Time is always running out, and I need to alleviate the angst rising from my throat, chest, stomach.

I bought a robe especially for this because it felt necessary at the time. The robe is called ‘Venice’ – which I thought was a good sign as the belt from Balzac’s robe was claimed to be Venetian gold. The online shopping description had said, ‘Living up to the legendary charm of its name, this is the Rolls Royce of all terry robes. Outside of the robe is lavish tufted pile, while the inside is soft and thirsty terry fabric.’ I’d pulled it straight out of the box at the post office and put it on straightaway. I’d expected some kind of ecstasy but the terrycloth only weighed heavily upon my body.

And – right at this moment, I’m blaming it for my inability to think clearly, and (in Hemingway’s voice) to write good, honest sentences.

I write to chase an idea – a fleeting moment to approach some kind of authenticity. It is an exasperation to feel alive. Often the source of pursuit is nameless and formless, more visceral than it is intellectual, more about the experience itself than its fulfilment. The pursuit is felt as an intensity that arises from the psyche and extends throughout the physical body. I clothe myself in narrative and write myself into the scene. I need to resolve the story, and this robe is going to help.

Lately my body has been breaking out in a rash. This almost always happens when I’m anxious, like when I’m late for something. I’ve been wearing this ankle-length robe for the past week to hide the rash (did I have a premonition of this rash when I bought the robe?). In my semi-delirious writing state I’ve been referring to it as ‘my’ Balzac robe, ‘my’ Balzac rash. The rash grows and travels from one part of my body to another; it’s hard to catch where and when it stops and ends, and at which point it mutates. When the rash travels up past my neck I just hide in my room. This gives me lots of quiet time to write and scratch at the rash. Staying for days on end in my room without any human contact draws me deep into other worlds – often dangerously but ultimately necessary. These are places where anything is possible, its limits bounded only by one’s own.

The sustained periods of self-absorption lend another dimension to the state of writing, transforms loneliness into solitude, empty pages into narrative. Thoughts become entwined with misperceptions, memories bent out of shape. No matter how hard I try it is simply impossible to represent thoughts and memories accurately. Something always mutates in the passage from image to word and vice versa. Instead of forcing links between them, I trace their trajectories. It’s my way of meandering the corridors of thoughts and spinning my own webs.

The robe covers my rash, lets me assume the role of other bodies, grants me access to extraordinary lives beyond these ordinary walls. In the theatre of my imagination, countless bodies are clothed in violent contortions. Lately they wear robes embroidered with gold and red thread, elaborate Baroque filigrees growing and pulsating across the entire width and length of the back. At times it looks like a giant gold beetle, at other times a Rorschach creature viewed through a kaleidoscope. Ruby clusters grow from points on the body – shoulders, elbows knees, simultaneously burgeoning and disintegrating. Around the waist they wear thick gold cords dripping with crushed rubies, the red thick like blood – heavy, glistening. Slick oils simultaneously hardening and melting. Molten lava. Faceless bodies. Or rather, whole heads covered in latex masks melting into the surface of skin and hair, a sticky composite where everything is pushed up or pressed against one another – a gelatinous force eating away at the faces. The robed bodies act out their parts via gestures and mutations in appearance. Are they trying to get somewhere or are they just going? Robed bodies with twisted limbs and weak hearts, kaleidoscopic visions at the edge of consciousness. I try to chase them down, pull back their robes and scratch at them. Shameful desires and broken memories, gaping holes and torn seams – narratives emerge from these hidden places like scent on a collar.

Here’s a memory that I return to again and again. He came and sat next to me on the curb early one morning. Californian high summer heat, the concrete sizzling on my skin. He was covered in a full-length bathrobe. ‘I started writing a new story today,’ he quipped. He rolled back the terrycloth sleeves. On his arms he had inscribed several lines with a thick needle, letters and symbols in an indecipherable arrangement. He would code all of his imagination this way: in a language that was not an end in itself, but full of departure points for imaginary worlds. He was Alice through a kaleidoscopic looking glass, a way of seeing through multiple dimensions all at once.

‘What’s the story about?’

He said, ‘It’s about these people we meet all the time here in this wretched place, you know, the ones who just want to be somebody else. Aspiring actors, directors and models in their waitressing and retail jobs, desperately wanting to be transformed. Not all that different from us, I suppose.’

I squinted at him, trying to make out whether he was real.

‘So they wear all these different robes, and the robes transform them into different people, or – you know – ideas of other lives. And after a while they begin to lose touch of who they really are. The robes start to mutate and grow, attaching themselves to the bodies, becoming the bodies. And soon enough these people start living through the robes, speaking in voices that are not entirely their own. They build identities out of the robes and construct histories out of the fragments of distorted memory and convoluted desires.’

He stressed, ‘It’s the robes – they clothe and take over the bodies, empty shells wanting to be filled with potential. They inscribe the bodies with meaning. They are access points to other worlds, other possibilities of becoming. Don’t you see – the robes write them into being.’

He asked me to look closer. His entire body was covered in inscriptions – glistening, raw, dripping with inky fluids the colours of ruby and gold, wandering over his back, chest, arms, thighs, neck, face. Mysterious shapes and symbols – seemingly alive – traversing and crawling on the surface of his skin, forming hardened clusters around the bends and joints, liquid gold articulating into filigrees. The coloured inks were growing and oozing out of incisions on his skin, covering almost the entirety of his body. It was hard to make out where his body finishes and where the inscriptions begin.

His inscribed skin was the robe – the fabric of his self, and his body – the shell – is the very medium through which the inscriptions could form and exude meaning. The inscriptions were written in code, as with all language I suppose, and it was up to me to use them, to access the other places.

In my daydreams I sometimes still see him, passing over the other bodies with his robe floating about his stride – silently, filled with repressed narratives, trapped in my memory. It is difficult trying to represent him in words – all of him, all of these bodies; once they are recalled, they mutate – they lose some essential part that could have only existed at that one singular point in time. You can repeat them, remember them, reproduce them – but they are no longer what they were, or what you think they were.

Extraordinary narratives arise from the hidden corners, the walls between the actual and non-actual become translucent, and the deeper I peer – through the doors, into the robes, at the surface of the bodies – the farther my thoughts travel and the more I uncover.

The city, the robe, the bodies – like language they ripple out to many tangents and dimensions the more you try to locate and fix them in place. You are perhaps reminded of an event or somebody from the past, or it might have been something someone had said, then you think it might have been a flicker of a dream instead, or perhaps it had all been imagined and that imagination had reminded you of some story you read. The deeper you go the more you lose yourself within the kaleidoscope of memory, imagination, and dream – all expanding in your present experience.

I am writing all this from my bed, within the four bare walls of a suburban bedroom. I am in my terrycloth bathrobe, sunken within its folds, and – coaxed by daydream – find myself in extraordinary circumstances.

Winnie Ha Mitford is a writer and doctor of philosophy at RMIT University, Melbourne.

WHY DIDN’T I KEEP it? It was used to me and I was used to it. It moulded all the folds of my body without inhibiting it; I was picturesque and handsome. The other one is stiff, and starchy, makes me look stodgy. There was no need to which its kindness didn’t loan itself, for indigence is almost always officious. If a book was covered in dust, one of its panels was there to wipe it off. If thickened ink refused to flow in my quill, it presented its flank. Traced in long black lines, one could see the services it had rendered me. These long lines announce the litterateur, the writer, the man who works. I now have the air of a rich good for nothing. No one knows who I am.

In its shelter I feared neither the clumsiness of a valet, nor my own, neither the explosion of fire nor the spilling of water. I was the absolute master of my old robe. I have become the slave of the new one.

The dragon that guarded the golden fleece was no more worried than I am. Care envelopes me.

The infatuated old man who turns himself over to the whims, to the mercies of a young girl says, from morning to night; where is my good, my old housekeeper? What demon obsessed me the day I chased her away for this one! And then he cries, he sighs.

I don’t cry, I don’t sigh, but every moment I say: Cursed be he who invented the art of putting a price on common material by tinting it scarlet. Cursed be the precious garment that I revere. Where is my old, my humble, my comfortable rag of common cloth?

My friends, keep your old friends. My friends, fear the touch of wealth. Let my example teach you a lesson. Poverty has its freedoms; opulence has its obstacles.

O Diogenes! How you would laugh if you saw your disciple beneath Aristipius’ luxurious mantle! O Aristipius, this luxurious mantle was paid for by many low acts. What a difference between your soft, crawling, effeminate life and the free and firm life of the rag-wearing cynic. I left behind the barrel in which I ruled in order to serve a tyrant.

But that’s not all, my friend. Lend an ear to the ravages of luxury, the results of a consistent luxury.

My old robe was one with the other rags that surrounded me. A straw chair, a wooden table, a rug from Bergamo, a wood plank that held up a few books, a few smoky prints without frames, hung by its corners on that tapestry. Between these prints three or four suspended plasters formed, along with my old robe, the most harmonious indigence.

All is now discordant. No more coordination, no more unity, no more beauty.

A new, sterile housekeeper who succeeds to a presbytery, the wife who enters the house of a widower, the minister who replaces a disgraced minister, the Molinist prelate who takes over the diocese of a Jansenist prelate cause no more trouble than the scarlet intruder has caused in my household.

I can bear the sight of a peasant woman without disgust. That piece of simple cloth that covers her head, the hair that sparsely falls across her cheeks, those tattered rags that half cover her, that poor short petticoat that doesn’t cover half her legs, her naked feet covered with muck cannot wound me. It is the image of a state I respect; it is the ensemble of the of the lack of grace of a necessary and unfortunate condition for which I have pity. But my stomach turns and, despite the perfumed atmosphere that follows her, I distance myself, I turn my gaze away from that courtisan whose coiffure points d’angleterre, torn sleeves, filthy silk stockings and worn shoes show me the poverty of the day combined with the opulence of the previous evening.

Such would have been my domicile, if the imperious scarlet hadn’t set everything to march in unison with it.

I saw the Bergamo cede the wall to which it had so long been attached to the damascene hanging.

Two prints not without merit: The ‘Chute de la Manne dans le Desert’ by Poussin and ‘Esther devant Assuerus’ of the same painter; the one shamefully chased away by an old man by Rubens was the sad Esther; the falling manna was dissipated by a Tempest by Vernet.

The straw chair was relegated to the antechamber by a leather chair.

Homer, Virgil, Horace, and Cicero relieved the weak fir bending under their mass and have been closed in in an inlaid armoire, an asylum more worthy of them than of me.

A large mirror took over the mantle of my fireplace.

Those two lovely moulds that I owed to Falconet’s friendship, and which he repaired himself, were moved away by a crouching Venus. Modern clay broken by antique bronze.

The wooden table was still fighting in the field, sheltered by a mass of pamphlets and papers piled up any which way, and which it appeared would protect it from the injuries that threatened it. One day it met its destiny, and despite my laziness the pamphlets and papers put themselves away in a precious bureau.
Evil instinct of the convenient! Delicate and ruinous tact, sublime taste that changes, moves, builds and overturns; that empties the coffers of the fathers; that leaves daughters without a dowry, the sons without an education; that makes so many beautiful things and great evils. You who substituted in my house the fatal and precious desk for the wooden table: it is you who ruins nations, it is you who will perhaps one day take my effects to the Pont Saint-Michel where will be heard the hoarse voice of a certified auctioneer saying: Twenty louis for a crouching Venus.

The space that remained between the tablet of this desk and the Tempest by Vernet, which is above it, made for a void disagreeable to the eye. This void was filled by a clock. And what a clock! A clock a la geoffrin; a clock whose the gold contrasts with the bronze.

There was a vacant corner next to my window. This corner asked for a writing desk, which it obtained.

Another unpleasant void between the tablet of the writing desk and the lovely head by Rubens was filled by two ‘La Grenées’.

Here is a Magdeleine by the same artist; there is a sketch either by Vien or Machy, for I also went in for sketches. And it was thus that the edifying repair of a philosopher transformed itself into the scandalous cabinet of a publican. In addition, I insult national poverty.

All that remains of my original mediocrity is a rug of selvage. I can feel that this pitiful rug doesn’t go well with my newfound luxury. But I swore and I swear, like the peasant transferred from his hut to a palace who keeps his sabots, that Denis the philosopher will never walk upon a masterpiece of La Savonnier. When in the morning, covered in my sumptuous scarlet, I enter my office I lower my gaze and I see my old rug of selvedge. It reminds me of my beginnings and pride is stopped at the entryway to my heart.

No my friend, no, I have not been corrupted. My door is always open to the needy who address themselves to me; they find me as affable as ever. I listen to them, I give them advice, I assist them, I feel for them. My soul has not been hardened, my head has not gotten too big. My back is good and round, just as before. There’s the same honesty, the same sensitivity. My luxury is brand new and the poison has not yet acted. But who knows what will happen with time? What can be expected of he who has forgotten his wife and his daughter, who has run up debts, who has ceased to be a spouse and father and who, instead of depositing a useful sum deep in a faithful coffer…

Oh holy prophet! Raise you hands to the heavens and pray for a friend in peril. Say to God: If you see in your eternal decrees that riches are corrupting the heart of Denis, don’t spare the masterpieces he idolises. Destroy them and return him to his original poverty. And I, on my side, will say to the heavens: Oh God! I resign myself to the prayer of the holy prophet and to your will. I abandon everything to you. Take back everything, everything except the Vernet! It is not the artist, it is you who made it. Respect your own work and that of friendship.

See that lighthouse, see the adjacent tower that rises to the right. See the old tree that the winds have torn. How beautiful that masse is. Above that obscure masse, see the rocks covered in verdure. It is thus that your powerful hand formed them. It is thus that your beneficent hand has carpeted them. See that uneven terrace that descends from the foot of the rocks to the sea. It is the very image of the degradation you have permitted time to exercise on those things of the world that are the most solid. Would your sun have lighted it otherwise? God, if you annihilate that work of art it will be said that you are a jealous God. Have pity on the unfortunates spread out on these banks. Is it not enough for you to have shown them the depths of the abyss? Did you save them only to destroy them? Listen to the prayer of this man who thanks you. Aid in the efforts of he who gathers together the sad remains of his fortune. Close your ear to the imprecations of this madman. Alas, he promised himself such advantageous returns, he had contemplated rest and retirement. He was on his last voyage. A hundred times along the way he calculated on his fingers the size of his fortune and had arranged for its use. And now all of his hopes have vanished; he has barely enough to cover his naked limbs. Be touched by the tenderness of these two spouses. Look at the terror that you have inspired in that woman. She offers you thanks for the evil you did not do her. Nevertheless, her child, too young to know to what peril you exposed it, he, his father and his mother, takes care of the faithful companion of his voyage: he is attaching the collar of his dog. Spare the innocent. Look at that mother freshly escaped from the waters with her spouse: it is not for herself that she is trembling, it is for her child. See how she squeezes it to her breast, how she kisses it. O God, recognise the waters you have created. Recognise them, both when your breath moves them and when your hand calms them. Recognise the black clouds that you gathered and that it pleased you to scatter. Already they are separating, they are moving away; already the light of the day star is reborn on the face of the waters. I foresee calm on that red horizon. How far it is, the horizon! It doesn’t end with the sea. The sky descends beneath it and seems to turn around the globe. Finish lighting up the sky; finish rendering tranquility to the sea. Allow those seamen to put their shipwrecked boat back to sea. Assist in their labor, give them strength and leave me this painting. leave it to me, like the rod with which you will punish the vain. It is already the case that it is no longer i that people visit, that people come to listen to: it is Vernet they come to admire in my house. The painter has humiliated the philosopher.

Oh my friend, the beautiful Vernet I own! The subject is the end of a storm without a harmful catastrophe. The seas are still agitated, the sky covered in clouds; the sailors are busy on their sunken boat, the inhabitants come running from the nearby mountains. How much spirit this painter has! He needed but a small number of principal figures to render all the circumstances of the moment he chose. How true this scene is! With what lightness, ease and vigour it is all painted. I want to keep this testimony of his friendship. I want my son-in-law to transmit it to his children, his children to theirs, and these latter to those that will be born of them.

If only you saw the beauty of the whole of this piece, how everything there is harmonious, how the effects work together, how everything is brought out without effort or affectation. How those mountains on the right are wrapped in vapour. How beautiful those rocks and superimposed edifices are. How picturesque that tree is and the lighting on that terrace. How the light there fades away, how its figures are laid out: true, active, natural, living. How interesting they are, the force with which they are painted. The purity with which they are drawn, how they stand out from the background. The enormous breadth of that space, the verisimilitude of those waters. Those clouds, the sky, that horizon! Here the background is deprived of light, while the foreground is lit up, unlike the usual technique. Come see my Vernet, but don’t take it from me!

With time all debts will be paid, remorse will be calmed and I will have pure joy. Don’t fear that the mad desire to stock up beautiful things has taken control of me. The friends I had I sill have, and their number hasn’t grown. I have Lais but Lais does not have me. Happy in her arms, I am ready to cede her to she who I’ll love and who she’ll make happier than me. And I want to tell you a secret: that Lais, who it cost others so much to buy, cost me nothing.

Maria Lima is a researcher in fashion and clothing, and a post-graduate student from the London School of Fashion.

Text excerpted from Denis Diderot’s memoir essay, ‘Regrets for my Old Dressing Gown’, published in 1769. 

THE ITEMS WE POSSESS ­and clothes we wear have unspoken power in our lives; in function, but also as anchors to our stories, memories and identities.

Take the notoriety of Honoré De Balzac’s famous writing coat. Legend has it that the author wore the monkish cowl routinely when he wrote. Auguste Rodin’s posthumous sculpture of the author had him cover the mould with a cloth soaked in wet plaster, capturing the house coat just so. The coat became so synonymous with Balzac that when Oscar Wilde went through his Parisian bohème phase, he wore a white dressing gown during the day while he worked, fashioned after his hero’s garb. The narrative of Balzac’s coat speaks of the transcendental power of a garment as an object of personal value, but also in our presentation to others.

Taking cue from Balzac’s symbolic coat, this series asks subjects from different contexts and cultural backgrounds to select an article of clothing that is meaningful or significant in their life. The dialogues that follow reveal the story of a wearer, but more broadly, the universal connection between dress and everyday life.

In the first instalment Hamza Kaddur, a Berber jewellery trader in Morocco, nominates his turban as the garment subject. Embedded in the story of Hamza’s turban is a notion of self image and pride that sets him apart from others, but is integral to his sense of belonging in his local culture. It connects him with his own personal history – his ancestors also wore turbans – and the people he meets on his travels abroad.

For Hamza, the act of tying the turban is a process that holds performative power, linking him with others when he learns new methods from others. The turban also connects Hamza to his land, and he chooses the naturally dyed brick-red colour as it goes with the gold of Morocco’s desert sand.

***

My three grandfathers before me wore turbans and so I wear one now. It is a symbol of the past, and has been passed down from grandfather, to grandfather, to me. I’ve worn one since age twelve, and I am now sixty-six. What I like about it is that anyone can wear one and tie it for themselves in their own way. But the turban is not part of my religion. I believe religion is more than clothes.

Originally, I am from the South of Morocco, a place called Tafilalt. It is a larger city with a market three times a week. In the markets we sell many things, and a lot of the people wear turbans, and they wear them in many different ways. I live in Essaouira now, and I have lived here for twenty-two years, but I always travel. I have been traveling since I was young, I am never staying for too long in the house. I leave to travel every few months and bring back my jewellery to sell at the market.

I wear the turban because I live in a culture where it is a common part of our dress, it is a way of belonging to the people of the kasbah. Our traditional clothes are called djellaba, but I don’t feel relaxed in these clothes, so I wear western clothes. My turban shows that I am from Morocco and reflects my history. In our culture, the turban symbolises man and his energy, but there are different symbols for women.

If I didn’t wear the turban I would feel like I had left something behind. It is a part of myself. I put it on each morning before I leave: I get up, take my shower, and then I tie my turban.

At home I keep a collection of different turbans; I have a blue one, a black one, a yellow, among others. I prefer the red one I am wearing now, the colour is symbolic because it goes with Morocco’s desert surroundings. The colour of the desert sand here is different from that of the south, and it’s not like sand you see in the beach. The colour of the sand of Morocco is like gold, and so the red of my turban goes with gold colour.

Our turbans are made from the fabric brought from places like India, Sudan, Mali, Dakar, and all over Africa. We add the colour by dying the raw material. For red we use the pomegranate fruit or henna, and for blue we use the indigo flower. This is a flower that grows in the desert sand and can only be cut between dusk and early morning during one month of the year. When you see the colour of the sun coming into the sky then the flower is ready to be cut. The indigo from the flower creates such a strong blue colour that with a single gram you can make one hundred kilos of linen. With the indigo we dye many things: clothes, paintings, even houses. We used to build our houses out of wood and make the colour correspond with our natural surroundings. But now, since the climate is very hot, we now live within the walls of the kasbah.

I have my own system of tying the turban that I use each day. My father was first to show me how to tie the turban, but in my travels people have shared their different methods with me. Different countries wear the turban in different ways, but at the moment, I wear it in a style that is similar to Afghanistan and Pakistan.

In the turban I am wearing right now, there are twelve metres of fabric. Sometimes you can have more than this, but when the weather is very hot, we have less. The turban also protects me from the wind and sand of the desert, it keeps my head clean, not to mention beautiful! During the hot season it prevents the sun from shining directly onto my head and into my mind, it shines on the turban instead.

I have a son who now lives and studies in Canada, he sometimes wears his turban with his friends, but he is free to do as he pleases. So long as he smiles and has a clean heart, he can do what he wants. God is not something we can see in the way we dress, we can see it on the inside.

Shana Chandra is a New Zealand-based writer on fashion and culture.

Mark Hall-Patch is an illustrator and painter from Canada.