The dresses are alive…

It’s all too much, and that’s where the loveliness – the couture moment – begins. The clothes are extravagant and unreal, but they don’t seem camp. They don’t seem artificial or out of this world, just symbolic of a common human hope that the world could be something other than it is – younger and more musical and less exhausting and better lit. It proposes that the little moments of seduction on which, when we look back, so much of our life depends could unfold as formally as they deserve to, and all dressed up – Adam Gopnik

The day I had my first period and became a woman, so to speak, I was 13, coming home from the Pasir Ris chalets with the clan. I was wearing my favourite white cotton blouse with epaulettes (made in Japan; found in the $10 bargain bin in Isetan by Ma; fits me now), red berms (…don’t fit me now, no). For my first date I travelled to Melbourne; then I tried to look like I couldn’t be bothered in crazy hair, crumpled slacks, off-one-shoulder top that was sliding this way and that crazily. The day I was interviewed for my first job I was wearing Ma’s close-fitting black sheath. Awkwardly, under an ugly beige jacket - I used not to know better.

We all have them, the vital, voluptuous moments – the little emotional events that become our history. And although I have not always been fashion-conscious (in my benighted Before-L years I didn’t know Miu Miu was by Prada, Miuccia Prada, and associated the label with kittens) most of my memories of those moments have always been tinted, textured by what I was wearing. Sometimes it was the moment that was so singular, my body memorised it down to how my dress was hugging me. Sometimes I was so in love with the dress, my mind hugged all my self-romanticised moments in it.

Some garments, as we know, have soundtracks. Maybe it is the flounce of the fabric, the swish of the skirt, the ping, ping, ping of light ricocheting off that glistening goldish dress. Maybe it is the murmur of the name that came to us when we zipped up that skin-tight dress for the first time in the fitting room, the name that came with a million dollar question: Will he love me in this? It may even be an actual orchestral soundtrack.

There is a navy and white slightly stiff boat-necked sheath that was my 2046 dress. After seeing the achingly beautiful set-in-1966 show twice in two days I wore the 60sish sheath to work and all I could hear in my head, particularly while negotiating a narrow aisle between cubicles crammed with computers and phones, was the swaying soundtrack. I was at work but not. My steps were not mine but Faye Wong’s. And then the music died one day, when after an angry call from a boyfriend I distractedly dressed for work in the sheath. Little did I know that there would be increasingly livid calls and finally a nail-in-the-coffin voice message. By noon I could not be at work any more but couldn’t quite be at home. My clearest memory that day was asking a cabbie to stop some distance from my block. Bending stiffly in the stiff dress I squatted uneasily and pressed the phone to the ear to hear the break-up message. I played it 10 times, 20 times. Then deleted it, straightened up, smoothed down the sheath and tried to walk free. It has been two years and I am okay. But the dress hasn’t got its music back. Last week he wrote asking to be let into my life again. I refuse to reply; I refuse to even remember what I was wearing while reading that email.