Mysteries of the dress store
September 7, 2010 Fashion
When I was a teenager, I went on a long holiday with my dad without taking any books. I don’t know how this happened, particularly as it was not the first time and previously I had ended up reading the collected stories of Edgar Allan Poe, not a good idea if you’re an impressionable 12-year old. This time we went to America, but my English was not good enough for local publications and I had to resort to my father’s stack of books again.
It included a book on PSI, or paranormal activity (I think the possible use of PSI in the Soviet Union was a hot topic at the time) and One Hundred Years of Solitude, which I found very, very hard going. Having just spent rather a long time to find the title of the third book, unsuccessfully, I am beginning to wonder whether it ever existed. I seem to remember that it was about a man who lived alone in the jungle (which one I don’t know). The forest kept encroaching on the little plot of land he had cleared, so he had to cut back the vegetation again, and again, and again.
Why am I telling you this? Well, sometimes, on a bad day, I feel like the lonely man in the jungle. What is it about dress stores that makes boxes multiply until they cover every available surface? What entices balls of (acid-free) tissue to congregate in corners and objects in trays to appear out of nowhere?
Don’t get me wrong, we make very effort to keep our workspace and store uncluttered but, mysteriously, it never quite seems to work. Every now and again we put on our lab coats and have a big clear up and much to my horror quite a few of the objects and boxes turn out to have been left unattended by myself. I’m not quite sure what induces this particular amnesia and sometimes it seems easier to assume that things happen in the store when no one is around. Maybe some elves or gremlins with a keen interest in dress history come out at night to hunt for examples of whitework or special types of quilting and don’t quite get round to putting everything away.
Encroaching cardboard forests are not the only mystery occurrences. Why, when I look for, say, a nightgown or a some silk knickers in a box full of the same, the one I am after is always at the bottom? Or, why do I sometimes not find the object at all until I go through everything a second or third time and suddenly, and quite magically, it is there?
You might think hanging garments behave differently. Not so. They are all hiding underneath Tyvek bags so I have to check the label to find the dress or suit, or whatever I need that day. Sometimes I can miss an object several times and when, in desperation, I drag someone else to the hanging bay, they spot it immediately. Do some objects shun the limelight, do they not want to be inspected?
Or what about the fact that quite often I take a larger object out of a box and when I try to put it back again it seems to have expanded and does not want to fit anymore? Or, why, if after some cajoling it does fit, do I always end up with at least one spare tissue roll or pad?
I don’t even want to think about what the mannequins and their assorted limbs get up to at night. Poe, magic realism and PSI all thrown together – probably not a good idea …