Why is it that the clothes that you miss the most are the ones that can’t be replaced?
Exhibit A: I had a secondhand tweed jacket that cost £20 from Pop! Boutique in Covent Garden. The label was a Savile Row tailor, now extinct. It had a nipped-in waist, and strong angular shoulders, and oval suede patches on the elbows, and the lining was worn bare with age and ripped around the armpits. Sometimes I wore it with J Brand Lovestory flares and a yellow tshirt and high-heeled platform sandals and felt like a groovy 1970s heiress. Othertimes I wore it with white skinny Topshop jeans, Converses, a lacy white high-neck Victorian top and pearls, in a sort of Jane-Eyre-Meets-Jilly-Cooper thing. God, I loved that jacket. I wore it nonstop from 2001 to 2010, when it disappeared during a house move, and if I think about it too long, I get tearful. I will never, ever find its equal. Come back, little tweed jacket. I swear I’ll fix your lining.
Exhibit B: I had an electric blue silk parka from Topshop. Yes, ridiculous. It wasn’t warm, it wasn’t waterproof, it was always wrinkled, it had huge billowy pockets that constantly turned inside out and an oversize hood that stayed on one’s head for approximately half a second before sliding off. Foxy thought it looked like something that they hand out at rugby matches when it rains, and he was probably right. But I wore it nonstop one rainy London summer, with big galumphing motorcycle boots and tiny floaty dresses, or little grey Converses and skinny jeans and white singlet tops, and felt like a punk rock fairy. Then one day it just vamoosed into thin air.
Exhibit C: I had a pair of high-waisted, super-short navy shorts that I only wore ONCE. They made me taller and thinner and, I’m pretty sure, smarter and funnier and less likely to make a dick of myself after too many whiskeys. A drycleaner in New York lost them, and I swear to God, if I ever see that old Korean lady rocking them through the streets of Soho, I will tackle her to the ground and rip them off her right there and then.
Sigh.
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