What was she thinking?

I called into Clegs today and found my attention caught by a bolt of the material Haley Bracken chose for the "bodice" — I use the word loosely — of the dress she designed herself for the Alan Border presentation. It's a gruesomely fascinating image — her hair, her dress, her smile, her breasts — that I can't quite bring myself to post on my blog. If you haven't had enough of an eyefull, go here. The material itself is quite pretty, in an ornate sparkly fairy princess kind of way. And the layers of blue and green in the long wavy skirt and its train? Ditto.

But I couldn't help but wonder: what was she thinking? Glamour, cameras, fame, and all the mystique of The Dress that will transform you, and, in this context, take on a life of its own, I guess. But apart from the sexual politics of her choice, there's a more prosaic question, about the imaginative process by which she negotiated the passage of seeing all those beautiful materials in the shop, choosing this combination and those shapes to end up with the finished product?  I used to be quite good at negotiating those tricky waters: today I became paralysed and indecisive. It's not that clothes shopping is that much fun: but at least when you try something on you can see what it looks like.

I'm also struck by the oddity that I can barely tell the faces of this one and the other blonde WAGS apart; but that I could pick the textile of her dress, out of context, in a flash.

Momentous Days

Well, the day has finally arrived. On careful and objective scrutiny, it seems my son is now as tall as I am. I've kind of been waiting for this day, ever since, years ago, I started measuring him against my rib cage and counting my ribs as he ascended in height. But now I look him directly in the eye, and see he is my height. Or rather, I see I am his height.

I sit at the big table and look at him moving around the kitchen and measure my own height against the cupboards, and it seems I am not as tall as I thought I was.

I tell him to be careful on the bike, because kids are harder to see than adults; and he tells me I am, by the same token, just as hard to see as he is.

His shoes are now bigger than mine (and I have long feet).

He wears my old jackets.

But tomorrow, when he accompanies me to the teaching awards ceremony in Canberra, he will wear a second-hand cream jacket his friend bought him at Savers, his new skinny black jeans, and a black shirt — and red Converse sneakers. I was going to save money, but eventually went shopping and bought a new dress. Locally made, locally sold, and, given that it is a wrap-around jersey number, amazingly flattering. It is red, black and white paisely print, with a deep black hem slightly curved around at the front, so we will be colour co-ordinated to the max.

I thought about buying a new suit — I have one basic black one which is now four years old — but didn't want to spend as much money as would take to get a really good one. And in any case, I'm not really sure that heavily tailored look suits me. Anyway, I have gone with this look (no. 12 is closest in design to mine, and if they had had this one in stock, I probably would have chosen this).

But in case I think I am not heavily enough tailored when I shake hands with Julia Gillard tomorrow, I just have to remember the words of the Sprinkle website:

Welcome to the world of Madam Mafia
....inspired by all those passionate, fiery European women who are not afraid to speak their minds!! Think Sophia Loren and Isabella Rossellini....

This collection is not for the faint hearted. Madam Mafia is a strong and yet feminine woman, who wants to stand out from the crowd. She is glamorous and stylish....a woman who knows and gets what she wants.

Great! Textiles with text! Dresses with attitude!

I bought it at Lupa, a little shop around the corner that features local designers. It was the first place I went to: freezing cold until she turned on the heater outside the changing cubicle. Turns out the owner is seriously thinking about going back to university to do her BA...

Ideally, of course, in our consumer, occasion-driven society, I would have bought new shoes, too. But I have perfectly good ones to wear. I did go shopping with Joel for tights, though, and was tossing up the various textured and coloured options. I chose very sheer black ones, and showed Joel all the control options for holding your stomach in. "You don't need that", he said.

When it was his turn, another momentous discovery: he is now too big for the "boys" section of Best and Less and K-Mart, and we ended up at Just Jeans, where he bought not the smallest pair of men's jeans. They were way too long, but I said not to worry, that I would take up the hems. Indeed, there was an ancient Singer machine in the shop, but it was Sunday, and no one was on duty.

So this afternoon, before it got too dark, and it got too hard to sew black denim, I got out my ancient little Elnita SP sewing machine. I was properly brought up to sew my own clothes, but these days, tend to leave even my mending till my mother comes to visit and offers to sew for me. She sewed all Joel's clothes for the first eleven years of his life (highlights include beautiful smocked baby nightgowns; a long, green, fur-trimmed dressing-gown; and indeed, the two waistcoats she made recently to his design). But I found I could remember how to thread the machine without thinking, threading the cotton through spools and levers as if I had performed that ritual every day of my life. I started to fantasise about sewing some more, especially next year, when I am on leave, and rediscovered the smell of my hot little machine, and the cotton dust that gathers around the bobbin, and the satisfaction of a neatly pressed hem as you stitch it into place. A wonderful throwback to my mother's house: ironing board and sewing machine at the ready, and the aromatic smell of warm cotton filling the house.

Life in the OG

One of the things I love thinking about with the Order of the Garter is the slightly uncomfortable effect of dressing up. The Queen's recent encounter with Annie Liebovitz touched this nerve; and there is always something "lunatic" about the Order and its pageantry (the word is the Duke of Edinburgh's).

So I was delighted when C sent me this link to a bunch of pictures of Prince William's recent investiture with the Order, with this wonderful moment of abashedness across the young Prince's face:



There is also a lovely shot of some royal women, and Prince Harry, who aren't members of the Order, smiling and waving at the others: is there a soupçon of mockery in those smiles?



I'm also fascinated in Baroness Thatcher's dress, very similar to the gown the Queen and Princess Anne wear under their Garter robes. Has this become, by default, the women's Garter uniform? In August, I start writing my chapter on dress and fashion and costume in the Order: will need this photo again then!

It's all about the frocks...

I'm developing a sub-theme in my lectures on medievalism this semester: viz. "it's all about the frocks". And it's true: medievalism is often associated with dressing up. It's one of the first questions I'm often asked, when I reveal my profession as medieval scholar: do my students and I dress up in medieval garb? I guess it would be the most obvious way of invoking a pre-modern subjecthood; and the distinction between studying medieval culture, studying medievalism and performing medievalism is easy to blur. But I'm not, myself, a re-enacting kind of medievalist; and while I've had my share of velvet dresses, they've not been of the floor-sweeping variety. Such as these:





But it did occur to me the other day, mid-lecture, that the distinction between those who re-create the medieval and those who study those acts of re-creation might not be watertight. Do I fall prey to a false distinction when I carefully distinguish myself from the medievalism that is about re-creating the medieval? Most academics will naturally deny they are driven by wish-fulfilment fantasies in their work, but can we ever accurately diagnose our own interests?

Last week I was lecturing on The Mists of Avalon and talking about the interesting exchanges between Bradley's research into Wiccan practice, and the way Bradley's work is sometimes itself used as a source for such practice. A nice example of cultural work, I think.

One of my students is organise a demonstration and talk on re-enactment societies for my class in a week or two, and I'm really looking forward to this, but it's a very complex phenomenon, with different groups working with quite different agendas and practices.

And the medievalist itself can look so different, too. It can be dreamy and girly...



... but it can also be seriously pedagogical:





Anyhoo, medievalist film, in particular, is often lusciously about the gowns. I'm teaching Braveheart in a couple of weeks, which features some particularly lovely numbers in crushed velvet. And the costumes of Lucy Griffiths in Robin Hood have been fun, too: stretch knit cotton or printed tops worn under post-modern pseudo-C18 corsets.



And combat/happy pants for the forest episodes.

Annie Liebowitz certainly understands what this frock business is all about though. Here's her Scarlet Johannson as Cinderella:



I think there's a lot more to be written about medievalist frocks: as escapism, as technical mastery of medieval design, as romantic fantasy for a pre-feminist mode, as sheer sensual and textile pleasure, as well as the mythology of the perfect frock. Did anyone else see Susanne Spunner's brilliant play, Running Up a Dress: A Dialectic of Sewing in the late 80s? Hilarious mother-daughter sewing scenes, often clustered around the idea of the perfect dress that will transform us.



I went to see it with my sister and my mother, who for years made all the clothes worn by me and my two sisters. Dozens and dozens of frocks, all designed and put together with love — even amid the inevitable arguments over contested hemlines — and handed down to the next sister after a year or two.

I haven't checked with her, but I bet she made all four of these frocks...


















I also found a picture of my own first best frock. I was flowergirl at a wedding, at the age of 4 or 5, and got to wear this little number...

















It must have been invested with magic and mystery, as it is the only dress from my childhood that I kept. Here it is, along with its dear little shoes (and no, it pre-dates The Sound of Music).




It has a little pocket in the inside of the lining, for a handkerchief...



Apparently at the wedding feast, I was unimpressed by the chicken salad, and distinguished myself by asking for a vegemite sandwich.

I think I kept the tulle headdress for a while, too.

I may be condensing several memories, but I do recall going shopping, either for this, or some other dress material, in a shop in the Cat and Fiddle Arcade in Hobart:

And I have fond memories of the fabric sections of Myers and Buckley's, now David Jones, in the city, pouring over the sequinned brocades and shimmering silks that belonged to the unimaginably glamorous world beyond the manse, before ending up at the ginghams and cotton prints sections.

I was also thinking about the mythology of frocks last weekend, when I had such a clear image in my head of the frock I was going to wear to the party on Saturday night, and how I was going to "put myself together", so much so that even though it was actually quite cold, I persisted with my summer frock because that was how I had envisaged myself. Perfectly, knowingly delusional... But it makes me think there is in fact a kind of continuity between medievalist frocks and "normal" dressing-up, since clothes are so obviously performative.

As it turned out, I took the car to work the other day, and took the chance to wear a frock (I can sometimes manage a skirt or a dress on the bike, but pants are much easier, of course). So there I was, thinking and talking a little about medievalist frocks, wearing a soft grey peachskin silk dress I've had for over fifteen years, but a frock all the same, and a rather floaty one at that. Oh well. Sometimes you just have to wear your frock with irony.