Autobiography of a Wardrobe

Chapter 1: Sash/How I Was Born Five-year-old B. in a daffodil-yellow pinafore and a white blouse with puffed sleeves stands at the end of a chintz couch, in the midst of grandparents, aunts, and parents. The pinafore has embroidery on the skirt and a wide yellow sash tied at the back of the waist. B. is leaning into the mother, who is sitting on the couch holding a baby brother. On B.'s feet are red "party shoes" with ankle straps and white socks. At her right temple, a white barrette holds back straight, fine dishwater-blond hair. This dress can stand as well as any for My birth. Wardrobes start out like children, without conscious identity. I was the emanation of the family at the Country Club on a spring day, in a large midwestern city, just after midcentury. Technically, I suppose I'd been born earlier, in a downtown cathedral, as a long, white, lace-trimmed christening gown (overly long, because that's how the Middle Ages phrased its wish for babies to live and grow). Or else in the preverbal moment when the very small B. took out the red corduroy overalls. But that day at the Club was when I first knew Myself, when I suddenly heard what B. was saying to Me: "You smell clean. You are the color of lemon pie. You have a story on your skirt." Adults had bent down to read the embroidery on the skirt, then patted B.'s head. What they'd seen were red-thread birds and brown-thread squiggles among green-thread sprinkles, and underneath, the sewn red words "The early bird gets the worm." Only Americans had put words on clothes-then. At that moment (it was the 1950s), words on clothes were a new idea. In this case they were a message from the business community that had bought the dress. The rest of Me that day matched the style of the little girls' clothes in books read to B. at home:Peter Pan,The Little Princess, the ubiquitousAlice's Adventures in Wonderland. B. was sashed, buttoned, and hairbrushed into an immaculate Edwardian wrapping, missing only Alice's horizontally striped stockings. How did I, a wardrobe, know I was antique at birth? That's what I do. I pick up intimations of sartorial history. Other family members in that tableau were not thinking "history," but merely checkingoff the right thingon each other: cinch belts on the young aunts; tweed suits on the older ladies; red bow ties on the older men; spectator pumps on the young mother. And for a small female like B., it was de rigueur to wear a crisp sashed cotton dress and these exact red shoes with a thin strap around the ankle and a red grosgrain bow (like a bow tie) on the toe. This dress code had come from the young mother. Astonished, like so many postwar brides, at having been promoted from ingenue to matron, she couldn't yet imagine a new era. She dressed B. as if she were not her child, but a version of herself as a child, before the war. So: I came into being in the last moments of that two-centuries-old institution called Childhood, in which everything wasironed: collars, sashes, sailor suits. Nowadays it's different. The other day B. saw a mother and small daughter in a New York cafe. (This is how we communicate: B. sees something and I breathe it in, and catalogue it.) The little girl was wearing a small wrinkled jeans cargo skirt and a miniature cardigan sweater; hermotherhad on a large cotton pinafore. When I was born, old persons' garments and young persons' garments belonged to very separate spheres. In My childhood I was more like the 1835 wardrobe of young Toni Buddenbrooks than like today's American child wardrobes. On the first page of that wonderful capitalist saga by Thomas Mann, eight-year-old Toni, "in a dress of shimmering silk," reads aloud to her extendKendall, Elizabeth is the author of 'Autobiography of a Wardrobe' with ISBN 9780375425004 and ISBN 0375425004.