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The little black book of black dresses
We see black in so many ways: as boldness, as strength. We see it as playing grown-ups, as a coming of age, as an expression of grief, as mourning, as a power to reclaim from those who took from us the selves we once wanted to be. As I sit now, to finish this essay, I can no longer recall what happened to my first little black dress, how old I was when I stopped wearing it, who I might have given it to, or why it was so emblematic in my mind of black dresses as a whole, when in reality there were likely many other black items in my wardrobe from many years before.
The jacket
DOUG CLOUDY WAS desperate for it. He hadn’t been laid since the backpackers came through town all those years...
Killing me softly
Camellias, carnations, chrysanthemums, daisies, daffodils, dahlias, gardenias, hibiscuses, lilies, magnolias, pansies, peonies, poppies, roses, tulips and more: perhaps we wear them complacently or ironically – or consider any symbolic associations as feeble, irrelevant or outdated – yet we cannot totally outrun, or outpunch, the connotative powers of a floral dress. Nothing signifies a well-behaved, compliant woman with no rough edges or anger-management issues quite like a pleasant and inoffensive arrangement of petals on a skirt. The signifier, however, is often a disingenuous and deficient representation of the signified.
Totentanz
We are loose now. We peel our skin veil by veil to what lasts longer. To the pulse of...
ode to Kylie’s gold hotpants
50p at a West London flea market. rumoured to be worth 10mil. see those ruched metallic folds behind bulletproof glass...
clothing is a language
Fashions fade away like epidemics once they have ravaged the imagination. – Jean Baudrillard day after day we change into clothes we change...
Change of clothes
I used to ask to be dropped off a block early flee the dumpster that somehow grew wheels evade the goodbyes...
A stitch in time
These tensions between our inner and outer selves, and the layers of anxiety we add when we imagine other people’s (mis)perceptions of who we are because of what we’re wearing, are surely some of the most simultaneously beguiling and brutal aspects of fashion. The right outfit can drop the veil between who we believe ourselves to be and who we want to become; the wrong one can be like showing up in fancy dress and realising it’s not that kind of party.
Behind the seams
THESE PODCAST EPISODES, which you can listen to via the links below, gather the voices of just a few...
Ladies who doth protest too much
TERFs speak with self-appointed authority about the mental health and wellbeing of trans women but fail to explicate reasons for their own obsession with another’s gender. The real question, then, is why are TERFs so concerned with trans women and the way they live their lives?
Shrapnel
On your way home, a postcard on the footpath. You pick it up. On the front is a photograph of the Goulburn Boer War Memorial (unveiled in 1904): a soldier wears a slouch hat, his arms firmly down by his sides, stuck in time.
All creatures great and small
Most American adults can now identify more corporate logos than native plant species, and primary schoolchildren in the United Kingdom can name more Pokémon characters than species of British wildlife
