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Home , Jumpsuit

NELL GREENWOOD

THE PURPLE JUMPSUIT

This story is dedicated to the purple jumpsuit that I wore through the summer of 1985. It was cotton, it had elasticated ankles and sleeves to ensure full body protection. When I zipped myself in on a Saturday morning, I knew the day would be good. I was a ten year old intergalactic, roller-skating warrior, switched on, plugged in, cresting the gamma waves of Battersea in the , racing towards a life of Athena tinged, tropical yacht sailing, Duran Duran dating good times. I wore the jumpsuit everywhere – to kids’ parties where everyone else was wearing and t- and green and white Dunlop sandshoes. I wore it with rainbow - laces in my hair. I wore it with complete joy. I have never worn an article of with the same degree of unadulterated, unapologetic joy. When I was twenty, a good friend of mine, a precociously successful designer, came to meet me after work. She was visiting London from her home in Los Angeles. We hadn’t seen each other for several months. As I came down the stairs to greet her in a crimson and aquamarine space , she winced and said, “You haven’t been wearing that all day have you?” I stopped: what did she mean? She pulled a face: “what are you wearing?” I looked down at the slightly puffy, ill-fitting with its mesmeric swirls of black and turquoise, my tight shiny top, my boots. Hot panic pricked across my forehead as I tried to inject emotion and affection into our hug. I could suddenly see the outfit from her cool, appraising LA eyes. I was wearing green boots with a Flash Gordon bolt of lightning: why? WHY? I could see now that the skirt that had this morning transported me to a deep forest of aqua pools and the top with its cherry laden beauty looked weird together. A vertiginous tumble of weird outfits flashed before me: the cluster of lacy nylon nighties worn under white cotton t-shirts (who likes restricting, Geisha-waisted clothes?) matched with white cowboy boots that a friend of mine’s boyfriend had said: please don’t ever let Liberty (his girlfriend) wear boots like that. Odd themes: space – shiny, tight, silver ; Gothic, with bats on, a black velvet , a red ball . God. I felt fear and illness seeping through me: I wore eccentric clothes. I looked at my friend. She was wearing a cream crocheted and dark tight trousers and tasselled boots. I could never have picked an outfit like that. I could see the outfit looked coherent and she looked like lots of other people on the tube and in magazines. The was tight, the were tight, the boots were tight, the poncho looked like it might get in the way of eating and useful human activities

R. Gibson (Ed.), The Memory of Clothes, 157–159. © 2015 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved. NELL GREENWOOD like using your arms. I looked around the bar: more people wearing clothes that were shaded, colour-blocked, aligned. No space stories. No turquoise swirls. It was my parents’ fault. My mother’s. No, it wasn’t, I was twenty and had to stop blaming my parents for everything. They were good people: it was my fault. My headstrong will, my over-weening, over confident arrogance. Thinking I had it sussed. They didn’t rein me in. I sat over a glass of wine, not listening to any of my friend’s stories. I wanted to cry and hit her and tell her about the shiny, silver top I’d just brought – thank God I wasn’t wearing that. And I wanted to get changed. I really wanted to get changed. Maybe that was where my life was going wrong. Maybe that’s why I didn’t have a boyfriend, why the man I was so in love with at university loved someone else. A someone who always wore tight jeans and dainty peasant tops. All the time. She always wore that. And I was wearing multi- coloured tat to tell a story in my head that no one else knew about. It was Thursday night. We could go shopping. While my friend was here, she could help me. Save me. Rescue me from my bad clothes. Guide me back to the land of sartorial elegance so I could congregate on its happy banks with other happy, well-styled people. My friend agreed. About time. We hit Oxford Street, busy, packed, streams of people heading into brightly lit emporiums of style and acceptance. Come spend your money, come fit in. My friend picked a shop I would never have entered. The clothes looked too tight, were made from un-natural fiber, and there was a lot of brown. I don’t like brown clothes, or red clothes. My eye was briefly drawn to a brilliant, deep blue in the men’s section, she carefully steered me over to the jeans corner. I didn’t like jeans. She said everyone wears jeans. I said they’re a bit tight. She said that’s the point. So people can see your legs. I wasn’t sure about that: people could see your legs wearing . She smiled, a sad, wincing smile. I agreed. I had to grow up, face the world and wear jeans, tight jeans. I picked a tight pair of dark blue jeans. She handed me a tight brown top. I tried on the clothes. “Finally,” my friend exhaled, “I can actually see your body.” Another friend joined us: “You look amazing,” she said. We then went to a shoe shop and I bought a pair of boots that felt like stilts. My friends were excited: I had to try on the whole outfit together. I looked at myself in the mirror: an impostor from planet tight who would never be able to do anything or say anything interesting. And I smiled. Thank you I said. She said: “You’re welcome. Look at you, you look like a model from a magazine.” I smiled. “Great.” She said: “Now go home and throw those clothes away.” And while I didn’t throw them away, I did stop wearing them. I haven’t thought about this story in a long-time until the other week when something terrible happened. Watching my seven year old daughter carefully assembling a party outfit of a black shiny , recently discarded by her four year sister because it was far too small, with tiny black shorts, a black and green flared Irish dancing skirt and a rainbow singlet, I found myself saying: are you sure

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