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This is what I wear when I am in full pursuit. 

#what i wear #rodarte f/w 22

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This is what I wear when after almost two years of outrunning The Virus, it finally catches me. 

#what i wear #vetements f/w 22

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Ronnie Spector taught me how to dress and how to long. To be unafraid to garland myself in desire. To enjoy loving fully and foolishly. To be soft and Black and a woman. To be a soft Black woman, yearning. Imagine living a life where you always get what you want? Imagine never pining? What a twisted creature you would be. Nothing The Ronnettes sung would make sense: 🎵 So when the stars are shining bright / I dream about the boy who’s gonna hold me tight 🎵 Ronnie’s voice wide and soft sings: 🎵 We will climb a mountain to see our wonderland / Maybe now you’ll understand. 🎵 And I feel full up with happiness for the boy I loved first. And this song made me feel it was a good thing to lose him and have this to dance to. Often I start my day with The Ronettes. Walking In The Rain. I Wonder. Why Don’t they Let Us Fall In Love. Is That What I Get For Loving You? So Young. Be My Baby.  Which is to start to the day celebrating my pining – cherishing the feeling of it trapped up in my bones. What a gift to make us feel young and in love every time and forever. RIPPP Ronnie peace, power, paradise xxx

#ronnie spector

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This is what I wear when I get my first dose of The Vaccine. And for the first time in a year my anxieties about my body, your body, all bodies — what even are bodies? — subside.

#what i wear #area #f/w #2021

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This is what I wear when The Universe throws me a lemon and I think “What! Another one? Maybe I’ll make sorbet this time!”

#what i wear #erdem pf21

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This is what I wear when I realise last year I acquired my first official smile wrinkle — an occurrence too humorously ironic to be sufficiently upsetting.

#what i wear #collina strada pf21

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Has clothing ever broken your heart? More specifically, has losing an item of clothing ever upset you so much that you could only describe the loss as grief? What silly questions! Considering this year, the big things that have left me, and all that we have lost collectively (people, time, space, knowing, patience, sanity).

But the navy blue RNLI sweatshirt with the cute logo is a thing I lost this year that I refuse to get over. It is the only thing I have lost this year I thought I could eventually replace. Maybe that’s why it’s so sad. Or that’s how I made it sadder? It had the cutest logo, though – embroidered people leaning out of an embroidered lifeboat into embroidered waves. When I wore this sweatshirt strangers would lean into me and ask questions.

I wore this sweatshirt all the time or carried it in my bag just in case, a security blanket. I misplaced it somewhere between the school on quiz night and the pub we did rounds of tequila in to celebrate winning the quiz. This was the weekend before lockdown. Foreshadowing? 

I should be embarrassed to admit how devastated I was when I visited the RNLI shop today and found out that the item has been discontinued. It is a safe loss and so I cling to it. Unlike all the other 2020 losses, that might break me if I hold them too tightly. 

During lockdown I dressed up in defiance of having nowhere to go. Which made me dwell, dwell, dwell on the meaning of all my clothes. And look, look, look in the mirror for far too long. And I already knew that I like the way a woman looks best when she is looking at herself. But then I decided that I love myself this way too. Heralding my favourite loss of 2020: the loss of the fear of vanity.

#me

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Buy yourself a holiday dress, though it is not yet the holidays and this year may yet have mourning left in it. Prepare yourself for joy, somehow. Though it has been a while. Limber up for it. Rumour has it: it's still out there, eager to be found. Rumour has it: 2021 is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius. (My moon is in Aquarius, so is my rising sign. Also, I turn 40. So, I am fully braced).

All my best dreams begin with getting dressed. What I’ll wear and why. How I’ll sweep through the room and take what I’m owed. My clothes fall into three non-negotiable categories: Spy School. Your Funeral. Lonely Disco. Sometimes they overlap.

This Sister Jane dress I bought in a sale on Friday is Lonely Disco. To be worn for the first time on Christmas Day and then on New Year’s Eve. (I always do this splurge on something that I know for sure I’ll wear both days and make it a point not to be seen with the same people). It is roomy and warm. I will eat many cheeses easily, I will not be intimidated into putting on a cardigan. I will wear it with black platform heels.

The nicer I dress, the bigger I dream. This is why even at the heights of my depths this year I put on a pencil skirt and clean shoes. To go nowhere but my kitchen, to keep believing in believing, believing in myself.

#what i wear

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This is what I wear when I read the polls, watch the news and generally feel sick to my stomach about the “future”. 

#what i wear #noir kei ninomiya s/s 21

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I’m on Tik Tok talking movies. If that is your thing, follow me: @pbpbbpbppb

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This is what I wear when I am scrolling Tik Tok. 

#what i wear #rick owens s/s 21

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The power of cycling shorts? Immortality. When I see pictures of Diana in hers I forget that she is no longer here, that she left 23 years ago, is not experiencing the lows and lows of 2020 along with the rest of us. Because, how else to explain why we are currently so sartorially in step? 

Diana wore her cycling shorts high, bright, tight paired with oversized logo sweatshirts and the clumpy sports trainers we’ve since nicknamed “Dad Shoes”. Which is exactly how we’ve been wearing cycling shorts in 2020. High, bright, tight, baggy on top. A uniform for our stalled lives. They have become the go-to item to ride out the pandemic. Whether you’re wearing them on a much needed daily run. Underneath your work shirt so you feel sneakily comfortable on a video call where your colleagues cannot see your bottom half. Or around the house as you try to get anything done. 

Putting them on helps me summon the energy I need to wrestle productivity from another day threatened with stasis. They give me active intent. But also, if I do not succeed at doing anything at all then I at least remain comfortable. They are the perfect combination of active and lazy wear. 

Diana Spencer, the once future Queen, was destined to become a style icon. Though initially only in the most suffocating sense of that term. Immensely popular when she became a member of the royal family -- she was young, tall, blonde, had a body type that would take to being styled easily and make dressing well seem effortless. And so we cooed at her in crinoline, sighed at how wonderfully she slipped into 80s silhouettes. Her choices were fitting for a royal woman, only ever a tad adventurous. 

Then came, the revenge dress. The night Prince Charles confessed to his affair with Camilla Parker Bowles in a pre-taped interview on ITV, Diana attended a Vanity Fair party. She wore an off-the-shoulder, above-the-knee, figure-hugging Christina Stambolian black cocktail dress. It was an instantly iconic item, though Diana hadn’t yet ascended to that status. 

In a 2013 interview with Glamour Rihanna said of Diana’s style: “She killed it. Every look was right. She had these crazy hats. She got oversize jackets. I loved everything she wore!” Rihanna is referencing post-divorce Diana. This is the Diana that did away with royal proprietary and drew influence from celebrities as she increasingly became one. This is the Diana that hung out with the Versaces. This is the Diana we take much of our inspiration from. The Diana of blazers and one-shoulder dresses, of two-toned and military-style suits. The Diana of nude-coloured outfits, of jumpsuits, sheath dresses, white jeans and of course, cycling shorts! 

Few of us listened to the cycling shorts siren call a couple of years ago when the Kardashians were singing from the sportswear items’ hymn sheet. Athleisure is for sure the livery of these end times but the problem the Calabasas crew had convincing the masses to partake is the same problem they have with everything they wear: addiction to sexiness. They put it into whatever they put on. Pairing their cycling shorts with crop tops, high heels or thigh-high boots. And sure cycling shorts can be sexy — they let you show off your legs, draw attention to that expanse of thigh and also keep it hidden. But sexiness isn’t their point. Practicality is. 

Diana’s cycling shorts were practical first - worn to and from the gym. Diana in cycling shorts had somewhere to go and something to prove. It is in this spirit that we don them today. 

For most of my 80 days in Covid quarantine I dressed up, not down. In my smartest dresses, tightest pencil skirts. I also relied on an old work from home hack suggested to me by a friend when I first became freelance: I donned heels. Their click-clack on my kitchen floor, the mild discomfort they forced onto my daytime feet kept me alert. 

1 June I was allowed out for the first time since time stopped and without thinking I threw on a pair of cycling shorts. What was I trying to say when I re-emerged? What did I want the world to know about me? I think I was trying to reassure myself, that in spite of all that time spent inside I was ready to move — immediately. That being confined had not diminished me or my physical abilities. That I intended to be as active a participant as possible in this strange, new, sick, sad world. 

I wear them every day now in the house and on meanders through my neighbourhood. What story am I telling myself as I do? That global illness be damned, I have purpose, somewhere to go, someone to be. That no matter how scared I become of sickness, of my own “extremely vulnerable” body. No matter how anxious or incapacitated I am made by Covid living, that some part of me will always be on the move, is striving to live forever.

#what i wear

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“1. How frequently do you look in the mirror? Does your face please you? Are you disgusted to detect familial features? Do you worship or hate your ancestors? Do you consider your image erotic? Do you pretend that you are a star’s child? If you squint, does your reflection become abstract? Is abstraction a transcendental escape from identity or a psychotic spasm of depersonalization?” 

Extract from “Figure” by Wayne Koestenbaum

Images:

1. I’m Just Mad, Mad, Mad, About Little Pierre’s Big Sister Naomi Campbell, (Vogue Italia, 1995).

2. Black Swan, (Darren Aronofsky, 2010). 

3. Hairdressers in Sebikotane, Senegal, (Bieke Depoorter, ????). 

4. Orphee, (Jean Cocteau, 1950). 

5. Carrie, (Brian De Palma, 1977).  

6. A Single Man, (Tom Ford, 2009). 

7. Opening Night, (John Cassavettes, 1977). 

8. Russian Girl With Compact, (Lotte Laserstein, 1928). 

9. Woman With A Mirror, (Frederick Carl Frieseke, 1911). 

10. Full House, S3, E2, Back To School Blues, 1989.

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This is what I wear now that shielding is officially over. This is what I’ll wear in hopes of returning myself to myself.

#what i wear #rodarte f/w 20

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mother-baby-art-monster reader

I look at pictures of myself before I became a mother -- all slouch boots and absent of worry lines -- and wonder who I was? Wonder what the fuck I think I was doing? Wonder where my children are? How did my former self become so genuinely unrecognisable to my mother self? How did I write back then? What did I do with all that ‘free’ time? How did I have the audacity to think my pen mattered on any page? Without my children? As they are the ones who have given me this monstrous courage! To assert myself creatively! I understand that their dreams are valid and conclude that by osmosis mine must be also! They reassure me that I am clean hearted enough to be in possession of this much ambition!

I once wore my son while I wrote a paragraph about Daniel Day-Lewis. Letting him nap in his sling on my body -- his sweet breath whispering on my chin -- was the only way I was going to get the time and space to put those words down. It ended up being a very good paragraph, I believe the warm demand of the 17-month-old, him pressing into me, it being that bit more difficult to reach the keyboard, made me work harder, faster, sharper, stronger.

Can a mother be a writer? is a question that leads to gross debate that can get nasty and rapidly prescriptive. I feel incredibly defensive about the possibility of it all. Also, the necessity! We need to hear from mothers! They are in and of this world! Their art has stuff to tell us! So I have collected things that inspire me, console me, provoke me, into dwelling on the hows, whys, and shoulds of motherhood and creativity. 

Here is my mother-baby-art-monster reader [to be frequently updated]:

HOW MOTHERHOOD AFFECTS CREATIVITY // Erika Hayasaki “Diaper changes might cut into the time spent on creative work, but they don’t cut out the drive to do it.“

THE THREAD: ART MONSTERS // Marissa Korbel

“Children, not women, define motherhood. Our cultural obsession with raising perfect children has eclipsed our interest in women as a class, and mothers in particular.”

A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MOM: IS DOMESTIC LIFE THE ENEMY OF CREATIVE WORK? // Kim Brooks

“…it feels like the kids gave me that by remaking me.”

ZADIE SMITH

Comment left under an article by Lauren Sandell. One that is so cynical about how a mother should be if she wishes to write that I do not want to link to it.

“I am Zadie Smith, another writer. I have two children. Dickens had ten — I think Tolstoy did, too. Did anyone for one moment worry that those men were becoming too father-ish to be writer-esque? Does the fact that Heidi Julavitz, Nikita Lalwani, Nicole Krauss, Jhumpa Lahiri, Vendela Vida, Curtis Sittenfeld, Marilynne Robinson, Toni Morrison and so on and so forth (i could really go on all day with that list) have multiple children make them lesser writers? Are four children a problem for the writer Michael Chabon — or just for his wife the writer Ayelet Waldman? The idea that motherhood is inherently somehow a threat to creativity is just absurd. What IS a threat to all women’s freedoms is the issue of time, which is the same problem whether you are a writer, factory worker or nurse. We need decent public daycare services, partners who do their share, affordable childcare and/or a supportive community of friends and family. As for the issue of singles versus multiples verses none at all, each to their own! But as the parent of multiples I can assure Ms Sandler that two kids entertaining each other in one room gives their mother in another room a surprising amount of free time she would not have otherwise.”

A WOMAN’S GREATEST ENEMY? A LACK OF TIME TO HERSELF // Brigid Schulte

“It’s not that women haven’t had the talent to make their mark in the world of ideas and art. They’ve never had the time.”

IT IS BOTH CREATIVELY AND POLITICALLY NECESSARY FOR WOMEN TO BE ALONE // Rosin Agnew

“Aloneness in a woman’s life is more important and enriching than it is in a man’s life because she is naturally inclined not to offer herself the luxury of it – socially and culturally women are conditioned to not engage in the narcissistic and selfish behaviours that are often necessary for work to flourish, develop, and for careers to advance.”

WHO HAS THE RIGHT TO BE A WRITER? // Stewart Sinclair  

“It is not a system that rewards artists, or writers, or even mothers or caregivers or social workers or anyone else who forewent the maxim of optimal fiduciary efficiency because they saw a higher value in a calling of lower profitability—i.e., a labor of love.”

DEPARTMENT OF SPECULATION // Jenny Offill

A novel. The novel! Foundational text. Part of what kicked off the recent round of CAN A MOTHER WRITE!!1!!111!!!? articles. Offill is responsible for the glorious/terrifying term ‘art monster’ thus understood:

“My plan was to never get married. I was going to be an art monster instead. Women almost never become art monsters because art monsters only concern themselves with art, never mundane things.”

TONI MORRISON PROVED THERE’S NO TIME LIMIT FOR SUCCESS // Janelle Harris Dixon

“She told an interviewer that once, as she was working, her toddler threw up on the page and instead of interrupting the flow of an inspired sentence, she just kept on writing right around it”

Morrison’s exact words: “I mean every woman knows, that you know, they spit up all the time. That I could take care of. But I might not get that sentence again.”

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This is what I’m wearing for Q1 of quarantine. 

#what i wear #christopher john rogers f/w 20