002:All About My Mother(s)
Carol, Charade, and the Mother of Mothers, my Mother
Towards the end of last year, I completed my (self)mandatory viewing of Carol and Charade. As someone who romanticizes the fashion of a by-gone era for which I was frankly not around, the costume design for these movies is my catnip. Outside all is frosty and grey, and the impulse to succumb to the dullness is overwhelming. In these times, Regina Lampert’s bright red coat paired with a leopard-print toque, her dark chocolate knit balaclava, and Carol Aird’s caramel fur coat and peach-pink scarf and gloves lull me out of the desire to wear the same three items relentless, to return to my closet. Like the odd glowing holiday lights that punctuate the city’s otherwise-subdued streets, these films remind me that a good coat and vibrant accessories on a gloomy day can do wonders (or at the very least make me look wonder-ful).
Another reason why I am so drawn to Carol and Charade is because Aird and Lampert are women in their thirties and perhaps forties who dress sharp and sensual. Their wardrobes seek not to return to infancy and but to assert their womanhood, their ages and the lives they have lived in full embrace. The on-screen portrayal of adult female leads without having to compromise one thing for the other – sharp and sensual, glamorous, empathetic, and deeply perceptive – are still depressingly rare.
From a very early age, I could not wait to be in my thirties and forties, a woman (hard on the consonants). I thought of it as the height of sophistication, to have, by then somewhat, lived experiences and to express myself through dress. My mother to me (now you really didn’t think I was going to write about Carol without talking about my mother?) was and continues to be the most sophisticated person I know, and from whom I learned that is has nothing to do with wealth, or how much one is in possession of. When me moved almost halfway across the world from a suburb of London to Dhaka, she shipped along with our furniture the few issues of Vogue and Harpers & Queen she had amassed.
There are images and stories of my mother imprinted forever on my mind. Nestled into a friend’s fur coat draped in a sari. In her long cream coat gifted to her from a family friend, the only one she owned, which had weathered and withstood the English drear for eight years. A black cardigan she wore for thirty-one years. A black patent faux-croc purse with a gold chain and gold clasp which I had foolishly encouraged her to part with in my early twenties because it was “too old-fashioned” (how young the young are!). Shalwar kameezes made to complement her accessories. Each weekday morning was a fashion show in our home, a swoosh of my mother’s perfume, her tea and buttered toast turning cold as she dashed about to get dressed for work, bright blue mules and a matching purse, and her rack of shoes, her one material vice. Never agonizing over age.
All this to say that as a young adult I fantasized about how assured I would be in my thirties. Perhaps my personal and professional lives wouldn’t be perfect, but at the very least in the way I dressed, age is just a number, nothing to fret over, or worse, reject. Yet as I approached and progressed into my thirties, the fashion and beauty industries insisted that I reject the physical changes cultivated through growth and maturity, and to swath myself in spandex and knit diapers in winter. To be relevant dress as the young do. But what is relevant in a flash is never lasting.
This isn’t to say that women of every and any age shouldn’t wear spandex or little pants if their hearts so desire: there are so many women I’ve encountered in their thirties, forties, fifties, sixties, seventies, and those in their diamond years who could school adolescents and young adults. What I’m more so talking about is the exasperating pressure to perform an age that isn’t mine, an age from which I had evolved. Regretfully, for some time, I found myself fearing the maturity I had earned and had once pined for. So overwhelming was the pressure to conform to trends to which I didn’t belong, when for so long all I wanted was to be and to dress like my own person.
While young adults currently dictate the market, the cycles, the trends, why should they dictate how I dress? Why can’t we allow for them to have their moment, and for us to have ours? The experience of being young often entails yearning for belonging, and then as time passes, shedding those layers to uncover the core, the inner and thus, outer identity. Why are we so intent on hijacking that process from those who are young, adults centering themselves and capitalizing on the aesthetics of those younger, trying to squeeze ourselves into something for which we are too overgrown, as if age alone is the only source of vitality. To imagine my mother in her forties in cargo pants and bike-chains I wore as a teenager not because she wanted to, but because she felt as though she had to in order to be seen and head, I shudder. I perish!
At the grand old age of thirty-three, thirty-four in three months, I am finally, finally! reconciling with who I have grown to be and continue to become. I embrace and accept that there are so many beautiful ways of presenting myself, that I have to look like no one else but myself. No longer do I mutter to myself “God I look so old” comparing myself to the vivacity of those a full decade younger than me. To put a child in a decadent dress is just a child in a decadent dress, but to put a woman in it alters its course. I have my own vivacity now, and she looks back at me in the mirror and says, “Sharp!" “Sensual!!” and dare I say, “Sophisticated.”
Ahhhh, to read about fashion in these terms. Love it Tasnim!!!!!!