When you grow up with something, you take it for granted. Especially if it isn’t taken away from you prematurely. Your house garden, the neighborhood park. The presence of siblings. Loud Sunday lunches with the extended family. What your parents do for a living. It’s only later in life that you realize just how formative these simple, and singular, facts are; facts you are born into, facts you have absolutely no control over.
I grew up in a family knee-deep in fabric, at least on my mother’s side. My mother is a fashion designer. Her father was a textile merchant. For the longest time, these simple facts were not just elements of one kind of life, one out of many. (It takes time, and a lot of experience, to reach that kind of abstract thinking.) These simple facts were life itself, plain and simple.
I’d always known that my mother’s profession was rare, and often misunderstood, especially in the context of Cyprus. As a child I picked up on the deliberate or unconscious slips of the tongue that often turned into palpable tension. Could my mother mend their ripped trousers or hem in their skirts? Could she help them copy the dress worn by so-and-so in that week’s Hello! magazine?
A designer is not a seamstress. I learnt that early on, but never in a context of hierarchy. My mother has always had the utmost respect and admiration for seamstresses. She spent her whole working life with them, first in Manchester and London, then in the basement of her atelier in Nicosia. The relationship is symbiotic.
Last week, I watched Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread (2018). The film is set in 1950s London and follows the fervid relationship of a superbly talented, yet painfully eccentric, fictional fashion designer—Reynolds Woodcock, played by Daniel Day Lewis—and his young lover and wife, Alma Elson, played by Vicky Krieps.
Phantom Thread is a visually luxurious work of filmmaking, with the director sharing his protagonist’s painstaking attention to detail. In many ways, the film unfolds an unattainable world: it is set in a bygone era of taffeta gowns as appropriate attire for going out to dinner, and it concerns a social milieu that most of us will never personally experience.
As unreachable as the social world of the film is, however, I found the life it portrays intimately familiar. In almost every frame, I recognized the trappings of the manual, intellectual, and creative labor of a life singularly committed to fashion: Paper patterns hanging on the wall, wooden work benches, pattern-cloth weights in the shape of a housekeeper’s iron. Textile names, rich- and foreign-sounding: organza, bobbin lace, chiffon, quipure. A designer’s singular obsession with form. A passion for precision. The strong-mindedness that comes with the unshakeable confidence in one’s taste.
Still from Phantom Thread (2017)
I spent a big part of my life in front of my mother’s mirrors, with her devoted seamstresses a few feet behind me, pin pillow in hand, soft measure draped over their forearm. I know all too well the feeling of standing in front of your reflection while a creator wraps and pins a shapeless fabric around your body in a way that transforms it into a dress. I'm all too familiar with the slightly exaggerated sense of fear that takes over every time a pin pricks a fabric’s fibers dangerously close to one’s skin. I’ve felt, many times, the initial disappointment of an unfinished garment that doesn’t quite look like what you’d expected, yet. (Your stomach sinks, you feel a lump rise in your throat). And I’ve also had the glorious privilege of experiencing the eventual sense of elation that comes with slipping into a finished garment, made to measure for the contours of your physical being, a form that moulds you and was moulded for you.
When I was a teenager, people used to say: “Wow, you’re so lucky! Your mother is a fashion designer! She can make you anything!“ I would respond with a provocation: “It’s not as fun as it sounds!” Yes, part of that response was age-related angst, and part of it was insufficient respect for just how special my situation was. But what I was rejecting, quite intentionally, was what I still think most of these good faith statements were implying: if your mother is a fashion designer, then you can have whatever clothes you want! You practically have your own personal Zara to pump out the latest fashion trends for you!
That couldn’t be further from the truth. And I disdained that distance.
In one of the most memorable scenes in Phantom Thread, Alma is modeling a new design by the House of Woodcock. She says she doesn’t like the fabric. Reynolds’ sister and business partner, Cyril Woodcock, disagrees. Reynolds sides with his sister, and tells Alma that Cyril is right, and not just because his clients will love the fabric:
Reynolds: It’s right because it’s right. Because it’s beautiful. Maybe one day you’ll change your taste, Alma.
Alma: Maybe not.
Reynolds: Maybe you have no taste.
Alma: Maybe I like my own taste.
Reynolds: Yes, just enough to get you into trouble.
Alma: Perhaps I’m looking for trouble —
Reynolds: Stop!
In this exquisite stichomythia, Reynolds may come across as cruel and arrogant. Most importantly, however, the exchange reveals Reynolds’ supreme confidence in the value of his choice. It is this very confidence that makes him a tremendous designer, and a tremendously difficult person. Alma, unfazed by this behavior—in fact, she takes it in her stride, she is energized by it—challenges Reynolds, insisting on the value of her own opinion.
What Anderson’s film captures so magnificently through Alma’s and Reynolds’ relationship is that the process of creation involves ceding control. It turns on the counter-intuitive state of absolute trust. As a result, the relationship between the model and the designer is always defined by struggle. Despite appearances, and the seeming omnipotence of the latter, power can swing between the creator and the wearer like a pendulum. Maybe I like my own taste. Perhaps I’m looking for trouble. This push back is an essential part of the eventual surrender to the designer’s vision, which is in turn affected by and dependent on the attitude of the wearer.
This interpretation of garment-making couldn’t be further from the instant gratifications of fast fashion. Like the waning practice of made-to-measure couture, the edifying and near-ritualistic experience of letting oneself be dressed by another may soon be a thing of the past, available only to the lucky few that can afford the custom-made services of global fashion brands. I have been lucky enough to have that ritual be a part of my everyday life, something that I no longer take for granted.
The people who were jealous of me having a fashion designer as a mother were jealous for the wrong reasons. They could not even begin to understand the tension, the negotiations, the fear, the elation; all the raw feelings exposed by my half-dressed body left to my mother’s care. In that part of my childhood home that I, an only daughter, shared with my mother, a designer of women’s garments, fashion has never been about a passing trend. Fashion has been entirely about timelessness, the timelessness of our ever-changing relationship.
Still from Phantom Thread (2017)