To The Newness of Things

I always think I’m so jaded. Oh, I’ve seen everything. Oh, nothing could ever surprise me or impress me. Especially in terms of fashion. Child, boo! I say. I’ve seen it all and have done it all. I managed to have killed these two birds with one stone while having a leisurely Sunday brunch in London with the late Isabella Blow.

Or so I believed. Nothing impresses me more than the possibility of a new fashion mode. Before it happens. Before it reaches the hallways of the suburban high school and becomes rote and truly passé. Like the straight-legged jean, now erroneously called ‘skinny jeans’. I first wore them decades ago when they were almost impossible to find and, if you did, quite expensive to purchase. I didn’t wear them to signal that I belonged to the prevailing social milieu; I wore them to show I did not.

When a brave pioneer wears something that is so new or outré that there is not a word to define what it is yet, I’m held in awe. This person does not hear your snickers. This person could care less about your opinion. (This person may be in need of prescribed psychotropic help, but I do not wish to digress.) I recently saw such a person walking proudly down a Soho street, wearing what I call a mammy-jammy. 

Mammy-jammy is my term for an indefinable article of attire. It exists as a new sort of thing, a piece of fashion that can’t be constrained by words like shoe or dress. As an example I can only think of the Comme Des Garcons collection of dresses that were constructed with a built in hump, so the wearer gave the appearance of being humpbacked. A piece from that collection was not merely a dress – a new word should have been invented for it, like drump.

The woman I saw in Soho was wearing something akin to a dress, but it looked as if she left a bathroom too rapidly and part of the dress remained stuck in her underwear, and decided to stay there. Or it gave that illusion, an appearance that few of us would ever want to sport. It was a blue and white striped affair, very simple at the top half, that seemed to gather around the mid-thigh like a kind of diaper-bottomed jumpsuit, but with more fabric draped between the legs. It was a tunic that gave something more, but I couldn’t tell exactly what was on offer. This ‘jumpsuit’ was worn with simple black oxfords and black tights, which declared that her outfit was worn on purpose. 

I was confused, but I was also held in a rare light wonderment. And to this young crusader, I must tip my Philip Treacy hat.

Erika Belle in a mammy-jammy at Agnes B. during FNO 2011. Photo by Patrick Albino