Same Dress, Different Person
the intersection between grief, change, and shopping
wearing the dress in 2014 and on Wednesday
I come home from Iceland, England, and Ireland last summer, an incredible trip that was, unsurprisingly, not free, and remember that I have also chosen to build a deck, another not free thing. I make a call: I am not buying any clothes until October, Basically, for three months. I have a love/hate relationship with rules, which is actually consistent: I like my own rules and don’t particularly care for anyone else’s. I make this rule up, so I follow it. I decide that a pair of chacos does not count, nor does the Wrigley Field baseball cap I buy in Chicago, because when I say clothes I mean clothes: that pink dress at Madewell, the babydoll top I eye at Anthro, the gray cardigan I really, really want from Free People and can almost justify because my gray cardigan has a hole in the elbow and I can’t wear it it anymore. But I persist. I buy no clothes, and the good people at Free People order the gray cardigan for me in October because my size is no longer in the store.1
There is another reason for my shopping hiatus, one that is not financial: I am running out of room in my closet. You would think a person who loves shopping would deal with this all the time, but you would be wrong, there. This is actually a new problem for me, directly related to Mike being dead. I am not a fast fashion person; I tend to buy well-made clothes that last. But I am also quite good at cycling through them and getting rid of ones that have served their time and purpose.
Usually.
Mike dies and then stuff that would normally cycle through…stays right where it is. Past its usefulness, sometimes past fashion. Past my evolving taste.2 The obvious solutions like getting rid of clothes I don’t wear much anymore or getting rid of all the clothes that belong to a dead man will not work for me right now. Or maybe ever. So I eventually find a third option: I kick my roommate, who has passive-aggressively, contemptuously, taken over three bedrooms in my home, out. Now I have more closets, and I move my back burner clothes - fancy dresses, clothes I rarely wear - to another bedroom.
This week, grief, change, and shopping all intersect in my brain. I find the incredibly interesting Brand Panic substack and fall down a bit a rabbit hole. Finally, someone has words for why I can’t stand all the ads for Quince that the algorithm keeps feeding me. And the author (Devon Rule) shops with her own rules (no pun intended), with a mind toward curbing consumption and balancing it with a love of fashion. Someone else does this, similarly, even.
Where does change fit in here? Well, it’s like this. The smug, anti-travel essay from the New Yorker is still living rent-free in my head. Not just because only one of us has been to a fucking falcon hospital in Abu Dhabi. I keep thinking of how the author says we say travel changes us but it really doesn’t, and then thinking
How would you know, Agnes?
How can you tell someone has changed? How would you know? And that’s where the dress comes in. On Wednesday, I wear an old dress to the office, one I still like. I wear it partly because I am about to be traveling, so I am wearing things I won’t be taking with me, because I am exactly the person who thinks this far ahead about clothes. This dress would actually be great for travel as it does not need to be ironed and dries quickly, but the reason I am not taking it is that I have owned it for twelve years. It has been in many pictures. It looks like the same dress, but I am not the same person.
I kind of look like I might be. In the 2014 picture and 2025 pictures above, my eyes turn into the same crescent moons when I smile. I have the same dress on (different navy cardigans though). Did it fade, or is it the light? My hair is longer and blonder, face easily eleven years older. But I feel more me than I felt in 2014. Travel is one reason, though not the only one. Lots of things change us.
Falling in love changes us:
Same dress, 2016
Grief and loss change us:
and in 2019
Time, and tide, and Wednesdays, and working, and friends, and religion, and politics, and children, and…and…and…all change us. Even when we keep wearing the same dress for twelve years. I buy the dress in 2013, and wear it to work just occasionally because I work in a store that sells exercise clothes. In 2016 it is in much more heavy rotation because I work in an office downtown every day, pre-pandemic, and jeans are only a Friday thing. My previous work wardrobe of mostly workout clothes is no longer appropriate. And my life is so different that it is virtually unrecognizable, but Agnes wouldn’t know that, seeing me in the same dress. Change is often internal, Agnes.
And grief colors everything, even a twelve year old dress. I don’t know how long I will wear it, or when it might move to the back burner closet, but I suspect that forty years from now my children will be saying
Can you believe mom saved this dress from 2013? We’ve been wearing nothing but glowing silver skin suits since the alien robot invasion of ‘38. Into the trash it goes!
Grief turns a dress into more than a dress, and it colors shopping, and my rules about shopping. It follows on my travels, and in my reading, and my eating, and my writing. There are innate pieces of me that pre-date the dress: a preference for my own rules above someone else’s, eyes that turn into crescent moons when I smile, and a love for the color blue that is as old as my memories.3 Some things don’t change. But lots of things do.
It isn’t the same person wearing that dress.
Did you know you can survive for a couple of months without a functional gray cardigan?
in 1973, before I am actually three, I tell my mom I want a blue birthday cake, and she makes one.
So with you on this. There are clothes in my closet that I never wear but I can’t get rid of. They’re the ones my late husband told me I look beautiful in, and it still hurts to wear them.