028/ Our Clothes Are Silent Witnesses
The special pieces in your life imbued with meaning + pieces that caught my eye this week, including the elusive "perfect tee".
Dear readers,
Today’s newsletter is mash-up of two things I wanted to share with you this week: a new feature in this newsletter called Silent Witnesses, and pieces that caught my eye this week.
Silent Witnesses
Last week in Part 2 of my Closet Editing guide, I wrote about the pieces we hold on to because they’re sentimental to us. And while we could all stand to shed metaphorical weight by letting some of them go, I wrote that it’s also okay to own, treasure and care for things because they’re imbued with special meaning:
Sentimental pieces are not a bad thing. In fact, I hope most of the pieces you’re wearing regularly hold the sentimental — rather than purely functional or practical — value that comes from wearing them over and over again.
Our clothes have borne silent witness to different events and seasons of our lives — just think of the people they’ve met, the conversations they’ve heard, the continents they’ve travelled and the lives they’ve lived.
There are stories to be shared and I want to share them here. If you want to submit a photo of a meaningful piece with a short (or long) blurb of where it’s been and why it means so much to you, you can respond to this email or leave a comment below.
In a What I’m Wearing post from a couple of weeks ago, I talked about the magical, elusive feeling of being so seen in a Patou blouse, which got me chatting in DMs with Emmanuelle Bourlier who is our inaugural storyteller.
Emmanuelle describes the journey of this ‘60s era dark orange wool coat she found at a vintage shop in Paris 25 years ago while she was living there.
I fell hard for the 60s details, the colour and the collar, the stitching, the decorative buttons and faux fur hem. The following year I moved to New York, and although I still loved wearing vintage, the coat felt “too much” at times and it slowly moved to the back of my closet. Several factors led to my style becoming a little more serious.