When I was quite little, my anonymous
sister Bridget told me that I had no sense of style.
It hurt. Not only because it was delivered
with the kind of purposeful flippancy that only an older sibling can bestow,
but because, in my opinion, it was not entirely true.
I’ll elaborate.
When I was about six, my anonymous
mother Susan bought me what can only be described as a purple clown suit.
Onesy. It was a fiesta of spots and stripes, had smart black buttons down the
front, and a comically large pointy collar. I loved it. Not only was it stylish, but it also had the
practical element of disenabling me to wear my usual tracksuit pants backwards;
a scenario that, at that time, happened more often than not. Perfect!
I wore my purple clown suit (PCS) around the
house and to school, and the love affair continued until one day my friend’s
pet mouse ran up the sleeve and could not be extracted.
Throughout much of my early adolescence,
my wardrobe choices revolved around a pair of overalls (a similar idea to the
PCS, but with greater access for removing unwelcome rodents), a skivvy, and a
pink and white striped hat that my anonymous Aunt Sara had bought for me at a
local Geelong market. I thought I looked great. Hell, I did look great. I was Alex Mac.
I wore my ‘ovies’ most days, apart from
school days when I was forced to turn into a blue school uniform.
My school uniform was a prison in
clothing-form. It consisted of a blue boxy dress, blue jumper, blue socks,
blue shirt, blue tie, blue kilt, blue socks and - the bane of my adolescence -
a blue blazer. Sports days were for blue tracksuits (at this point generally
worn the right way around). I still struggle with ‘blue’ as a general concept.
So, with all this blue to deal with five
days a week, high school clothing decisions were mostly restricted to ‘boxer
shorts or bike shorts’ under my school-dress, whether my ‘royal blue’ scrunchie
was close enough to the ‘sky blue’ outlined in the school’s dress policy, and
what to wear on casual dress days (overalls, of course!). For one glorious month in 2001, (to my
seemingly easily evoked delight) the school trialed a ‘no tie’ policy, which
led to such an immediate flurry of wild behavior among the ‘ladies’ that ties
were swiftly re-instated. And just in time, no doubt.
It was when I started university
that I decided that I would become a dress wearer. In those days (the olden
days of 2003), dresses had not yet come back into fashion (though my mother’s
LL Bean catalogue would say that tracksuit dresses, and skorts, had never
left!). So I decided that if I was going to wear dresses to uni, I would have
to do it from day one, so that people who didn’t know me (and my overall
inclined behaviour) would just assume I did that kind of thing all the time.
“No big deal guys, that’s Kathryn Kelly - she wears dresses”. Totes.
Like they cared.
My first dress was a pink floral number. I
wore it on my first day (and by that I mean second day… I forgot to turn up on
the first day.), with my carefully practiced guise of confidence. I felt
summery and pretty and special and I loved it. I wrote songs about it. I never
looked back.
Luckily, the rest of the world was watching
(as I had evidently assumed they would), and so dresses came back into fashion
quite soon after.
So it comes to the point where I reveal I
spent the next nine years accumulating enough dresses to be able to
quite comfortably wear a different one every day for one month, and still have
quite a few left over to keep my wardrobe satiated.
Yes, that’s a lot of dresses. No, I am not
ashamed. (Note that I am slightly ashamed.) I
love them all. And if you go back through the ‘Coming Up Kathryn’ archives to
October last year, you will find dorky and sentimental dedications to 31 of
these dresses.
If only there was some kind of month-long
celebration of overalls.
My first dress. And some chickens.
