It’s A Funny Old World: Gabrielle Mullarkey
Recently, a friend of mine showed me a photo of herself and her sister (both grown women) wearing matching floral sundresses on a day out. They did so now and then, she explained, so people would twig they were sisters – and no, they’re not twins.
The idea of cutely coordinating with my own sister is as unthinkable as lending each other a toothbrush in a crisis. (Long story. We were youth hostelling with family at the time. I haven’t forgiven her.)
Our reluctance originates in childhood memories of being kitted out for a while in matching togs by a multitasking mother with four kids under 15 and a part-time job on the go.
I asked my friend if she and her sister had been ‘doppelgänger dressed’ as kids. Oh yeah, and they’d both loved it. Not only that, but they’d shared clothes. Willingly!
That was never going to happen with me and Sis. On top of everything else, we had to share a bedroom
– quite enough sharing to spend the next 30 years recovering from, ta very much. Sis and I resolved to reach adulthood as differentiated from each other as possible, give or take gene-pool intangibles.
As the elder by three years, I was the first to rebel against Mum’s twin-pack approach. My nadir arrived, at the age of eight, in the form of matching polka-dotted dresses with frilly, tiered skirts and sewn-in undies.
My fear of being caught short while wearing an all-in-one was as nothing to the day a small boy dropped an earwig down my neck. Never has the phrase ‘shake a leg’ been taken to such vigorous extremes. To this day, you won’t catch me in a onesie. Or anything polka-dotted.
Sis joined my rebellion. We’d both had enough of being called ‘sweet’, ‘two peas in a pod’ or by each other’s names. Which brings me to hand-me-downs. Sometimes, Sis got mine. She even got my first Holy Communion dress, which had been tailor-made for me. Every childhood Cinderella may want her own dress for the ball, but a savvy, upcycling mum always has the last say.
While neither of us blames Mum for being thrifty and practical, if I’m out shopping with her I still deliberately pick the opposite to anything she recommends. It turns out I’d rather brave sub-zero temps in wafer-thin cotton than dress ‘sensibly.’’
Sis and I grew up using Saturday-job money to hone sartorial differences
– in my case, any colour as long as it was black, teamed with fishnet tights. Sis, on the other hand, went all tailored jeans, Alice bands and pastel cardis.
Our fashion choices since then may have mellowed and merged, but those early days of polka-dotted parity still make our differences more important to us than our similarities.
Even now, though, relatives and friends of our mum still get our names mixed up, to our puzzlement, since we consider ourselves bywords for startling distinctiveness. She’s a carnivore, I am not. She’s married to a dark-haired bloke, I am not. She lives in London, I live just outside. Vive la difference!
But is there a similarity that others see, beyond the genetic?
We’d both disavow the idea, without spotting the irony of our knees – one notionally fishnetted and the other denim-clad – jerking in coordinated response to the very suggestion.