Justine Picardie - My Mothers Wedding Dress: The Life and Afterlife of Clothes

My Mother's Wedding Dress

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

If the Spirit Moves You

Wish I May

Truth or Dare (ed.)

My Mother's Wedding Dress

The Life and Afterlife of Clothes

Justine Picardie

BLOOMSBURY

Copyright , 2005 by Justine Picardie

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Picardie, Justine.

My mother's wedding dress : the life and afterlife of clothes / Justine
Picardie.1st U.S. ed.

p. cm.

eISBN: 978-1-59691-880-1

1. Wedding costumes. 2. Clothing and dress. 3. Fashion. 4. Fashion designers.
I. Title.

GT1752.P53 2006

392.5'4dc22

2005033215

First U.S. Edition 2006

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Typeset by Hewer Text UK Ltd

Printed in the United States of America by Quebecor World Fairfield

For my mother

"A consultation last year took me to an intelligent and unembarrassed-looking girl. Her style of dressing is disconcerting; where women's clothes are normally attended to down to the last pleat, one of her stockings is hanging down and two buttons of her blouse are open."

Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams

"She immediately stepped into the wardrobe and got in among the coats and rubbed her face against them, leaving the door open, of course, because she knew that it is very foolish to shut oneself into any wardrobe."

C. S. Lewis, The Lion,

the Witch and the Wardrobe

"Have you ever been so lonely that you felt eternally guiltyas if you'd left off part of your clothesI love you so, and being without you is like having gone off and left the gas-heater burning, or locked the baby in the clothes-bin."

letter from Zelda Fitzgerald

to her husband, Scott Fitzgerald

CONTENTS

"Married in black, you will wish yourself back."

MY MOTHER WAS married in a black wedding dress, a French cocktail dress from an expensive boutique in Hampstead, close to where she lived at the time. It was October 1960, the beginning of many things: the winter, the decade, the marriage, and me. I was born eight months later, in June 1961, feet first and too small (little enough to fit into a bottom drawer, until a cot could be found; five pounds of jaundiced fretfulness; not the neatly stitched white-linen contents of the bottom drawer that my mother's mother would have planned). When I was eighteen and started to wear the dressa narrow, corseted sheath, just above knee-length, hidden bones within its bodice and waistI thought about my mother, and how slender she had been on her wedding day, no more than a girl herself, even though she was meant to be all grown up.

What became of the black dress? It has gone and disappeared, lost like my parents' marriage, yet it lives on in my memory, and in photographs of my mother's wedding day, and of me, when I wore it to my university graduation ceremony, a few weeks before my twenty-first birthday. Just as I cannot yet explain how or why or when I allowed such a precious bequest to slip through my fingers, neither can my mother tell me her precise reasons for buying the dress (and sometimes, when I wake up in the night and think about this, about what I don't know, and what I want to know, it feels as if something has unraveled within and without me). But what my mother can recall for me is this: she spent more, far more, on her wedding dress than anything else in her wardrobe; sixty pounds, which was a great deal of money in those days, especially for an impoverished twenty-one-year-old, newly arrived in London from South Africa.

"I bought it in a hurry," she says.

"Why black?" I ask her.

"Why not?" she says.

Although the wedding dress was lined with a soft dark silkworn and torn by the time I inherited it, wrinkling like an older woman's skinits skirt was made of a scratchy woolen mohair beneath a satin bodice. I sometimes wonder if my mother hoped it would keep her warm, in the unfamiliar coldness of London, even though the dress was sleeveless and really rather short. "I thought it would be useful," she says. To which I might reply, "How useful is a French cocktail dress to a pregnant girl living in a rented one-bedroom flat in Hampstead?"

But that would be missing the point entirely. The dress, perhaps, was her way of declaring that she was a chic European now; that she had left behind the safe conformity of her colonial upbringing (a place more English than England, with its good manners and carefully observed social etiquette). Here was my mothera pale-faced convent girl, with a family tree that was carefully traced back to a beatified Catholic martyr; the great-granddaughter of a colonel of the 11th Hussarsmarrying a Jew. I was always taught never to say that word; to say "Jewish" instead, to avoid the inflections of anti-Semitism; but isn't this how the story of my parents' wedding would have been told at the time, back home in South Africa? Hilary Garnett married Michael Picardie, a Jew, in London, in black.

Actually, I can't be certain how that story was told. South Africa was such a long way awayand when we did go there to visit my mother's parents, Pat and Fred, they were far too polite to comment on their daughter's marriage. They were not wealthy, despite the titles and prosperity of previous generations on both sides of their family ("I'm a Balfour," my grandmother used to say, with some pride, "and your grandfather is a Garnett," not that those names meant anything to me). Pat and Fred are dead now, leaving me a set of Georgian silver cutlery and a clutch of unanswered questions; as discreetly silent in death as in life; though I have borrowed from my mother a map to their lost world, a copy of the Garnett family tree. My mother is not certain who wrote it ("One of the unmarried aunts, I think," she says, "a grand one in South Kensington"), but I have pored over the author's spidery Edwardian handwriting in order to decipher a small piece of the fabric of my past. It seems that my grandfather Fred was the son of a second son: his father had come to South Africa, lured there by the goldmines, but there was no fortune to be found, just blackwater fever, which killed my great grandfather at the age of forty, leaving behind him a widow, May, and two children, Lillian and Fred. Someone had to support the family (and May, said to be a stubborn sort, didn't want charity from the rich relatives back home in England), so my grandfather left school at fifteen and trained to be an engineer. He was a man who liked mending things, who could fix anything: even a broken heart, it seemed to me whenever my sister and I went to stay with my grandparents; not that my mother would have necessarily agreed.

Pat and Fred loved each other with a calm consistency quite unlike my own parents' marriage, and their lives were ruled by routine: up with the sun, the BBC World Service news just after breakfast, The Times crossword, tea and shortbread at 11 a.m. and half-past three; a brandy sundowner at six. The only disagreement of theirs I ever witnessed was over the last slice of avocado in a green salad: they both loved avocado, and wanted the other to enjoy the remaining piece. "You have it," said Fred to Pat; "No