Dirty Laundry

Illustration by Luella John, Head of Design

Just a week after getting my driver’s license, I was in a car accident. 

It wasn’t catastrophic, but it was enough to keep me from driving again for the foreseeable future. What lodged itself most stubbornly in my mind wasn’t the impact – not the deployment of the airbags or the sound of breaking metal – but rather the clothes I was wearing. Nothing remarkable at that, I was on the way to the gym wearing grey sweatpants, shorts, a sports bra, and my ex’s HBA sweatshirt.

Once I got home the first thing I did was wash those clothes, even my shoes. Double rinse, 120 minutes, high heat. I poured in half a bottle of Maison Francis Kurkdjian Aqua Universalis laundry detergent, one that I had been gifted from my birthday years ago. I had been saving it for a “special occasion”. I suppose nothing says “special” more than a totalled car and mild whiplash. 

Despite the sixty dollars of laundry detergent, the clothes still weren’t clean. Stain free, mostly smell free, but still dirty somehow. I almost struggled to hold them. I was so repulsed by their presence. I feared that by simply touching them I would contract whatever disease it was that they possessed. It was not a disease, but perhaps rather a ghost. These garments seemed to hold the day in their fibres; no amount of water would run them clean.

It made me realise how clothes so often become archives of memory. Memory itself is fallible, blurred, rewritten, sometimes mercifully erased but fabric cannot lie. Perhaps that’s why memory clings to clothing. 

Textiles and fabric are one of the most intimate things we interact with every day: whether it be the clothing that adorns our body or the sheets that we sleep in. It is in constant proximity to our bodies, it bears witness to almost every interaction and experience we have. Our anger, happiness, sadness – and then it even collects proof. It absorbs our sweat, our tears and our blood. It is washed and dried and worn time and time again. In many ways it is our transient second skin. It is loose and fragile, it seeks something solid. Clothes are the tangible things that cling back to us. In this way any single item of clothing has the potential to be autobiographical. It can anchor the narrative of a life, holding together the good, bad and banal.

Even weeks after the accident, I didn’t look at the clothes. They laid limp in a poorly folded pile in the corner of my closet. Even indirectly, having something so concrete and material, like clothes, can give a physicality to our inner sanctum. My disregard for the clothes mirrored my inability to deal with the trauma of the accident. It must have been almost a month later before I had finally decided to put them away. In doing so, I had gained an almost ‘sartorial conscience’. I began to open both physical and psychological cupboards.

I use the term ‘sartorial conscience’ to refer to the understanding that clothing can be linked to internal lives, that clothing lives in both the physical and non-physical realms. I have come to develop a relationship with my clothes that ties together my assumptions of memory, identity and the body. Before the accident, my understanding of what I wore, in all facets of life (to see my friends, to go to work, even to sleep), seemed either functional or expressive. But now, I realise these garments also participate in the moral economy of remembrance and erasure. To decide what to wear is also deciding what to remember.

As a form of moral witness, clothing unlike the body which heals, or memory which blurs, retains the imprints of its experiences. Through symbolic association which we cannot control, as well as physically through its wear and tear. Roland Barthes describes fashion as a “system of signs”, a coded language that is continually written and rewritten. 

However, I’m starting to believe that whilst fashion is in constant motion, clothing itself may resist this rewriting. Even when we try to give new meaning to something, the fabric insists on what it already knows. Some stains are too stubborn to come out.

Despite this, I still wear the clothes I wore on the day of the crash. It isn’t as difficult as I once imagined. It wasn’t a conscious decision, but I woke up one morning needing grey sweats, and there they were: washed and folded in my closet. The ease of it confused me, how quietly the extraordinary could become ordinary again. 

This sort of nonchalance made me think of clothing as narrative. It is cumulative, in that though we cannot erase what has been written into its fibres, we can layer new stories over the old. The meaning we give to something does not vanish, but it may soften, fold, and make room for whatever is next.

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Edited by Hania Ahmed, Creative Editor