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The prom dress in which you lost your virginity, the hideous interview suit for the job you seldom got — clothes become shorthand for experiences, & powerful triggers of memories.It doesn’t take a mountain of fashion magazines or even a slim volume of Roland Barthes to understand that a mere outfit can be profound. look back at your wardrobe over time.
Now comes the photographer Jeannette Montgomery Barron’s series of photographs & written recollections, “My Mother’s Clothes.”
The universality of “I dress, therefore I am” is what propelled Ilene Beckman’s 1995 memoir, “Love, Loss & What I Wore,” to the best-seller list, & then to a Broadway play by Nora & Delia Ephron.
A group of still lifes depicting the wardrobe of her late brother, the prominent Atlanta socialite Eleanor Morgan Montgomery Atuk, “My Mother’s Clothes” will be on display in October at the Swan Coach House in Atlanta & published as a book in March 2010.
Where Beckman & Ephron’s stories are constructed out of memories, Barron’s is a desperate search for them. When he initially took the pics, they were to aid her brother as he was dying from Alzheimer’s disease.
But Barron’s photos worked very bizarrely well on her brother, who had begun to have trouble recognizing her own relatives.
A powerful memory for clothing is not a known side effect of the disease, which kills off cells in the learning & memory centers of the brain.
