Canada, clothes and cold snaps
Hi all,
I’m in Canada! Specifically, I’m at the airport in Calgary. I’m here to do some events around The Husbands, and I’ve just finished up at Wordfest, a really wonderful writers’ festival that does a lot of interesting and slightly unusual things.
One of those slightly unusual things was an event called The Way We… Wear, in which a bunch of writers were invited to tell a little personal story about clothes. Just something casual and chatty about a real article of clothing that was important to us.
When I was invited to do this I said “oh yeah for sure, that’ll be fun” with the carefree optimism of someone agreeing to a task that’s still several months in the future. And then as Wordfest grew closer I started to actually think about it. What? Clothes? A story? What? I found the whole process weirdly intense, and once I got to the festival and talked to some of the other writers involved it turned out I wasn’t alone - a lot of us were actually quite worried about the event! We couldn’t imagine how it would work! We weren’t sure about our stories! And also, everyone was going to be performing in front of a giant drawing of their own face? Why had we agreed to this!
But the people running the festival just went “it always works, the format works, trust us”, and… they were right. I ended up choosing a kind-of emotionally loaded topic that I was a bit worried about, but it turned out that: everyone else had too. Other writers at the event talked about a handbag found in a chimney, a post-divorce suit, gendered clothing as a way of enforcing gendered tasks, what it means to keep clothes that belong to people who have died. I was glad I’d gone for the story that felt slightly tricky to figure out how to tell. I’ve popped a written-up version of my contribution below:
MY THE WAY WE… WEAR STORY
Hey everyone! It’s so lovely to see you here!
Now, first things first - although I’m wearing a red sequinned jumpsuit, I’m not going to be talking about the red sequinned jumpsuit. In fact I’m not currently wearing the item of clothing I’m going to talk about, because the item of clothing I’m going to talk about is a bedsheet.
But it’s going to take us a minute to get round to the bedsheet. To get the right context we’re going to have to go back to the 90s and the early 2000s.
I’m not, you know, categorically against the 90s. There was a lot of interesting stuff going on. But one of the things about the era that was particularly messed up — at least in Australia and the UK and from what I understand in Canada and the US as well — was the way people felt and talked about weight and body size.
Which is not to say that society is normal about these things now, because it’s absolutely not. But it does feel much more relaxed compared to, say, 1998: a time where you could ask people if they would rather win a hundred thousand dollars, or start a new relationship, or get a job they love, or lose ten pounds — and everyone would just look at that range of options and go: oh, the ten pounds please, I would like to replace my body with a slightly smaller version of the same body. After that the health or happiness or wealth or success would come! And if it didn’t, at least your body would weigh a bit less.
The fashion industry’s attitude to dressing bigger bodies at the time was kind-of like… do you ever do that thing where you tidy up by putting a bunch of objects in a box, and then you put that box on top of another box, and then you put both those boxes in the corner, and then you go “hmmmm don’t really want to deal with that” and you kind-of throw a big scarf over the whole thing? That was what the clothes in the shops were like for fat people in the nineties.
As I recall you generally had a choice of four types of garment:
Huge baggy shirt, grey or black, maybe dark purple
Long straight skirt that went all the way to the ankle, also grey or black
Slip dress made out of weird staticky fabric, usually with some kind-of splotchy polka-dot pattern
Dramatic Tunic: a bunch of floaty layers in bright turquoise and a glittery pink hibiscus pattern on top
And to buy those clothes you couldn’t go shopping with your friends, because your friends would want to buy cool cheap clothes at the cool cheap clothes shops and none of the cool cheap clothes shops would have anything in your size. So you’d go to Target and occasionally K-mart, or there’d be one shop in the mall that had a secret upstairs room with bigger sizes called something like WOMAN PLUS or EXTRA WOMAN, as if woman-ness was a substance like dried lentils and you could weigh it out, the more weight the more woman. Which was particularly excruciating when you were, say, sixteen.
But you know, it was fine, it’s not like I was ever going to be a fashion teenager anyway. I had other things to worry about, like teaching myself Latin and memorising a new poem every week and writing terrible novels about sexy swordfights in a magical forest. So I picked a couple of those categories of clothes — the big baggy shirt, the long skirt — and I stuck with them for years.
And time rolled into the 2000s, and I started uni, still with the same basic outfit. And then in my second year I signed up to do props and stage management for a sketch comedy show that some of the law students put on every year.
The actual comedy would probably not, I think, hold up very well to examination now. I don’t remember many of the sketches in detail, although I do recall there was one that was the supercalifragilisticexpialidocious song but instead we sang bona fide purchaser for value without notice, which I don’t know if this comes across but I can assure you it was very funny. Although I don’t know if there was a sketch to go around it or if we just had that single line, you know, ta-da, there it is!
One thing about being a stage manager that was surprising to me was that all of a sudden the clothes I owned were appropriate. They weren’t just the only clothes I could get - they were clothes that filled a purpose. Stage managers are meant to dress in unremarkable black and grey, they’re meant to be covered from wrist to ankle, and it’s not because their bodies are somehow shameful or upsetting or because they don’t deserve nice things, it’s for a reason. You want to be covered up so that if people see you through the curtains, you don’t catch their eye. You want to be monochrome so that if you come out on stage to move stuff around, your outfit can act as a signal to the audience: this is logistics, you’re not meant to be paying attention, there’s not going to be a joke. The outfits were practical.
And I came back the year after, even though I was no longer a law student (it turns out law is really hard and I was terrible at it).
And that year, for reasons that now escape me, we had a sketch that required a whole load of valkyries. You know valkyries? Those mythical Norse women who come down on flying horses, all armour and billowing dresses, to take the souls of dead warriors off to Valhalla? There’s a particular pop-culture conception of them: big plaits, big dresses, big helmets.
Our budget was pretty small and so our valkyrie costumes were some bedsheets sewn together, and some plastic Viking-y helmets with horns that I got from the local party shop. Good enough, sure. They went into the general props-and-stuff pile. And then at some point during our rehearsals, when we were all messing around, I tried on one of the weird sheet costumes.
And it was magnificent.
It felt like it was made for me. These were literally just sheets sewn together, I think one of them even had a bunch of little blue daisies on it, but those sheets billowed and the helmet was kind-of great as well and my hair was long enough to do plaits and it looked like I was wearing everything on purpose, like I was dressed for power and splendour and vastness and immortality. It was an outfit that worked because of my body, not despite it.
I’m pretty sure I had to go and have a bit of a cry, me outside the almost-empty law building on a weekend sobbing in my valkyrie sheets. And I wore the costume on and off for a bunch of the rehearsals, even though like I said earlier, typically as a stage manager you want something focusing on ease of movement and a sense of stern authority, which these billowing sheets were… not. But every single time I put it on, it was a silly, funny, glorious joy.
It was a ridiculous costume, yes. But that was the point. That was why it worked. It was ridiculous and wonderful, and wearing something ridiculous and wonderful was all of a sudden an option that I realised was available to me.
The bodged-together bedsheets said that my clothes didn’t have to be a chore, or an apology, or a disguise - that sometimes they could be playful and magnificent and silly and powerful and fun.
(So I guess it does come back to the red sequinned jumpsuit after all.)
MORE CANADA
When I arrived in Calgary for Wordfest it was sunny and autumnal, golden leaves everywhere, a literal rabbit hopping around in the park outside one of the venues(???), and then overnight on my last night it switched: I woke up and the air smelled that particular cold way that I always forget exists until I smell it, snow was smattering just ever so slightly, trees were bare.
And now I’m on my way to Vancouver Writers Fest for some more events.
My challenge for the rest of the week is: to continue to attend book events WITHOUT picking up so many books that I have to pay for excess baggage at the airport. I’ve been sticking to a really strict “only buy books that aren’t out in the UK yet” rule which has been helping so far. I escaped from Wordfest with only three - Jenny Heijun Wills’ essay collection Everything and Nothing At All, a proof of Morgan Dick’s upcoming debut Favourite Daughter, and Canisia Lubrin’s Code Noir, a collection of fifty-nine linked stories.
One thing that’s making it particularly difficult not to buy a bunch of books is that a lot of Canadian books have these really neat untrimmed edges:
I love it, the sense it gives you of how the book was made, the specificity and roughness, the way the staggered triangles of the edge show where the bundles of paper that form the pages have been folded. I didn’t realise it was common outside very fancy small presses until I saw the Canadian edition of The Husbands, which has this going on too. What a neat thing for a whole country to decide to sometimes do! What an enticement to buy a copy of any particular book now instead of waiting to be back in London! I’m going to stop typing now before I talk myself out of my useful policy!
ANYWAY, I should get about the day, I started writing this in the Calgary airport but now it’s actually the next morning in Vancouver, whoops. Festival time!
Thanks for reading,
Holly