CLOSET SKELETONS

It’s a funny experience, the Eminem thing. Clearing out your closet. The annual weeding out of the garments which have got too big, too small, too old, too young, too out of fashion… the things that, when asked for an opinion, partners or family members visibly fight to be polite about.

It starts out as funny-ha-ha.
‘Does my bum look big in this?’ you ask (or other stock phrase from the ‘appearance opinion’ phrasebook). You see the shadows of doubt clouding in. ‘Be honest,’ you encourage, because it’s ultimately more helpful that way.
‘Well,’ he replies, initially a bit nervously but with a growing smirk of satisfaction and amusement and, just possibly, a tiny little bit of revenge for a few recent jokes about hairlines or ageing, ‘it’s not so much that your bum looks big. It’s more that you look as though you should be sitting on a saddle, but the saddle has somehow got trapped inside the trousers.’ You stomp off, outraged and half-laughing, thinking sadly of how all those models looked so good in that ‘harem’ look, and yet you look, supposedly, as though your hips have swallowed a saddle. Maybe the skinny look will fare better? You try again. He’s getting into his stride now.
‘Um well, dear… it’s kind of… you’ve not got fat legs, ok? You really haven’t. But they look a little bit like a string of sausages in those jeans.’
And when it came to the couple of ‘retro-chic’ items, then he really did have a bit of fun.
‘You see, dear, with those kind of retro things… that tweed coat or that sort of Desperate Housewives dress [you know he means Stepford Wives, but by this time you’re too desperate to correct him] … you kind of… you get (and you detect his sudden and complete satisfaction as he suddenly cuts the hedges and fillers with the same confidence he applied to the garden the week before) – you get to an age when it doesn’t look retro. You just look old. And with those on, you look… older. Than you are. Than you normally look. You see what I mean?’

Oh, you see what he means all right, and what he means results in you carting so much stuff off to the charity shop that you end up feeling clothes shopping should be tax-deductable. Except that, as the three bags of unflattering garments which seem to have the same effect on your frame as the Hall of Mirrors in the local amusement arcade, turn out to be so heavy – their weight reflecting all they seem to add to your hips and all those sins of excess on the high street or its online version – the Husband ends up carrying the bags into the charity shop from the car, joking flirtatiously with the ladies who run the place, and returning to the car with a satisfied and rather guilty grin which makes you realise that the joking has been at your expense. Quite literally, in fact, in keeping with another of his choice comments: ‘Darling, it’s days like today that make me realise all over again that the secret of a happy marriage is separate bank accounts.’

But it’s not as simple as that, is it? Is it ever? It goes far beyond the cut and thrust of marital politics… the debating floor of the gender divide. Because it soon drifts from funny-ha-ha into funny-peculiar. That hall of mirrors which has materialised, as if by magic, just like the Shopkeeper from ‘Mister Benn’, in the single mirror on the front of your wardrobe, has offered up a hundred different versions of yourself. Unlike Mister Benn, who tried on a costume offered by the magical Shopkeeper, and then went off through a Narnia-esque curtain in the fitting room and had, quite literally, a ‘fitting’ adventure before coming back, putting his suit back on and going home for tea, you’ve had a hundred different adventures inside the internal mirror by which you try to figure out who you are, and, although you haven’t left home so you’re definitely home in time for tea, you’ve somehow lost your appetite. And it’s not just those jokey comments about your hips, because the bathroom scales and the size labels show that you haven’t actually internalised a saddle or turned into something last seen on a barbecue. And he’s managed to slip in a couple of compliments as well, just to be on the safe side. No… you’ve had those ‘what was I thinking?’ moments when you recreate the crush and hassle of sales shopping – the Saturday morning when you couldn’t face the rigours of the fitting room or the superior, figure-assessing glances of that size zero assistant in her little mini-dress and stiletto boots as you stumbled in out of the wintry weather, awkward in the layers of coat and scarf and gloves. Those moments are the easy ones – they present a valid excuse. It’s the other times… the times you fitted something on and thought it looked ok – nice, even – and now you look at it or offer it up for opinion and wonder… why didn’t someone tell me? Tell me that I looked ten years older or six pounds heavier? Were they happy to see me engage in a fashion car-crash or was it worse – was I actually fashion tumbleweed? So invisible that no-one noticed just how unflattering that outfit really was? You lurch, like a model on impossibly high platform shoes, from the horrors of ‘What was I thinking?’ to the terrors of ‘What were they thinking?’ to the despair of ‘Was anyone thinking anything at all?’

And then funny-peculiar takes another tack as roads diverge in the narrow, neurotic wood of ‘what was I thinking?’ A popular television series traces the genealogy of celebrities, ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’ It could as easily be the title of a fashion-and-shopping show, though I would quibble that the title ought to be ‘Whom Do You Consider Yourself To Be?’ Because we’re defining ourselves daily, aren’t we, by what we wear. You dress in a particular way for work. If you’re a teacher, then it’s sensible shoes and nothing too revealing or provocative. If you’re in business, it’s tailoring to make you look invincible. Work in a particular clothes shop, and you’ll be expected to wear the very best of what that shop has to offer that season, and wear it in such a way as to make customers want to shop there. Stepping further, you might be wearing an official uniform, but even if you’re not, you are, in the sense that it becomes easy to spot a teacher or a business executive or a hairdresser (and so on) by what they’re wearing. Off-duty, you’re faced with the challenge of being just you. And that’s when it happens… the bewildering array of decisions and choices and definitions. Take jeans for one thing. Skinny, bootcut, flare, skinny-flare, traditional bootcut, boyfriend, wide-leg, ultra-skinny… there will be others, too, but you might not be ‘with it’ enough to know them. One of the finest jean categories (for linguistic reasons as well as because they don’t make many women look as though they’ve swallowed a large item of equestrian equipment) is the ‘distressed boyfriend’. Factually, these are slightly loose-legged, hip-hugging, straight-cut jeans which have been given a ‘fashionably dishevelled’ appearance. They might be a bit faded. They might have a couple of artful holes or rips. They’re instantly comfortable in the way that the jeans you’ve had for years tend to be. Husbands don’t really ‘get’ this… perhaps it’s the financial utilitarianism of the male gender, expecting to get what you pay for, while women might have a different notion of what this might be (style, fashion…). Picture it. You give your new, really comfortable, really stylish ‘distressed boyfriend’ jeans their first outing. He observes with horror.
‘Good God. What happened to those?’
‘Fashion. They’re… you know, ‘distressed’.’ You pronounce the quotation marks, emphasising them with an eyebrow.
‘Distressed? I’ll tell you who’s distressed. I’m bloody distressed. And the bank manager. Some loser… some loser is getting paid to ruin perfectly good pairs of jeans with a… with a bloody razor blade or something. God Almighty. I’ve thrown out better jeans than that after doing DIY in them and getting them covered in bloody… paint, and sawdust and grease and stuff. In my next life, I want to be that loser, getting paid a bloody fortune to ruin perfectly good clothes, all in the name of ‘fashion’.’ He enunciates the quotation marks so effectively that his eyebrows almost disappear, and then stomps away shaking his head, leaving your arguments about fashion unheard. Although you can’t help but see his point, you stick to your instinct and wear the jeans, though perhaps not on every occasion… coffee trips but not ‘dress down’ days at work, that kind of thing. You know that they’re called ‘distressed boyfriend’ because they’re cut like a man (or boy’s) jeans and have been fashionably ‘distressed’ (by that loser with the razor blade or whoever it really was) – but another definition has presented itself: they distress boyfriends (or husbands) because they don’t quite represent the fit for purpose/ value for money principle held so dearly by the male gender.

But it’s not just gender politics, is it? You’ve thought it all day, as you’ve been fitting on and throwing items into the piles: the ‘Keep’, ‘Maybe’ and ‘Charity Shop’ piles which are making your bedroom look like an explosion in a high street warehouse. It’s all about trying to decide who you are or, more accurately, trying to decide who (or how) you want other people to think you are. Funny-ha-ha for trying, funny-peculiar because it’s probably true for everyone, that just as you’re trying to make the right impression on the people who are seeing you, they’re probably trying to make an impression on you and on one another as well, and you’re back in the hall of mirrors as the whole artifice of outward image perpetuates and repeats itself in a series of everlasting reflections. Are you that person who wears too much black and repeats the same image over and over again in too many variations on the same theme, as predictable as the counterpoint of a fugue? Or are you more like the actor wearing different costumes for different roles… like the actor who doesn’t want to be defined by doing too many ‘costume dramas’ in case someone can’t see her without a bonnet and a heaving bosom, are you the person who’s scared of being defined by the sensible shoes or the not-quite figure-hugging top, typecast into the kind of invisibility which comes with being predictable?

We’ve all got closet skeletons. You might think they’re just those impetuous sale purchases, where you didn’t think for long enough, intimidated by the crowds, about why that style or that colour or that cut of fabric didn’t sell. You end up giving them away, perhaps years later, once that opportunity to wear or use didn’t materialise, or the item never did come back into fashion. So far, so easily dealt with… the guilt at poorly-allocated funds (and those disapproving looks, whether articulated in words or not) offset by the sense of doing something good for others by choosing a suitably worthy cause for the donation of your dubious fashion sense. The real skeletons, though, lurking in the dust at the back of all our closets and cowering, scared, beneath the fronts of costume and artifice we try on for one another every day, are the rattling and bony insecurities which hold us upright in front of one another. The structures of fear which underpin the artifice of the outward images which we present to one another every day, in the hope of being visible, of being thought of in a positive respect… or of being seen, in some kind of positive way, as who we’d like to think we are.