When I close my eyes at night, there is a dress that dances on the back of my eyelids: chic, sleek, tailored, and 100% impractical for the life I’m currently leading. I see it every time I close my eyes, and I am convinced it can flatter every shape, make every woman feel as if all she desires is at her fingertips.
The reality is I am a mother of young children; I work alone most days; I live in an extremely casual city, where a dress and heels are out of the ordinary. And, social media and Pinterest tell me I’m in Perimenopause, which means I need to be lifting heavy weights and eating more protein. *insert grunt here*
White shirts are stained with (what I hope is) Nutella before the end of the day. Dresses aren’t realistic when I need to sit on the floor for two hours to help my son build a lego pirate ship. Most of my cuffs are covered in cooking oil before the end of the evening, the greasy evidence of a hard-fought, hard-won battle to put healthy and palatable meals on the table for my family.
And yet, I yearn for the elegance of a three-piece suit - vest, blazer, trousers, all perfectly tailored and exceptionally well made.
When I close my eyes at night, I see a tailored sheath, in a yummy chocolate brown. I am designing clothing for a lifestyle which does not reflect my current reality.
But I have decided this is where the beauty of design comes from: designing clothing we wear in our dreams, with the hope that those dreams one day become our reality.
When Christian Dior came out with the New Look in the late 1940s, he had created a line of dresses with voluminous skirts and fitted bodices that drew a line under the austerity and masculinity which had defined war-time fashion. He instead highlighted femininity and beauty, dangling the desire for something new and different; something that lifted their heads up from the exhausting gray-green military reality they’d been living in.
I remember when I traveled to Monaco for the first time in high school. I had worked three summers to save enough for the trip, and it was absolutely worth the days out in the sun. The city was stunning. So beautiful, so ethereal. Perfect gardens lining refined stone facades with the winking blue of the bay just over the hedges. For some reason, Michael Buble is always singing “Come Fly With Me” when this specific scene comes to mind. Like everything, my memory has softened its faults and flaws over the years, and were I to go back now, I know this world I’ve created around my memories does not exist.
But as I lift my head up from the leggings, lounge-wear, and half-zips of the post-Covid era, I yearn to design for a world where we can yet again use clothing to invite others in to the dream we’re creating.
This is the world I’m designing for: a world that softens our faults and flaws and tells our beautiful stories, that is built from shear willpower and a deep desire to love our wardrobes again. And, maybe, just maybe, includes a cameo from Michael Buble… ;)
Like Monaco, this world may only ever exist in my dreams but the joy and delight those memories evoke are a wellspring I can return to time and time again, bubbling and refreshing, telling me it is worthwhile to dream; it is worthwhile to design for something that does not yet exist.
Elise
