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A Lot Like Eve

Page 20

by Joanna Jepson


  But instead of wagging her chocolatey spoon at me and making it clear that it would be thoroughly shameful if a vicar let down her parishioners by breaking her Lenten fast she just said, “Damn. That’s it. That’s what I’ve got to do now.” She was annoyed with me for having even mentioned the idea because, she went on, “I trawl the shops, every week, for that one thing; that one item of clothing or accessory that will complete my wardrobe … And complete me. So that’s it: I have to give up shopping for Lent now too.”

  So for the next six weeks we did our best to stay away from shops and temptation and allow our restless cravings for a bit of retail therapy to be felt. It was like being back at the convent in those frequent moments where I just wanted to kidnap a guest from the retreat house and guzzle all their nice, non-convent-made food and talk all night as a distraction from the circular whir of my unholy daydreams.

  Because that’s what Lent is for: to give us space to recognize and really feel, very uncomfortably, just how addicted we are to things that will never actually complete and satisfy us. Human beings are experts at taking any of life’s random good things and turning them into a blind compulsion. But on a cultural level there’s definitely some ironing out to be done in our relationship with shopping, consumerism, fashion and beauty products. These are our easy idols.

  When I arrived at the London College of Fashion I discovered that the students there were not the godless, hedonistic, absurd and vacuous creatures people had predicted they would be. That was the noticeable thing: that below the College on Oxford Street roamed girls who all conformed to some kind of uniform – skinny jeans, deconstructed T-shirt, ballet pumps, iron-straight hair – all searching for that great new item of clothing that might make them cooler or more acceptable. Yet the corridors and studios of the College above were filled with people who had no interest in looking exactly the same as anyone else. If I felt at all grim having to wear a clerical collar around the College, that soon gave way to relief that it would just be taken for a very unique fashion accessory. These people were all about pushing stylistic boundaries in order to preserve and expand their artistic integrity; being unique and experimental were just part of that process. Far from being the silly followers of fashion that they are assumed to be, I discovered serious artists in pursuit of beauty, truth and ethical integrity. People who understood the language and nuances of fashion, and how closely that impacts on, and can shape, a person’s presence in the world. People who had something very important to offer a hungry audience of young slaves to fashion.

  I also saw how your average designer doesn’t always get to wrestle fashion’s influence away from the strategies of big brands that want to keep us buying fast fashion with no moment to pause and be satisfied. Nor would my students single-handedly avert the debate about size zero models. Because, after all, the advertiser’s life’s work is to pull us out of ourselves, away from the present moment, with illusions of how perfect life could be if we just had this pair of jeans, or thighs thin enough to put inside the designer jeans. And somewhere in all of this we need to wake up and take responsibility for our part in the game.

  Feeling good when we look good in a pair of jeans is great; but it’s not a solution that calms the frantic noise telling us we could look like That if we had all This. It never really quietens the drive that compels us to buy more; it doesn’t make us content. Because even when we taste the promise of that perfect future – all styled and airbrushed for our consumption – we can’t hold it and maintain it. It’s an illusion, and if we were able to hold ourselves in the perfection of that moment then economically things would begin to seriously dwindle.

  And there’s the nub, because, in order to make a profit, industries have to get a hook into our deepest weakness, fear or need. For women, that deepest vulnerability lies in exploiting how we feel about ourselves, in our bodies, our sexuality and our appearance; because this is where we find and express our sense of self in the world. For men it is generally different: men derive their sense of self in the world from the things they gather around themselves – economic power, achievement, success, property – including perhaps their ability to obtain the trophy wife. These external things are the currencies and powers by which men index their place in the world.

  But when you’re a woman your sense of presence lies in your sexuality and physicality, in the way you carry yourself, the clothes you wear, the looks you give or don’t give; in your coy mysteriousness or warm effervescence. Which is why I never really could shake off Rachel Humsley’s words that I would be pretty if my teeth were straight. Or why, that night at Bible camp, I’d rather have been pretty than able to speak in tongues. And why, even after three operations to reconstruct my face, I felt crushed when Rich said he preferred long hair on girls.

  Because if it’s true, as someone once said to me, that “men desire women and women desire men’s desire”, then that’s a pretty pathological system. After all, it’s not terribly Girl-Power, which may be why Girl-Power has become such a phenomenon: a way of saying, with a good dose of sass, “We’re going to choose not to surrender our need for affirmation to unloving gazes. We’re going to grow into the fullness of who we are: celebrating that, instead of constantly comparing ourselves with things we will never be.” It’s realizing that there’s a different place for us to live, and in that place there are no comparisons, because it’s your place, your holy, unique space; full of gifts and possibility.

  It’s not a religious space; it’s a holy, human space.

  Our unique, truthful and irrevocable place in the world.

  It is ours.

  Nobody else can be us.

  People can criticize, reject, mock, attack, dismiss or ignore us but they can never rob us of who we are. Nobody can take from us our way of being. Even when that has been buried a long way under the scars of abuse and trauma. At our core we are each in our own way beautiful, mysterious, gifted; and we are part of something greater than ourselves. That’s a truth we wouldn’t find so difficult to live if we weren’t constantly being set up to compare ourselves with celebrities and each other. That’s where shame and pride unsettle us; by making us feel that we have to contrive and earn and prove our worth against another. But we can’t be compared with anyone else, because our true value and beauty go beyond the window-dressing by which comparisons are made. And so it is our seeing that needs to be healed and transformed.

  But even a preacher-woman wanting to share a message like this might find sermons a dull way to spread the word; it’s not the kind of language we speak in the fashion world. Instead I partnered with a photographer, Larry Dunstan, and the charity Changing Faces, and together we put on an exhibition called “Notions of Beauty”. Walls of gallery space were given over to Larry’s portraits of people revealing, in their various ways, something of their own incomparable beauty, whether a display of strength or of vulnerability. Alastair was invited to sit for a portrait and the studio lights were not fully set up before he had stripped down to his vest and jeans and begun to impersonate some of his screen heroes: David Beckham, Austin Powers and Joey Tribbiani. Leaning against the wall he nonchalantly slipped his hands into his pockets and coolly gazed at the camera with a confidence that could make you weep. He filled the space with his presence. It may have been inspired by Beckham but a roll full of photos later and Alastair owned his particular beauty and integrity. And so did the other sitters: each photograph, detailing the angles, scars, anomalies, twists and expressions of its subject, conveyed people who had discovered how to inhabit their own space in the world. And it was glorious.

  But these were rare people who had already met themselves in all their naked reality. What about those who hadn’t, those who didn’t see that they had a part to play in the flourishing and beauty and healing of the world? Like teenagers who were left alone on Christmas Day with a frozen pizza: twelve- and thirteen-year-olds who were in danger of sexual exploitation; young people who were being passed through the social se
rvices system until they had had enough and tried to commit suicide. Children who already believed they were failures because that’s the word that hung over their school community.

  It was from a school where staff were trying to deal with such things that I was called by the chaplain and asked if the London College of Fashion could do something to help these teenagers see themselves differently. “I want these kids to know that there is hope for them and that they are known and loved by God, even if their families and local government haven’t got time for them and the local newspaper keeps putting them down. Will you come and work with us?”

  I was there. I took a group of designers who were equally curious and passionate about the power of art and creativity to speak to these children, and we went to visit the school and receive our brief. My students were used to looking at the world and taking their inspiration from anything. Anything. Which is why they were less floored than I was when the chaplain gave us Chapter 1 of Matthew’s Gospel as our starting point. “I want you to bring this to life through fashion.”

  We stood in a circle looking at the open Bible he’d handed us. It was a family tree but not as artistically organized – more a dense paragraph of ancient, unpronounceable names tracing the lineage of Jesus Christ. “Do we get anything else?” I asked hopefully.

  “No, that’s your lot. I look forward to seeing what you turn it into.” He smiled at us.

  One of the designers held the page close up to her face, her eyebrows raised.

  “It certainly needs to be turned into something.”

  “Look at these names … who are these people?” another student asked.

  It was my turn to take a closer look, but even a childhood of Sunday school classes hadn’t familiarized me with the likes of Aminadab, Jotham, Salathiel and Achim. “Why don’t we start there then? Let’s take this away and begin finding out about these people and get to know their stories.”

  For the next few weeks my group of volunteers took a few names and rose to the challenge of finding the stuff of catwalk legends buried within this ancient family tree. When we met again there was a mixture of results. One girl didn’t turn up at all: the potential for Jehoshaphat, Joram and Uzziah to inspire anything worthy of a twenty-first-century fashionista’s talents had quite understandably passed her by. Another student was perplexed by the lack of mothers being given space on the official records and all the credit for this Messiah being taken by the men. She insisted we fill in the blanks and found some more of the women’s stories. We all liked that idea. “How about Eve?” I prompted. “Why not use artistic licence and include Eve? Think of all the connections with fast fashion and the environment that we could make.”

  Jennifer, a second-year surface textiles student, had already honed in on Rahab. “I love that, out of a list of Jesus’ male ancestors, two of the women it does include are a prostitute and a victim of injustice who uses prostitution to secure her fair treatment.”

  Esther, a postgraduate womenswear student, clutched her notebook of reflections on Joseph and Jacob and mused, “Yeah, some of these stories are incredible.”

  Apparently so. We had prostitution, environmental meltdown, injustice, failure, deceit, sibling-rivalry, exploitation and hope. There seemed to be enough overlap with the lives of pupils in our school to make it come to life.

  We also had the narrative of a family tree. Not just the biological family tree that ended with Jesus, but the one that the Gospels nudge us towards; the one that lets people know that there’s a spiritual family tree and they’re invited to find their place on it. Which is how our collection of outfits was inspired and the Empty Hanger project was born. We returned to the school later that year and invited the pupils to try on the designs we’d created: garments which told the stories of Eve, Jacob, Joseph, Rahab and Jesus and the struggles they’d had to overcome and the part they played in transforming their communities, their people and their world.

  At the end of the collection of clothes hung an empty coat-hanger, which we gave the children as an invitation. It was a symbol that we put there to speak of belonging; an invitation to them to begin telling the story of who they are, where they have come from, the battles they have to face, the triumphs they have achieved and the person they are becoming. As pupils worked to design their own outfit, they began to overhear their story and re-tell it, not in the words of disparaging news headlines or the stamp of Ofsted Special Measures but through the encouragement of designers, teachers and a chaplain who enabled them not to dismiss or overlook any of their struggles and failures, because all of their life matters and out of their fiercest battles might come their greatest contribution.

  At the end of the workshop a teacher showed me the girl who, having heard the story of Joseph, sewed together the beginnings of her own dream coat imprinted with the words I dream of being a doctor so I can learn to heal.

  The teacher told us how several members of her family abroad had been caught up in conflict, suffered grave danger and been seriously injured and, as he held her designs up to look at them closely, it was clear that he was moved by her response. “No one is expecting a child from this school to study medicine.”

  Notes

  1 Marina Hyde, Guardian, Comment is Free, Tuesday 18 July 2006.

  2 Terence Blacker, Independent, Tuesday 18 July 2006.

  32

  Nuns’ Tea Party

  There are lots of stories we can tell about ourselves, and our story can be told in different ways. The space for reflecting on identity and story and creativity that the Empty Hanger project brought about was something the students from the London College of Fashion were passionate about making possible for disaffected young people. They too began to take inspiration from the stories themselves, incorporating symbols into their coursework and their final collection designs. But I was to have my own opportunity to reflect when the following summer we were asked to run the Empty Hanger project as a summer school for Muslim, Jewish and Christian teenage girls.

  I had grown up being told stories about people of other religions. I had absorbed the story preached from the Big Top stage at camp about Muslims rising up to overthrow Christianity, and it had become a part of the story of fear and defensiveness on which my childish imagination had fed. It wasn’t the story that I wanted to shape me, and I had done all I could over the years to let go of these stories I’d been told about Muslims. I made a lot of effort and felt pretty self-righteous about the improvements I’d made. That is until I saw a woman in a burka which, since I was living in London, was fairly frequently, and then it got me. It would flare up and the flash of infuriation and offence would leave me feeling totally out of sorts for a while. “Why don’t you get out from under there?” I railed at them in my mind.

  I couldn’t tell if I was more peeved at the men who made them wear it, at the women themselves for not refusing or at all those preacher-men who had ever made me feel overruled and suffocated with talk about covering women with male headship. But now I had 30 girls heading my way, a good number of whom were going to be fully veiled: hijabs, niqabs and all. I had seriously to deal with my prejudice, otherwise I was going to feel out of sorts for the whole three days. Only it’s hard to go into battle with one’s monkey mind and win. And, having learnt in the convent that the more I fight it the louder it shouts, I thought about a more subversive approach. Like, what would I choose to feel towards them instead of vexed suspicion? How would I like my relationship with these women to look?

  When the word “sisterhood” popped up I immediately imagined going to visit Ty Mawr and taking some burka-clad Muslim women with me. That floored me for starters; as I pictured the scenario, I realized I would be the only one not in a veil of some sort. Enough said. But I couldn’t help enjoying the picture of the convent, all cosy against the drizzle of Welsh rain, the sisters sitting around in the library handing out tea and slices of cake to their veiled visitors, chatting away with them. More than anything I knew their response would be w
hat it had been when I’d met them all those years before: a smile, and open welcoming arms, beckoning the newcomer to join them. So I started with that – well, the smile at least. Every time I met the eye of a Muslim woman on the bus or tube or on Oxford Street I decided I would smile at her.

  It’s a hard thing to do when you feel stupid, and I did feel stupid. It was kind of ridiculous and could have been badly misinterpreted, especially since I felt I really had to force it to begin with and probably looked like I was giving a weird wince. But the image of the nuns’ tea party stuck with me – a fearless sisterhood of women – and it was a picture I could believe in. I wanted to overcome the distance between sisters on different sides of the religious fence.

  When the girls arrived at the London College of Fashion on the first day, I was told by one of the interfaith facilitators that none of the girls from Islamic schools studied art or music; these subjects had been removed from their timetable.

  *FLASH*

  ‘^$%! *£% @$*&’

  Breathe…

  “OK, so let’s see how they get on with some sketching.” I handed out slim sticks of bamboo and small pots of coloured ink and set a clothed mannequin in front of them to copy.

  They were a marvel.

  How did these girls learn to draw and paint like this if they weren’t taught? Which in my head sounded more like an indignant yelp of “It’s criminal for anyone to rob these girls of their chance to be creative.” But then I looked again at Aliya, the robed young teacher in front of me, and thought how much she had done to get these girls here in the first place. She and others had been working for months, smoothing the way with school authorities and parents and the girls themselves, to make this possible. The result was magnificent, and I wanted to meet the girls in their enthusiasm and do everything possible to enable them to make the most of the opportunity.

  But I was in for a rough ride. We were taking a spacious, reflective look at our stories and our identity. For these girls their art, their poetry and their fashion designs all came back to modesty. They had been well schooled and I was intrigued by the frequent partnership of the words “beauty” and “modesty” in the annotations around their designs. Their veiling was carried out with utter self-respect. If a man came to visit the studio, gentle nudges were given, faces would turn aside and veils would be quietly let down to fully cover their faces. Then there was the tall girl who even wore gloves to cover her hands, whose elegance and self-possession were evident, even under layers of flowing black fabric.

 

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