Slow Fashion October: Revisiting the Cool White Jacket

Didn't I mention, the other day, that I'd been following along over at The Fringe Association, with #slowfashionoctober? I think I did. The theme this week is "long worn". I haven't had time to write a post about it, what with things being the way they are round here right now; but it's been in my head.

I've always believed in the notion of "slow fashion", since the day I first laid a pair of sharp scissors to the liberty print cotton which would become my school needlework project smock. It was slow, that's for sure: it took months for me to piece it together,  in an hour a week. But when it was done, I had learned a lot: not even so much about sewing, for the teacher was no stitcher, but about putting care into something I was going to enjoy, about choices, about reward. And the thing is, I remember that still, now, and the remembering has become a part of that reward, even decades later. 

The smock had a story and it's for the pleasure of remembering just that kind of experience that I became a scrapbooker. Over the years I've been telling my story, I've recorded memories about many favourrite outfits. That's my kind of slow fashion. If I can hold a treasured item in my hands, pull it out of the wardrobe after years of its hanging there..that's good. If I can wear it again, or pass it on, bring it back to life..that's better. If I can tell its story and then step back and watch a new story emerge..well, that's as good as it gets. Four years ago now, I wrote about my Cool White Jacket and how I had bought it when I was a teenager, and how my just turned teenager daughter had spotted its potential. Now this week, and last, and over the summer and forward now to winter, she has been wearing the jacket on evenings out. And she's wearing it to the places it has seen before, in its first life. She wears it as she walks up the same road I walked on the night I met her father; and, yes, I was wearing it that night too. I can't show you a photo, because the jacket isn't here with me now. It's in Studentland, where it belongs. But I can reprint my original story, which I like even more now that I now it has a proper second chapter. Any bets for a third?

Cool White Jacket

A while ago now I made a page about Marie Antoinette. You might remember it. I liked it and I blogged it and I thought that was that. Until a couple of days later.

The (Not So) Small One and I were lying side by side on the bed, staring at the ceiling and talking about clothes. She wanted to know if I had "any vintage" she could borrow - you know, old stuff from when you were young. And suddenly I made one of those strange connections, when something you've just done leads you to something you didn't know you were about to do. Scrapbooking is useful in all sorts of ways.

I did have a bit of vintage, but without that Marie Antoinette page I might never have remembered. The story goes like this:

When I was in France on that exchange trip I've told you about, one of our excursions was to Versailles. We saw the gorgeous rooms and the gardens where Marie Antoinette used to play at farming; but we also had a bit of time to wander round the town. We stared in the window of a second hand clothes shop and my friend Judith spotted a white denim jacket she desperately needed to have. Her Mum was a French teacher, and maybe that was what gave her enough swagger to march in there and buy it. The rest of us couldn't have managed it..

My friend in her jacket, in my scrapbook from the time

I loved her jacket. I wanted her jacket. Every day for about three years until I finally found one I could afford in a shop closer to home. I paid £5 for it; and, every time I put it on, I thought about the lazy, low sunshine that day in Versailles and the dusty shop window and my crazy, headstrong friend. (Who, coincidentally by this time, had moved seventy miles away to the city to board at the very school The Not So Small One goes to now.)

I still have my piece of white denim history and I told The (Not So Small) One the story and she got it and I pulled the jacket out of the wardrobe and she slipped it on and she was beautiful. So I let her keep it. She says she'll guard it with her life and I think she probably should. That jacket has stories of its own to tell. And I thought of the 80's with a smile. And she thought of the 80's and laughed. And we were both agreed that we each had it Just. Exactly. Right.