060/ Silent Witnesses ft. Mia Kirshner
A coming-of-age story of the actress and writer, her vintage marinière, and what it represents to her today.
Silent Witnesses is a series featuring extraordinary women, and the clothes which have borne silent witness to different events and seasons of their lives. Read the last instalment with Monica Velosa 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, respond to this email or leave a comment below, and I’ll be in touch!
Silent Witnesses grew unexpectedly out of a seed planted 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 charged 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.
Which got me thinking: our most special pieces of clothing have acted as the proverbial “fly on the wall.” Just think of the people they’ve met, the conversations they’ve heard, the continents they’ve travelled and the lives they’ve lived. They’ve absorbed the tears of our heartbreak, the pheromones of our mating dances, the spit-up of our babies.
Monica Velosa’s black silk dress saw her through a decade of change — one which saw her move between four countries in eight years, and giving birth in three of them. Emmanuelle Bourlier’s ‘60s-era orange wool coat crossed the Atlantic with her and was reborn in her new life and role in Los Angeles.
For this edition of Silent Witnesses, I had the pleasure of speaking with actress Mia Kirshner of The L Word, Star Trek: Discovery, and 24, and creator and co-author of I Live Here, a book published by Pantheon about stories of survival in war and violence in Chechnya, Burma, Mexico and Malawi.
Mia told me about the vintage marinière she found at a Belgian market when she was just 15-years-old. “The thing that’s wonderful about it is that it’s absolutely falling apart, and I refuse to let it go. It has patches, darning marks…”
Mia tenderly associates the blue-and-white striped jumper with the bisection of her life story into B.M. and A.M. (before & after marinière). “Life literally opened up. It was such a sensual time period.”
Raised in Toronto, Mia was in Luxembourg for what seemed to be a year for what was one of her first acting jobs, playing the high-waisted jean and bolero jacket-loving Sophie in the television show, Dracula: The Series.
Still a minor, her mother was supervising her, and Mia would follow her to bordering Belgium on weekends to thrift shop in the outdoor markets. In the small provincial capital of Arlon, in a cramped store filled with large tables overflowing with used clothing, she stumbled upon a vintage “thick-striped, no label, classic Breton shirt with three-quarter length bell sleeves.”
A perennial classic, the marinière is believed to have originated in the Brittany region of northwestern France (hence, aka the Breton shirt). It was made of densely woven wool to protect sailors and fisherman from the strong winds of the north Atlantic, and the stripes helped make someone easier to spot in the water if they fell overboard.
The Breton shirt came into wider prominence in 1858, when a French law introduced it as the navy’s official seaman uniform for all personnel stationed in the region. In 1913, Coco Chanel adopted it and, from there, the marinière wove its way into popular culture, where it endures today.
With a history already imbued into its fabric, the top landed onto the tables of the unassuming shop, ready to be adopted by Mia — and to which she has imparted her own coming-of-age story.
“That shirt made me feel special. It was like a magical cape, it had magical qualities.”
“The shirt was bought at a time of many firsts: my first time away from my family for an extended period of time, the first time I bought well-made clothing, and most indelibly, my first time in Paris, where I was introduced to a world of sensuality, perfume, the elegant Hausmann architecture and the bucolic parks. It left me breathless.”
“I remember sitting on a hill in Montmartre, and I said, ‘I’m going to live here one day.’ And I’m sure Paris was the first time I’d been in love. I fell in love with Paris. Or, it felt like love. It was exhilarating, and just made my body feel different. Paris was just so unlike anything I’d ever seen. The elegance, the women, the seemingly careless beauty, the idea of someone walking by you with that intoxicating scent.”
To this day, as soon as Mia puts it on, “all these memories would come back, in almost a Pavlovian way.”
She treasures the top as “it’s a reminder to never to lose a sense of wonder. That is the centre: wonder, curiousity and openness. The shirt came to represent that.”
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, respond to this email or leave a comment below, and I’ll be in touch!
Love and gratitude,
Irene
My Grandfather's shirt! It's a blue Christian Dior button down dress shirt. I swear its the only piece of designer clothing he probably owned (he was a farmer and didn't care about material things). I assume it was likely thrifted and given to him by one of my Aunt's/his daughters. I love it not for the Christian Dior label but the S Triebner label that his nursing home had put in it to help track of his clothes. He passed in 2010
Just here to say (again) how much I enjoy this series. Love to hear the stories behind the pieces people treasure.