Klamotten

Clothes. They mask us, they reveal us. They are us.

Here in Vancouver, I think it would be fair to say, people don't dress up much. And it was one of my Canadian friends who first pointed this out to me.

Everyone is casual all the time. Oh there is smart casual and down market casual, sure, but there is rarely dressy. And I don't say that in a critical way, just as an observation.

I remember arriving for the summer one year, and a good friend of ours was going to be in town the same day, so we went straight out to dinner. I still had my South of London head on, and more to the point, my brightly coloured, slightly up-market summer dress.
Walking from the car a little way to the restaurant, I suddenly felt like the woman in the ad who has the back of her dress tucked into her knickers. Everyone, I realised, was wearing shorts and T-shirts or some variation thereon.

I have my suits and other work clothes from England, hanging in the wardrobe. Sometimes I gaze at them wistfully, but the truth is, I'm more than happy to wear my khakis to work. Love it in fact.

My own dysfunctional relationship with clothes is twofold.
I have clothes in sizes I haven't been for a few years, but I like them. Yes, clothes escape the excesses of my weeding obsession.
And once I like an item, I keep buying slight variations on it. So I have many pairs of black stretch trousers, likewise khaki cut-offs. I have Old Navy vests in every colour they do. Oh, I wear these, wear them all the time, but that just makes it worse that I have all this other stuff that I don't wear.

Last weekend, I weeded, and didn't I feel good afterwards. Why, I wonder, are clothes so difficult for me to part with, when I even managed to get rid of some of my books before I left England.

Perhaps one reason is that it is only recently that I got the whole Canadian sizing thing sorted. Although my friend Ree and I had done some research on this, and found that Canadian sizes are one lower in number than ours, this didn't seem to be born out in the shops. In the UK, women's sizes go 12, 14, 16, here they seemed to go 11, 13, 15. But then I found a shop that sold clothes in the sizes I was used to, so I applied the one size lower rule and it worked! Not so much when I then wanted to buy something in the 11, 13, 15 range, but a step closer. That was when I was able to clear out my wardrobe, or at least go through it.

Clothes have changed, of course they have. Clothes have always been a measure of how society views women. And using that as an indicator, to my eye, it seems that women have liberated themselves from the corset, the high heel, stockings, tight fitting uncomfortable fabrics - unless they choose to wear any of those things of course, but men, well they still seem bound by the suit, shirt and tie.