Bari - Dressed the secret life of clothes

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Copyright Shahidha Bari 2019
Design Suzanne Dean

Shahidha Bari has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

First published by Jonathan Cape in 2019

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 9781473564466

TO ALMARA

She wears a different cheongsam in every scene stiffened silk, capped sleeves, high collars and is, somehow, impossibly lovelier each time. All quiet grace and lissom limbs, she is a sylph, silently slipping through narrow corridors and darkened stairwells, her tiny wrist brushing against his sleeve, their bodies only momentarily turned to each other on their star-crossed paths.

After the revolution of 1949, the Communists had curtailed the wearing of the cheongsam in Shanghai, but migrs carried them with them to Hong Kong as a marker of a defiant elegance. In Wong Kar-wais film, In the Mood for Love (2000), Maggie Cheungs cheongsams are perfectly fitted to her slight frame, the upright collars reaching to the neck, always meticulously matched to studded ears. The dresses are structured and traditional, skimming close against the ribs and over the waist, holding her in place, holding her back, holding off the tumult inside. She never lets go.

He, by contrast, is young and warm, capable of passion. Tony Leung plays him with a rueful, smiling carelessness: a slim hand habitually running through glossy hair, rolled sleeves and slackened collar. He is plain-shirted, but stylish-smart, quick to laugh, neat in a narrow tie and tiepin.

When, partway through the film, she realises that they can never act on their desire, the camera catches her gazing wistfully from a gilt-edged window, its golden frame picking up the yellow jonquil printed on her dress, the flowers own mute beauty, in turn, mocked by the landladys loudly chintzed lounge stretching behind her. The green tendrils of some climbing plant creeps into the edge of the shot. In its original Cantonese, the film was titled The Age of Blossoms. Maggie Cheungs still-girlish character, in the spring of her life, mourns the loss of a flowering that never comes. She sips absently from a glass of water; her slender arm is pressed against her waist, holding in everything she might once have felt, might ever feel again, under the blooming yellow jonquil printed on her bluish-grey dress and across her heart.

When the American heiress Claribel Cone purchased an oil painting depicting a pair of discarded boots, she grimly conceded to her sister, Etta, that she was not so pleased with her newest acquisition. You picture her writing from the satin-slippered serenity of her salon with a disappointed, grudging respect: the pair of shoes will not grace my living room with beauty however it is a Van Gogh almost certainly Mr V. [Vallotton] says sans doute The painting is unmistakably Van Goghs, a variation on one of his particularly obstinate themes. The boots were his too, bought in a Parisian flea market in 1886. The feverish series of paintings that followed indicate how they possessed him in that wildly productive year, repeatedly commanding his painters eye and demanding the touch of his brush.

The 1886 canvas in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam is also, unmistakably, his, profoundly marked by that peculiarly heavy hand and rendered in the dulled browns of his Dutch Nuenen palette. The paint is thickly knifed, the pigment-clogged brush visibly scrubbed across the canvas next to vigorously cross-hatched textures. The brushwork is graceless, brutish, honest. So are the boots. They sit exhausted, reluctantly ordered like chided children, right and left in place, the battered leather robust and defiant, and the long-worn uppers curled from use. The laces are tightly threaded but left strewn, resting in the gleaming eyelets they have pierced. The lolling tongues dip into each boots dark internal recess. And yet they have the grace of the sunlit earth on which they rest. They rest. These boots have walked, have worked, and though they come to rest here on this sunlit earth, they are only momentarily stilled, as though they might labour yet with ragged breath.

The German philosopher Martin Heidegger, seeing the painted boots in an exhibition, wrote of them in an essay of 1950. He feared and romanticised them, projecting onto them the toilsome tread of the worker and the menace of death. The shoes, he claimed exultantly, contained a world, full of ripening grain and fallow wintry fields. On the leather, he wrote, lie the dampness and richness of the soil. Under the soles slides the loneliness of the field-path as evening falls. In the shoes vibrates the silent call of the earth But perhaps the world they contained was less even than this and more profound. The boots are simple and entreating, piercing us with their visible fatigue. They ask us to imagine the life of feet, conjured, as they are, by Van Goghs hand. But walking and painting were always bound together for him.

As a child, he had roamed the fields and woodlands of Brabant, feeling the colours of sky, marsh, heath and sand resonate with unspoken tone and atmosphere. When in 1890 he suffered a breakdown, he sought solace and tranquillity in the grounds around Auvers-sur-Oise, painting landscapes palpably freighted with an emotional charge. Sometimes I long so much to do landscape, he wrote, just as one would for a long walk to refresh oneself, and in all of nature, in trees for instance, I see expression and a soul, as it were. In July 1890, he walked out into the wheat fields around Auvers for the last time and shot himself in the chest.