Dickens Chic
In lieu of the Economic Crisis sweeping through our greedy corporate-run nations, it has been my fancy to imagine myself useful to those struggling to acquire less and less and almost nothing at all. Hip Hooray! Let the reign of meek-dom come to pass! Let greedy-excess, plastic-excess, hyperreal-excess be a nightmare of memory! Let us empathize with our neighbor and share what we’ve got!
Actually, it’s a bit of a wicked fantasy for me, conjuring up scenarios for some shopping-bag ridden woman; I watch her in my mind’s eye slip quick into despair. Expensive lotion, expensive shampoo and mascara tubes are desperately watched as their level, once fullness, finishes. Fashion from this season is only taken note of as it passes in, then out; a tear falls down her cheek with self-pity, “I’m so last spring.” It is pain to go out the door. She fades.
There is no need! It is just then, when poverty becomes interesting. Hence, I coin the name: Dickens Chic. And though I am no fount of fashion talk, I have managed to survive in the most fashion fecund and finicky country, without. Besides the perpetual lust I feel for a certain pair of boots, besides that my mom replenishes me with some fresh shirts six months by six months, besides the fact that my jeans have gotten as far as they can possibly go alone, Dickens Chic has worked OK.
Dickens Chic is created out of a hole of desperation, for if the holes and frayed edges and faded colors and floppy soles can not be avoided, they must be embraced. It is a desperate embrace, like a rope tossed—that’s all you’ve got. One must not be stubborn and taunt yourself with what you can’t have—Oh! Please! Just one pair of boots!—but take what you can get. Anything free must be snatched up, wherever, under whatever circumstances.
In some countries there are actual institutions that make this pathway of exchange more simple, for a tiny price. There are actual shops that help people with less money, or who find it a slight absurdity to spend lots on clothes, to keep them adequately dressed. There are some places where the middle-man of good will has been done away with and for a small humiliation of picking things off the street, one can be dressed for free.
In other countries, like this one, a fashionably “sensible” country, they find the passing on of clothing, whether by one means or any other, akin to moral sin. That other people would actually use the layers upon layers of material sitting dormant in closets has never been thought. Strangely enough, they throw it in the trash!
Luck has everything to do with it. What a treasure mine and I was simply passing by!
For example: the other day I pined for a trendy hat as I stood in the mirror contemplating how to hide my hair. I don’t remember what I did about my brown strands but when I was walking away from the ponte medioevale with my busta full of verdure, I saw just the hat I had pined for, stately ensconced, flat on the ground. With a swift, deft motion I added it to my carrots and then whistled the rest of the way. What luck! and just the hat I had asked for!
Dickens Chic depends on the vague notion of want, but it is also practiced in spite of it. It is the ability to imagine oneself further ahead, by some spiritual or mental trick, than one actually is. Dickens Chic rests in the gap of one’s mind, between the visual reality of what clothes represent and the actual reality of all they don’t. In some ways it plays the joke and in other ways its what the joke is played upon.
If you have already donated to a good cause, maybe you would like to donate to a not so good one—like boots! They’re on sale!
· · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · ·