It's just a f***ing dress

I risked it all to buy myself the time to write what I wanted to write, to paint what I wanted to paint. This is 'The Dress'.

The Dress

The Dress

Where I can, I try to speak as little as possible of my pains and of my losses. I’ve heard it only feeds them and helps them grow. But some loss is to be shared, some pain to be sent back out in writing, or through art. Some pain exists to be seen.

I have, since I was a little girl, harboured a secret fantasy. As far back as my memory will take me, I have dreamt of chancing upon a beautiful designer dress. A classic piece of couture, of art, a black Givenchy gown, an Audrey Hepburn number, something never meant for me but that somehow found its way into my world regardless – hidden on the back of the rail with a £5 price tag. Or gifted from a fairy godmother. Rather than pray for the wealth to buy such a piece, I’ve wished instead for a freak incident, for the odds to shift in my favour, that somehow this dress would find me, that God exists and sends me signs in the form of vintage dresses.

It's not a figure of speech, to say that I have dreamt of this moment since I was at least 6 or 7. I dreamt about it. I fell asleep and in my dreams I gathered garments, one after the other, a dalmatian-print Cruella coat, a glass slipper.

I’ve always carried a sense of the macabre, of the dramatic with me. I preferred villains to heroes. More Maleficent than Aurora, more Posh Spice than Baby. There are photos of me as an 8 year old, grouped together with my sisters and family friends, all of the others squinting against the summer sun, tummies full of ice-cream poking out over crop tops and teal green 90s tee-shirts, protruding over knickers, or nappies, or shorts. And there I am, head to toe in a black turtleneck and what I can only describe as black velour cigarette-cut pants. I’ve rounded this ensemble off with a string of pearls, and have my hair expertly brushed and sitting across my shoulders. Nothing about the way I present myself to this world has ever been an accident. The 90s felt all wrong for me. I’d have been better off being born in the 50s and coming of age in the 60s, but for some reason, I’ve been put here, on this hot rock, at this time, in this fashion era, where I’ve had to endure the low-rise offences of the noughties once, and now twice.

These dreams have followed me into adulthood. I frequently dream of finding haute couture in the strangest places. I often venture through the other realm and into unknown women’s closets, where I am gifted cast off Chanel jackets, or unwanted diamond earrings. During my late twenties, I went though a period of trying to be sensible, of trying to make a sensible living and look sensible, and wearing sober colours and cream blouses, and saving money. No one ever told me I should, but I did. I hate blouses. The dreams stopped for a period. As though those gifts went elsewhere, looking for other, braver slumbering souls, who’d like to slip into a timelessly cut garment of silk and walk as a well-dressed ghost through the empty streets of the sleeping mind.

When I turned thirty, I lost my sensible livelihood. I walked away from a partnership with a man because neither of us knew back then how to love each other properly. Soon after, I fell out of love with drinking too much, then out of love with trying to write articles about difficult things like philosophy, like post-political states of discontent, like ontological turns, like climate change, like justice. No one ever made me write those difficult things. But I did. And nobody gets to opt-out from difficulty, but we are allowed to rest, to choose our weapons, to let our weapons choose us. I’m looking for new words, for new and foolish ideas, since I’ve no more sensible ways to talk about how absurd the world around us has become.

I want to write about love. About art. About the soul and how it shines through each and every one of us. About how I meet people and sometimes see colours shining all around them. About how love is yellow, and art is turquoise, and words are only worth using when you know exactly what it is you want to say. Anything other than that is too pricey. We expend too much energy writing and speaking in ways that don’t make sense, that eclipse what it is that we truly want to express. Say it. “I like dressing up”. “You hurt my feelings”. “I love you”.

Since returning to myself, I have begun to fill my wardrobe with new colours and shapes. A vintage pink and red embroidered jacket, a haul of fishnet tights, a thrifted burgundy Aubade corset, a pair of black PVC gloves bought from my local fetish shop. I wear them and I burn bright yellow. I don’t know what it is that is in me, but something shines a headlight each time I wear what I want. I call it soul dressing, and I pray that each and every one of us that wants to, is able to mirror through some expression whatever it is they have sitting down there in the seat of the soul, in the depths of who they are.

A few weekends ago, on a Friday night – I dreamt I went to my local thrift shop, that I found there a pair of golden boots in my rare size 41. Friday night’s dream, Saturday told, sure to come true on a Sunday. So I woke up and spoke those words. I went straight to the thrift store and found right there, on the shelf, a pair of size 41 black leather, pointed-toe stiletto boots. They end just below the knee and if I’d had the money, I’d have bought them new. But I do not have the money and that is the point. That’s what makes it a gift.

Yesterday, at 14.45, I suggested to my friend that, following a coffee date, we go to the thrift store again. After so much spiritual toiling, I am by now quite attuned to my own gut instincts. I was sure I was going to find something special. I was unsure however, that my bank account could take the hit. My friend asked me what I needed. A classic black dress, I told her. She reached through the dark rail and handed me a simple black, full-length gown, the halterneck straps draped over the back of the hanger.

Click. My intuition goes. Click. I check the label. It’s vintage Sonia Rykiel, and it’s priced at 300NOK. That’s about 30 euros. It probably cost 1000 new. I know I couldn’t, no shouldn’t, entertain the idea of taking it home with me, but my body is already carrying me towards the dressing rooms, and I’m staring at my naked trunk in the mirror, hoping no-one can see me through the gap in the curtains and why are changing rooms in thrift stores always so badly plugged, the doors so poorly fitted so some passing browser might catch a flash of hurried flesh while combing the shop floor. They leak.

The dress is perfect. It curves and fits just beneath my shoulder blades, and is fastened with a signature Rykiel bow at my spine. The front is an A-line cut that doesn’t mound over my breasts in the way that most of those shapes do. And best of all. The dress has pockets. A rare diamond. I take two selfies.

And then. For some unknown reason, to the horror of all the deities who I imagine have conspired that this be my moment, the moment of my dreams, I put the dress back on the rack.

I. Put. The. Dress. Back. On. The. Rack.

And walk away.

And go home. And tell myself that frugality starts now. That hard times are coming. That I won’t want to wear a backless ball-gown in the apartment I can’t afford to heat this winter. That every penny counts, that there will always be something new I want. And I go to buy ingredients for dinner and think that right now it costs as much as a Sonia Rykiel dress just to feed myself. And I go to the cinema that night and think that the ticket was half of the dress and we walk home under the autumn skies and I nearly fall over when I realise what it is that I have done. And I spend the whole night waiting for the shop to open on Saturday morning, and another small stress-pimple appears on my jawline.

The same friend who picked out the dress sent me a poem by Charles Bukowski earlier this week. I’ve never read him before, is he good? Is he problematic? Has he been cancelled? I don’t think I ought to check.

The poem is called The Laughing Heart. He says:

“be on the watch.

the gods will offer you chances.

know them.

take them.”

I go back first thing the next day. I check the black dress rack, then the ball-gown rack en général, then in desperation ask the shop assistant who says she thinks she saw it towards the close of the day yesterday but that it must have gone, and to remember to reserve it next time. And I think, my God, why didn’t I reserve it? And it’s just a dress, it’s just a fucking dress. I’ve lost jobs and loved ones and there are people suffering everywhere and I can’t hold my emotional self together long enough to accept that I stopped watching for a moment and the chance slipped right off of my body. Like a shadow. Like those dreams that stop knocking. Because you’ve closed the door.

What if there are black dress moments, every day. What if the gods are screaming at you, watching from above, throwing popcorn around the room and fighting over the volume on the remote yelling “take it! Take this one. It’s good!”.

And if this is so, then how many moments have I missed when I was worrying about paying for the future? And if this is so, how many more have I yet to steal?

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Original artwork by me, Eleanor Flowers. Pastel on paper, 2022.

Follow my Instagram: @flowerseleanorflowers