy metropolis, New York City. I am often in a situation where I am not quite home but not quite not-home, where I question a lot who I am and which place I belong to.
There is something about suitcases and clothes. When I travel from city to city, move from apartment to apartment, I am either here or there. But with my suitcases, I can have pieces of other times and other places by my side. Most of those pieces are made up of my clothes, clothes that tell me who I am and even construct who I am. We, to some extent, become our clothes, our closets, our archive.
I always have a black dress in my suitcase, a black dress that used to belong to my mom and she passed it on to me. It is a knee-length sleeveless dress made of jacquard fabric with a mandarin collar. It was the most beautiful dress I’d ever seen as a child. I fell in love with it even before I realized my love for fashion. Mom always allowed me to try on her clothes, even though they were too big for a child. The first time I put on the beautiful black dress and saw myself in the mirror, I fell in love with it immediately as it was the embodiment of everything I wanted as a little girl — growing up, being mature, being elegant. When I turned sixteen, I put on the dress again and both Mom and I realized it fit perfectly, so she gave it to me that day. Mom gave me a number of clothes after that, some of which no longer fit her figure, some of which she considered unsuitable for her current age, and some of which I really liked. “You’re becoming a big girl,” said Mom, every time when I put on those clothes, in a feeling voice, “and I’m getting old.” The emotion in her voice and eyes was so complex that I don’t understand yet and probably won’t until I’m older or have children of my own, I think. I’ve seen a lot more fascinating dresses in fashion shows and department stores later, but I still bring that dress with me wherever I go. It represents a special connection between me and Mom, and it triggers the collective memory we share and even the memory belongs to my mother that I never experienced. When I wore the dress, I am not just an individual person, I am my mother’s daughter; and I am not just “what I am” at this moment, but in the process of “becoming” what I expected as a child. It creates a sense of expectation, both reminding me of the home and people in a corner of the world that await me and encouraging me to become the person I always want to be.
Another piece I carried everywhere is a white cotton short-sleeve top. It is a normal T-shirt you can find in every fast fashion brand. What made it so special is that I wore it during my high school graduation trip. I went to Singapore with my six best friends — and the seven of us are still best friends now. We spent months planning the trip during our senior year. Even with the stress of the college entrance exam, we still made time to discuss and finalize the details — dates, flights, hotels, itinerary. The trip only lasted a week, but it was so much fun that we agreed to travel together once a year. We traveled together three or four times over the next few years, but one or two people were absent each time for various reasons. For almost six years, we spent nearly every day together, and now we are scattered all over the planet. As we get older, it seems increasingly difficult to get seven people together. Bringing the top with me is a kind of nostalgia and also an anticipation for me. Sometimes I wear it to bed, and when I close my eyes, all the good old days come back to me. On a cold, rainy night in New York, I could smell the humid, warm tropical air from it.
Sometimes I add new items to my closet. I rarely wear clothes in bright colors before. Partly because my dark skin does not conform to the Chinese beauty standard of fair skin. I believed that bright colors would make my skin tone look darker, so I avoided wearing pink, yellow, orange, and similar hues during my puberty, when I was most concerned with what people thought of me. However, I bought something pink last month. It is a knitted maxi tube dress from COS, and most importantly, it is in a bold fuchsia-pink hue! A color I would never try before. Another reason I used to avoid wearing pink makes me, as a feminist, ashamed now. I used to believe that pink was reserved for little girls, the petulant and timid. This idea was not innate, as I vividly recall liking pink when I was four or five years old. The stereotype is imposed on all of us by culture, whether we are males or females. Not only does a patriarchal society require each gender to comply to specified gender norms, but all attributes connected with masculinity are regarded as positive and admirable, while those linked with femininity are not. Many girls deliberately draw the line at certain feminine traits — such as wearing pink and make-up — to demonstrate that they are not a part of the discounted category. I was uncomfortable with wearing pink because I was uncomfortable with being a female. But I’ve realized how wrong I was after years, and I can now proudly and unapologetically announce that I am a woman and a feminist. With fashion, or more specifically, with my pink dress, I feel the urge to break something, if it’s not the glass ceiling, it at least needs to be something that used to confine me. The pink dress is a new piece to my archive that I think I will carry with me, as it signals the moment of “breaking”.
In almost twelve years, my suitcases are basically my closet — I can fit all I need into one or two suitcases. I seldom buy new clothes, and that’s not because I am an anti-consumerist. Sometimes I encounter beautiful garments but thinking of the inconvenience of traveling with them and the limited spaces of my suitcases, I just give up the thought of possessing them. The limited capacity of my “closet” makes me appreciate the clothes I have, think about my connection to them, and reflect on the role fashion plays in my life. Fashion and clothes are so important to me that the long period of being lost and lonely was materialized in my dreams as the absence of clothes.
I remember when I was a kid, my dad was packing for a business trip, and I asked him if he could put me in the suitcase and take me with him. He laughed. Though it’s impossible to carry people in my suitcase with me, with the clothes in my suitcase, the emblems of memory, I can always have people I love and moments I cherish by my side. ▪︎