Dress through the heartache
Laura Antonia Jordan on how falling back in love with fashion helped her cope when tragedy struck
AS AS A A PISCES, PISCES, IT IT is celestially destined that I am a crier. However, even for an emotional livewire like myself, rarely have I cried during a fashion show. But last September, at the Marc Jacobs S/S ’20 show – the final of New York Fashion Week – I began crying, and continued to do so all the way back downtown to my hotel in Soho.
It wasn’t just that it was beautiful and that I was exhausted – although both were true – it was that the collection seemed to mirror and magnify my own relationship with clothes at that moment and magic it into technicolour reality.
A dazzling, delicious buffet of looks picked from Marc’s mental mood board – Lee Radziwill, Doris Day and Anita Pallenberg were all referenced – the collection was a party of explosive dresses, floppy hats and sunny tailoring. Giddily extravagant, it was the fashion equivalent of having birthday cake for breakfast, just because.
But there was a poignant message behind the fun and finery. The show was held on 11 September, 18 years after the world changed irrevocably. ‘Tonight is a reminder of the joy in dressing up,’ it said in the show notes. ‘Our unadulterated love of fashion and embracing grand gestures of unbridled
expressions, reactions, ideas and possibilities.’ A chance to reclaim the narrative, to trump fear with limitless optimism, it was a stark assertion of the restorative power of fashion. Just as people feel that a particular musician is singing only for them, it felt as if Marc had designed that collection especially for me.
Five months before that show, a grenade had been launched into the middle of my life. On Easter weekend I had received a phone call from my parents to tell me that my beautiful, brilliant brother-in-law, Cam, had terminal cancer. I received the news with a strange mix of horror and disbelief, as I would an offensive joke without a punchline. How could this happen to him, a man full to the brim with kindness, creativity and life? (That same day, because life doesn’t hand out heartbreak in instalments, I learned that my ex-boyfriend had bounced into another relationship.) One moment you are riddled with anxiety about a nagging neighbour and a sticking door and then – bam! – tragedy comes in from nowhere, as surreal and unavoidable as a plane curving out of a perfect, unremarkable September sky. Normal, as you know it, is done.
That evening, two friends took me for dinner. I looked at my food and thought my appetite – which when faced with most of life’s curveballs could heroically, and somewhat regrettably, rise to the challenge – would be gone forever. I was certain I would never laugh again.
Certainly, in the days following the news, my ability to find joy in anything was obliterated. But the beat goes on and, aided by the groundswell of responsibilities, you must march with it, however out of step and wobbly you are. And so, I had to get up, go out and put on some clothes, by which I mean ones that are socially appropriate to leave the house in. Clothes for facing the world.
Unsurprisingly, in the initial wake of the news, I had little interest in fashion. It was my job, sure, but what did it matter if boots were back or brights were having a moment? Because, what did anything matter? From my own wardrobe, I demanded nothing but the minimal effort my mind could muster. But people are remarkably resilient. You begin to accommodate a new normal even when you can’t accept it. And so, slowly, I began to see my wardrobe as a refuge.
In the mornings, I began to take time to dress, finding solace in the simple ritual of getting ready. My weakness is dresses. With their promise of romance, it was towards the modest silhouettes of The Vampire’s Wife, Batsheva and vintage Laura Ashley that I veered to again and again. These were dresses that belong to meadows, prairies and bucolic idylls, where bad things didn’t happen. The simple act of pulling up the zip, feeling the waist nip me in and the sleeves puff slightly at the shoulders made me feel a reinvigorated togetherness. Besides, a great dress can feel like a party (you actually want to go to); how could I not smile in emerald green Altuzarra tie-dye, Loewe’s Aubrey Beardsley printed silk or Dodo Bar Or’s lurid ’60s wallpaper floral? I started to revel in what I was wearing in a way I hadn’t for months.
When my ex and I began spending time together again in the summer – comforting, precious and painful in equal measure – there was a marked difference in how I looked. Here was the girl who had once, much to his disappointment, worn tracksuit bottoms and Birkenstocks (with socks, a truly dumpable offence) to the Wolseley for dinner, where I had slumped on my seat picking at fries with my fingers, mistaking lazy entitlement for insouciant ease. Now I was wearing a sweet Liberty print Vampire’s Wife to get dim sum on Baker Street, chevron-striped old Céline to eat pizza in Belsize Park and rainbow patchwork Polo Ralph Lauren to sit at the bar at Soutine and share a tart. I was making an effort. It mattered, of course it mattered, when he said I looked beautiful; what mattered more, however, was that my appetite – for everything – was coming back.
According to the legendary costume designer Edith Head, you could ‘have anything you want in life if you dress for it’. What I wanted was to press a reset button but, in lieu of that, I simply wanted to feel as if I wasn’t crumbling. And so I discovered that glamour (albeit my hodgepodge version of it) when applied softly, can be salve. There is delight to be found in dressing up, but that doesn’t necessarily mean being dressy. Clothes can offer escapism and fantasy. So I donned Prada’s kick-ass tread-sole boots when I wanted to feel the swagger of fearlessness and a candy Coach shearling when I wanted to add some vim to my morning walks on Hampstead Heath.
I even faced my fashion phobia and tried jeans (Khaite’s Vivian) because, well, why not? Clothes can’t fix you, but they can help you tap into your potential.
That’s why I profoundly disagree with people who think that fashion is the trivial pursuit of the frivolous and vain. Clothes matter, but not in the sense that having the latest or most expensive thing matters. Whether you’re aware of it or not – or, more to the point, whether you’ll admit to it or not – what we wear says something about who we are and what our outlook on life is. We all get dressed in the morning and make decisions about what we are going to wear. There are numerous factors that influence our sartorial choices, some of them practical, determined by, say, the weather or the occasion, and many of them nuanced idiosyncrasies of our personal style and taste. One person’s sexy is an oversized shirt; another’s is a micro body-con dress.
What fascinates me most are the emotional drivers behind what we wear and why. We slip into tailoring when we want to feel empowered and fluttering dresses when we want to hit vacation mode. In the seams of our clothes are memories and potential. When we get dressed, we are setting an intention about who we want to be that day, how we want to be seen and, importantly, how we want to feel. It’s why, despite the nightmarish tumult of global politics, super-viruses and ravaging fires, this season designers have produced some of the most joyful clothes we’ve seen in years. What we wear is something we can control.
Grief spins you around and dumps you out on to a wild terrain without a map to navigate it. You feel topsy-turvy in its wake; it’s a spiky, slippery emotion that pervades everything and yet is impossible to grasp. But while heartbreak is untamable, my clothes were something I could exercise agency over. Learning to enjoy them again was my own little act of resistance when my life was turned upside down.
To Cam’s memorial I wore a voluminous Simone Rocha dress that flapped like a sail in the wind and red Bottega Veneta shoes. Cam wouldn’t have cared what I wore, of course; he wouldn’t have wanted a fuss. I love you so very, very much, my darling, I thought, as I got ready that morning. Let me make an effort – for you and for me. And that is something I intend to keep doing – when every day you’re given is a gift, the least you can do is make an effort for it.
I BEGAN TO FIND SOLACE IN THE SIMPLE RITUAL OF GETTING READY