6

N OT LONG AGO, my mother asked me whether she could borrow the suede boots I bought in Melbourne. They had been a good purchase, as I knew they would be, even at the time. I had worn them often. I still loved them. The tips of the toes were now worn and faded, and the back of the right heel was scuffed from driving. I planned to keep wearing them for some time.

I told her no. I told her to buy her own. And while I felt only the barest pinch of regret, of guilt, I wondered over the next few days whether I should have said yes. Karma suggests I should have. A few years ago I borrowed a long, black, one-shouldered formal dress and kitten-heel shoes that she’d last worn to my brother’s high school graduation dinner in 1994. And though I haven’t worn them since, I kept that dress – it is still hanging in my wardrobe. I may have rejected my mother’s attempts to teach me how to dress, both as a young girl and later, as a teenager – I may have been determined to develop my own style, even if that style was antithetical to the word itself – but the truth is I have been wearing her clothes all my life.

There are photos of me and my sister, still toddlers, standing in the kitchen wearing nothing but her high-heeled shoes and self-satisfied smiles. I don’t remember it, but I suspect we’d taken them from her wardrobe without her knowledge or approval: isn’t that what all daughters do? I don’t remember her encouraging our play, or giving anything of hers away, not like Nan, my grandmother on my father’s side, who let us play with her old blush and powders, and gave us tiny bottles of 4711 eau de cologne to keep. But play we did, painting our faces with her lipsticks and tottering in her heels, our necks and arms adorned with the costume jewellery she must have kept in boxes in the lower drawers, where prying hands could easily reach them.

At the age of twenty-two, having taken my first tentative steps toward adult independence – a full time job, a rented room in a share house, a boyfriend – which brought with it a newfound self-confidence, I began to experiment, again, with my appearance. I still shopped, predominantly, at op shops and markets, but my sense of what to wear and how to wear it had grown more refined. I had a long skirt that fell all the way to the floor – pink satin, set with glitter and gold. I used to wear this skirt – my princess skirt – with Blundstones and a singlet, to see bands. At the markets I bought long sundresses and 70s-style sunglasses, like the ones I’d borrowed from my mother for dress-ups years before. At Vinnies I bought some fawn corduroy Wranglers and a pair of too-tight high-waisted Gloria Vanderbilt jeans, both for $5. Those jeans, which I wore until I tore a gash across the bum crease sliding down a grassy knoll in New Zealand four years later, are still the best pair of jeans I’ve ever owned.

I may not have been conscious of it at the time, but I see now that I was absolutely aware that the clothes you choose to wear can both attract and refract attention, can make you feel more or less yourself, can transport you through time. This was, of course, the mid nineties, an anti-fashion era. Almost everyone I knew owned at least one flannelette shirt, and we all wore them to death. We wore everything to death. The older something was, the more faded something was, the better. But it has always seemed to me that my sensibility for the worn-down, for the ripped and torn, mismatched, stained, too short, too long, too loose or two sizes too small was somehow innate, and simply flourished in the era I was born into.

Perhaps this is how it always seems; we convince ourselves that we are somehow unique, original – perhaps even avant-garde – when in fact we are followers, if not of fashion, then of someone else’s style. It seems to me now that the aesthetic I adopted during those years – an aesthetic that I still haven’t quite grown out of – was drawn not from the pages of fashion magazines, or even the zeitgeist, but from some place deep inside. From all but buried memories, and memories of memories, of the clothes my mother wore in the first few years of my life – the faded denim, the big sunglasses, the silk scarves covering her wavy ash-blond hair, which she wore loose to the shoulder and beyond. I’m more attached to this image of her than any other, I think because it seems that during those years she was somehow more herself. Or maybe she was the self that I preferred her to be.

A few days after I refused to lend her my boots, my mother called to tell me she had bought herself a similar pair: leather rather than suede, pewter rather than taupe. They would be a better match for the dress she planned to wear.

It’s only now, in my forties, that I have begun to allow myself, on occasion, to spend more than I absolutely need to, but I still have mixed feelings about it. I browse more than I buy. My first impulse is still to say no, even when I really love something, even when I can afford it, even when I actually need it. I’m not entirely sure why.