“Let us go singing as far as we go; the road will be less tedious.” --- Virgil
By
Published: Mar 18, 2010
Category: Memoir
Caring a lot about clothes is not my thing. Because I’m male, I’m not penalized for this --- unless you think it’s a tragedy to be ignored by the committee that votes on the best-dressed list. I don’t. Day after day, I wear what is essentially a uniform, the same one I’ve worn since I was 15. Makes life very simple. And dramatically frees up my time.
Women have no such luck. Clothes are not just functional, they’re plumage, the bits of color and fabric that catch the eye of the male and win the admiration of other women. Clothes are also sports. “No man has ever given me as much pleasure,” a friend once said, “as the kick I get slapping down my credit card at Bloomingdale’s.”
In the fashion Olympics, Eleanor Morgan Montgomery Atuk was a Gold Medalist. She was born with more taste than money. Then she married a successful businessman, and her collecting began. She was beautiful to begin with --- one year, she was praised for “the best legs” in Atlanta --- and the clothes she bought enhanced her beauty, and on top of all of that was her personality, which was effervescent in the extreme.
Wire hangers? Never. Ellie had museum-quality closets. She took inventory often, adding to her collection the way an aesthete might buy art. Then her husband left her --- for a Playboy bunny, yet --- and wasn’t it lucky that she had Bill Blass and other designers to fill some of that gap.
Ellie’s daughter, Jeannette Montogomery Barron, is a noted photographer. When her mother started losing her memory --- “It was like watching Sandy Koufax lose his pitching arm,” Jeannette’s husband has recalled --- Jeannette discovered that she still had a firm grip on her closet. All they had to do was stand near a dress or a jacket, and the memories would flood in, and Ellie would tell a story --- a brilliant, stylish personal story, a story only she could tell.
Jeannette lived in Rome, her mother in Charlottesville, Virginia. After each visit to her mother, Jeannette would take a few pieces back to Italy, scout around for the right fabric to use as background, and immortalize a fraction of her mother’s collection. She did this again and again, and even when Ellie developed Alzheimer's, she could still identify each piece, where she’d worn it and what she did that day.
Now there is My Mother’s Clothes, “an album of memories.” It’s a smallish book, very much in the spirit of its subject --- tasteful pictures of clothes both classic and outlandish, and a scrapbook of family snapshots, linked by short, evocative paragraphs by the author. Think of it as a visit with a long-lost aunt, who has only an hour to show you her life. She deals the memories and images like playing cards, and almost every one is a winner.
The project began as a way of grieving for her mother, but Jeannette says it quickly became a joyful project. “I don’t think of it as a sad thing,” she says. “I see it as a celebration of her life.”
My own mother is now 93 and still formidable; as she looks back, she sees a laundry list of achievements. But there could have been more of them. And the peaks could have been higher. Why didn’t that happen? Because she was a child of the Depression; early on, she had to help support her family. And, back then, many doors were simply closed to women.
Maybe I’m projecting here, but I see Ellie as a woman much like my mother. Burdened by the codes of the South and the strictures of married life in corporate Atlanta, she looked around for a way to burn her prodigious energy and engage her artistic imagination --- and there was fashion, just waiting. “It’s easier to walk through doors than walls,” the Buddha said. Ellie did.
Clothes are ultimately ephemeral. Good books aren’t. Jeannette Montgomery Barron has engineered a small bit of alchemy --- her mother, dead and gone, lives on in these pages.
To visit the web site for "My Mother’s Clothes", click here.