One more feature needs description. This is an object that covers — as if it had flown in from mountainous lands where giant, benign creatures dwell; found itself over southern Florida; gazed down and seen, from high above the clouds, my mother at work in her shop; then descended and landed in her fields of silk, where it got comfortable and decided to stay — this object, as I was saying, covers the entire upper back of the kimono. It is an enormous, enormously winged, butterfly.
The body of the butterfly is something my mother bought in a store. Its skin is paper, stretched over a lightweight wooden frame, and brightly painted. I suspect it may be an Indonesian export. It is three-dimensional and elongated — with a proper head, an abdomen, and a waspish tail — and is attached to the garment along the back seam, running head to tail down the wearer’s spine. Its outstretched wings, which are made of soft, quilted silk, reach to the kimono’s shoulders and are a dull white, painted with pastel swirls and stripes. With its outstretched wings — and as if in imitation of nature’s strategy of imitation — the creature looks like a kite. The wings reach to the kimono’s shoulders. As a crowning touch, the butterfly displays two delicate antennae that extend upward from its head. In photographs of the robe, these antennae are long and spiraling. Somewhere along the way, however, the antennae have been broken. They’re short, splintered.
For more than ten years, my mother had run a program in fashion, textiles, and costume history at Miami — Dade Community College. She had a small faculty under her, and many students. Frequently, she was up and out of the house by sunrise. She might not return before evening. She slept little. Instead, she drank. My father was her partner in this. As evening turned to night, the two of them fought. As the night got late, she went after him with greater and greater fury. A woman had come between my parents in the early years of their marriage, and brought about their first divorce. After their remarriage, when I was nine and my sister, Terry, eight — and until their relationship ended for good — the memory of that woman haunted our family. Many times, following a bout of fighting, when my mother had tumbled into bed or lost consciousness in a chair, my father wept and apologized.
“I’m sorry,” he would say to me and my sister, and the look on his face showed that he meant it. But though he did not intend to, and could not have known it, he was apologizing our mother out of existence. He was apologizing himself and his children out of existence, when he whispered to Terry and me, “Your mother works hard all day at school. She works so hard. She’s just tired. She’s tired.”
“She’s not tired!” I shouted back. “She’s an alcoholic!” No one was listening. Who pays attention to an unhappy fifteen-year-old? And, after all, my mother wasn’t the only one who was tired. All our lives were given over to her. I once marveled that my father could endure my mother. I found his martyrdom, as I thought of it then, honorable. It seemed to me that our family was guided by a bleak, incomprehensible fate. It wasn’t incomprehensible, though, and it wasn’t fate that was guiding us. It was alcohol.
After the nights came the mornings. My sister and I got out of our beds, put on clothes, and marched from the house to the corner where the school bus stopped. In this we took our mother’s lead, our mother who lit a morning cigarette, swallowed her coffee, and, without memory of herself in her darker form, went to the office. In those days, the early seventies, her work at the college did not figure much in our family’s daily life. It was not something that we talked about. It was never celebrated. She was alone in her work, and she was alone at home, and her isolation — from her family and from the world — informed her use of fashion and design to tell her life story.
But there is a problem. Fashion — and I refer not only to clothes, stylish or otherwise, and the ways they evolve and are worn, but to the meanings and associations that can be drawn from stylistic variations or the lack of variations in clothes — fashion, whether or not considered a high art form, remains explicitly a visual and tactile language, a language, as I have come to understand from reading the work of the art historian Anne Hollander, written in an alphabet of colors, shapes, textures, and forms that subtly shift and change from season to season, and from year to year, over the decades of our lifetimes. Fashion is a communal dialogue, a conversation that never stops — on the subjects of desire, power, kinship, sex, and the passing of time — between people living together in a society. What happens to the conversation, though, when the primary society known by a maker of clothes consists of a dying family — a family which, night after night, year after year, apologizes itself out of existence?
There was a week in the early nineties when my mother, driving her station wagon from Miami, and I, flying south from New York, met in Black Mountain, North Carolina, at the home of her parents. She’d brought with her a selection of her wearable creations, and she was eager to show them off. One night after dinner, she led me and my grandparents to the hallway closet. One by one, she pulled out the garments she’d been working on in her shop near the Miami River, the garments she thought of as works of art. Among them, I recall, was the kimono adorned with butterfly wings.
I watched the faces of her elderly, southern Presbyterian parents. My mother’s mother touched the fabrics and said, “Oh, look at this,” and “How about that.” And she appreciated, in a reserved though generous manner, her daughter’s workmanship with needle and thread. But what, exactly, had my mother made with needle and thread? This wasn’t clear to me or to my grandparents, who were, frankly, distraught. They didn’t know what to say to their daughter.
After a long moment, we retreated from the closet in the hallway. We went to the living room and sat. The television was tuned to the Tony Awards. My mother had always loved Broadway musicals. After a while, I looked away from the screen and saw, on my mother’s face and in her slumped posture, in the way she blew cigarette smoke forcibly from her mouth, her angry disappointment.
Had she pulled out hangers draped with clothing that showed either an ironic exaggeration or a direct repudiation of contemporary fashion ideals — glamorously deglamorized dresses in the mid-nineties Comme des Garçons mode, for instance, or radical versions of men’s suits executed as statements to be worn by women — her parents might have been similarly perplexed and anxious. But I would have understood that she was making something that, however odd her choices might have appeared at first glance, could nevertheless be worn in the world in a way that communicated to the viewer, in a relatively direct manner, aspects of her desires and her attitudes about the body, about shape and form, about seduction and the politics of public life. I understand that a comparison between my mother’s clothes and European and American runway designs is not entirely fair. I also realize that her parents and her son were not the perfect audience for her fantastic productions.