![]() So every morning, I ask myself, ‘How is my soul today?’” How you look is a manifestation of your soul. I see clothing as an expression of personality. But I’m almost a feminist before I’m a human. “Look, this whole thing is a feminist piece,” she said. And it’s in that paradox that she dives: clothing is both a powerful tool of oppression and a vital means of self-expression. Her stories about fur coats, miniskirts and hippie boots are not about fashion as much as they are about her boisterous spirit set loose in a world of conformity and rigidity. She insists that, for women, clothing is a potent and complicated symbol of how they view themselves and their place in the world. Two weeks later, the smell was gone and I threw it in the garbage.” ![]() “I put it under my pillow and I slept with it by my face, breathing in my mother, a mix of cheap sherry, garlic, cigarettes and Chanel No. And despite the fact that my mother was one of the most progressive people I knew, she said to me, ‘You are no longer my daughter.’”Īfter Peggy died, Patrice went to her mother’s house to look for the pale blue sweater. I was having a relationship with another woman and I told her. “My mother disowned me,” said Vecchione, 59. Peggy was an alcoholic with mental health issues who ferociously loved her daughter and just as ferociously psychologically inflicted all kinds of psychological pain on her. Vecchione’s relationship with her mother Peggy was stormy - atmospheric-river, mudslides-and-flash-flooding stormy. Take for instance, one pale blue sweater that once belonged to her mother. And she is using clothing as a vehicle to explore the contours of her life in a new one-woman theater piece called “Words Dressed & Undressed.” Like many women, the local writer, poet and teacher has a super-charged relationship with clothes. She keeps things left behind by close friends and family members who have passed on, occasionally wearing them, always aware of the ghosts she’s conjuring and of the power clothes have in her psyche. Patrice Vecchione thinks about the clothes of the dead in ways that most of us don’t. The clothes of the dead have to go somewhere, maybe the landfill, maybe to Goodwill, maybe to the closets of loved ones. You never read about it in Vogue or hear it mentioned on “Project Runway,” but that old bromide about death - “You can’t take it with you” - also applies to clothing.
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