The Tamesis
Some people spend their infancy in a box—baptismal lace with an off-white patina, a first pair of shoes tied with a ribbon, a silver mug engraved with their initials. I was given nothing valuable as a child – except for a small pearl bracelet my father gave me when I was born, but only because a few years ago I had it enlarged to fit my adult wrist. What was my remedy when I became a new mother? Go shopping: Buy vintage baby clothes, as well as hand-me-down clothes that I never had, thanks to my mother’s craftsmanship in souvenirs.
Interestingly, this is not a trait she inherited from her mother. My grandmother might be called the family archivist in her own unique way. Not only did she save the photos, she also saved the evidence. Air tickets, report cards, baby teeth wrapped and tagged, every mundane little thing in family life is given dignity by preservation. The captions on her photo albums are so meticulous they read like contributions to a time capsule, as if future historians might one day need to know the background of the child on a tricycle in Houston in 1997. She later wrote her memoirs with almost unbelievable accuracy, recalling, among other things, the names of the stewards on the Queen Mary when she emigrated from England. By the time her great-grandchildren arrived, she was working on annual albums for each branch of the family. She understood instinctively that memory is like a container.
At the same time, my mother has always had an anti-matter instinct. It’s so ingrained that our routine “What did you do this weekend?” often comes with phone calls reporting that another wardrobe has been edited, another shelf checked, another donation bag dispatched. She has a very critical eye. She doesn’t just keep things that she likes, but things that are appropriate for the season of life she’s in. That’s not to say she isn’t sentimental. My grandmother worked with paper and paste, while my mother worked with pixels—filming and documenting family trips, birthdays, and ordinary weekends into video montages worthy of a Best Live Action Short nomination. I sometimes think she never felt the urgency to save physical objects because her own mother did such a wonderful job for everyone.
It wasn’t until I got pregnant and started building a nursery that I realized how little I cared about my baby stuff being kept – especially my clothes. I often think about the second Christmas dress I found in a photo album, and the white tights I wore with little candy canes embroidered on them. I also thought of a pink and white Hawaiian-print hibiscus dress that I wore with almost religious devotion until I almost took it off. My mother gave it away when she couldn’t get me to wear anything else. I remember throwing a tantrum because I couldn’t find it in my closet. I still wish I could wear it—or, more importantly, have my daughter wear it. So I found myself searching for something just like it – and what seemed like a whole collection of vintage jewelry that dated back to my own childhood, but also that of my mother and grandmother. Each little piece of clothing is like a family heirloom retroactively installed into my family.
It’s probably inevitable that this will happen. I wear vintage almost exclusively, make a career out of old clothes, research labels, source vintage, and write about clothing as a memory bank. Of course, sooner or later I turn my attention to baby clothes: handmade bubble onesies embellished with French knots and pleated like seashells, little dresses embroidered with bunnies for Easter, pumpkins for October, decorated Christmas trees for December.
Coincidentally, when my daughter was born, my friend Alessia Fendi had just launched Le Fefi, a vintage children’s brand, and invited me to pick out a dress. She placed in my hands a pale pink striped dress that was so delicate that I didn’t want to dress my daughter in anything else. It’s not just the workmanship that appeals to me, although I could preach on the decline of proper smoking, these look like baby clothes. Not the shrunken adult fashions—tiny cashmere and Breton stripes—but the more ceremonial garments from infancy. There were bubble silhouettes with extremely loose proportions, rich Peter Pan collars, and jumpsuits with tiny needlepoint bows at the chest. Not very practical, sure—there’s no such thing as a two-way zipper—but there are few modern baby clothes that celebrate the fleeting days of our infancy and those who wisely reveled in their own cuteness.
