Friday

My clothes-hanging apparatus has just fallen down. This is a common theme in my life which I have learnt to laugh at ever since being almost killed in 2002, when I was literally pinned down by dresses, unable to move, in the bedroom of the second-floor apartment I lived in with my boyfriend, Jack. Luckily, he was home at the time to rescue me, weeping and terrified by the downright force of my own wardrobe.

The perpetrator that time was just an old French dressing screen, three-panelled with hinges, gutted of its actual screens so that only the wooden frame remained. I dragged it home from the famed 'Junkie Eviction Sale' on Gladstone Road the year before. The Junkie Eviction Sale - so named because someone (was it Hannah? Beck? Blake? Or Jack?) came breathlessly running in one day to announce to everyone that 'the woman who owns that weird op-shop on Gladstone Rd is being evicted because she hasn't paid her rent because she's a junkie, and so everything in the shop is 50 cents!'

Much of my wardrobe up until the time I left for New York last year dated from this period. The amount of pure second-hand gold we all got at that sale, watched over by beady-eyed detective-looking dudes who couldn't give a shit about mink and gloves and beads and records and only cared about the value of the real estate, has never been matched for sheer volume by any op-shop outing before or since.

Literally everything was for sale in this place, shop fittings and all. I wandered downstairs to investigate what was beneath the shop, and it was there I found the French screen along with an old wooden easel. I dragged them both all the way back to Ruth St where they got dumped beneath my house and sat there purposelessly for half a year. When I moved to Brighton Rd the following year, I announced to Jack, "This will be perfect to hang my clothes on!" And sweet as he was, Jack helped me assemble and hang, and acted as if my idea was as brilliant as I proclaimed it to be, even though he is an engineer by profession and would have known from the beginning that the structure was unsafe for the volume I intended to burden it with.

I piled it so full of dresses and coats and scarves and hats that I had a special technique whenever I needed to pluck an item off - the whole thing needed to be handled correctly and gingerly, and then re-balanced in a very specific way so everything would stay standing. If someone wanted to borrow a dress, I allowed it, but only if I was present to supervise the delicate operation of browsing. The problem escalated because Jack and I loved to op-shop, and every Saturday we'd buy the newspaper, get out our yellow highlighters, and mark all the garage sales in Brisbane. We'd be out for three hours, and when we returned I piled more and more onto the French screen. It was bursting. The impression you got when you entered the bedroom was that it was a big walk-in wardrobe, with a bed in it.

I always seem to be present in the room when my life falls apart, and it occurs to me that this is because I need to be taught a lesson first-hand. When the French screen finally fell, ravaged by the weight it was carrying, I saw it all happening before my very eyes. The gentle swaying and unbalancing, and then the topple. I ran forward to catch it, confident I could save everything, but I had underestimated how heavy it would be. Even with prior training in boxercise, which builds upper-body strength, I was overwhelmed, and crashed to the floor, choking on the many kilograms of fabric which still unfortunately seemed to retain that overpowering op-shop mothball scent. I remember seeing a whole bunch of those headlines - which are usually reserved for the deaths of anorexic models - flash into my head: Killed for fashion! Dying for style! I lay there in shock, the first of many subsequent lucky escapes to come.

Now, back to the present, where just an hour ago I walked into my room carrying a nice pot of tea. I closed the door behind me, some might say a little too forcefully but my hands were full so I couldn't manage to do it softly. Instead, I did an elegant little backwards kick with my foot, perfected over many years - but this time it proved to be a sinister death knell.

I saw it all happen. First, the sound of the door shutting; then suddenly, an almighty crash. The nail that was holding the piece of washing line which was acting as one arm of my clothes-hanging structure, was ripped straight out of the wall. The legitimate clothes-hanging part, which is one of those stand-alone, knock-up things you can buy for about $30 at K-Mart, was attached to the clothes-line part by my pathetic anti-Girl Guide rope-tying ability, so it co-dependently crashed down with it. If I wasn't better-trained to deal with this kind of emergency, I would have been quite hysterical, but I just calmly piled all the dresses on my bed, the precious new New York ones on top; the coats and scarves (I don't even know why I am harbouring coats and scarves in the current climate I'm living in) next to them. The clothes remain piled up on my bed, and I will probably sleep in there with them tonight, which is romantic and quite fitting really. I have somehow acquired far too many clothes again. But the fact is that something deep inside me needs to be surrounded by dresses and fabrics, and I can't really help it.

The other thing I thought of when this happened (besides the realisation that I still haven't learnt my lesson from all this) was a thing I read last week in the Good Weekend magazine that columnist Maggie Alderson said. She revealed that she is frightened of the ephemeral reality of vintage clothes - that one day, they're going to run out, and soon. If you're interested in what I think (and of course you are) this is utter rubbish. Not only is the innate nature of vintage clothing that it can never run out (vintage clothing being by definition the clothing that is second-hand, of a previous fashion and thereby limitless as clothes just continue to be made) but attitudes like this turn the whole scenario into a snobby and ridiculous undertaking, where vintage means a $200 floral fifties dress which is the example that Alderson mentions. I love buying proper quality pieces and a dress I bought in Berlin is certainly of this ilk, but the majority of this kind of talk comes from the arrogance of under-rating the imagination and flair and fun of actual op-shopping as hunting, where you can take second-hand clothes of any era and make them amazing if you are clever. Poverty enhances fashion style wonderfully in this sense, and frankly, if we hadn't been so poor over the years most of us wouldn't be anywhere near as stylish as we appear to be to the average observer. It makes me think of a book title I've always adored - Muriel Spark's The Girls of Slender Means. I love it, and with that, I'll finish.

POST SCRIPT: I had wanted to include a photo of the disaster zone earlier, but I had to quickly run out. Here it is now though, so you can see my favourite thing - the neatly positioned 7" record sleeve of Kate Bush's 1985 single Running Up That Hill in the top lefthand corner, where Kate appears to be aiming directly at my ill-fated wardrobe structure.


Here it is in close up. I prefer to imagine today's disaster was all her doing, like in Ancient Greece where they understood tragedies as being due to the gods' anger, which meant no-one had to face up to bad planning. I guess she was just jealous of my large selection of leotards.