IN HER CLOTHES | PART FOUR

TIME TRAVELS IN FABRIC

Editor’s Note:
This essay is part of The Circularity of Time (and Fashion) series – intimate reflections at the intersection of identity, memory, and fashion. In this fourth and final piece, Queen steps into a dress from her mother’s past — and into a version of time that feels almost sacred. What follows is a meditation on inheritance, storytelling, and the garments that carry us across lifetimes. A closing reflection on fashion not just as fabric, but as memory, movement, and the possibility of return.

I believe that clothes are strange things.

We call them fashion, we call them style, we call them “trends” as though they are tides, but what they really are, at their core, are vessels of time. Folded memory. Carried seasons.

Every piece I have ever worn has known a version of me, versions I have outgrown, left behind, mourned, and sometimes, rediscovered. Some of those clothes have been with me through these versions and are still with me. Others have moved on: donated, forgotten, reborn in a stranger’s story. But even when they’re gone, they leave something behind.

For example, one rainy Sunday, during another inventory, my mother had pulled down a box from the top of her wardrobe. Inside were things even she had forgotten she kept, and we sat cross-legged on the bedroom floor, lifting each item one by one. And at the bottom, almost like it had been waiting, was a dress.

Long, cotton, indigo with delicate embroidery around the collar and cuffs. “I wore this when I found out I was pregnant with you,” she said, almost casually, folding it across her lap. As though bewitched, I reached for it. The fabric was softer than I expected. It smelled faintly of camphor and something sweeter, like the trace of perfume worn years ago, even though I knew that couldn’t have been possible.

I held it up to myself, half-joking, and she nodded: “Try it on.” So I did. The fit wasn’t perfect at all, and to be honest, I didn’t like the dress and still do not like it, but when I had it on, I felt still. I had stepped into a version of the mother I’d never met.

Not the mother who folded my uniforms or warned me not to stay out too late, but the woman who danced on balconies, who chose bright lipstick, who was young and scared and brave all at once. I stood there for a long time. I didn’t say much. I simply let the fabric hold me, understanding that I was “wearing history”, even though it meant something different for me.

Since then, I’ve worn that dress on quiet days when I need grounding. It reminds me of her laughter and of beginnings.

Circular fashion, as I’ve come to see it, has never just been about sustainability. That word, while important, has always felt too clinical for what is, at heart, a storytelling form as much as it is a system. What does it really mean to wear something old? To pass something on? To give a dress to someone who doesn’t know your story, and yet somehow continues it?

It means time is still alive in the fabric.

Sometimes I remember that little girl in the hallway, the one who twirled in my pink birthday dress. I didn’t know her well. I don’t remember her name. But I remember the way the dress moved on her body. I remember the sound of her spinning, soft shoes, giddy breath, her voice calling for everyone to look. And when I saw her, I didn’t just see a child. I saw a moment of mine returning. A memory come back to bow and say goodbye.

I believe that’s also what my mother, on both occasions, saw in me as I stood in her dresses. She hadn’t been looking at me. Not really. She’d been looking past me, through me, into a memory she’d forgotten until I was the window through which she could see it.

That’s what clothes do, I think, when we let them live beyond us. They become storytellers. They say the things we are not always brave enough to voice. It’s time travel, a form of resurrection, through grief and joy, through weddings and wakes, through girlhood and adulthood and back again. They loop time into a texture.

Clothes are not just what we wear. They are what we remember in cloth. They are the second skins we shed and sometimes return to. They are the witnesses. And in wearing them again, differently, consciously, we become their continuation.

I think now of the arc I’ve travelled: from the girl who clung too tightly, to the young woman who let go too quickly, to the self I am now, someone learning that fashion isn’t about acquiring or discarding, but about returning. About reseeing. About honouring the slow beauty of staying.

Circular fashion is, perhaps, not just a system of recycling. It’s a way of understanding time. A philosophy of movement. It’s the realisation that time does not move in one direction, that it curls back sometimes, and clothes can be read if you know the language. In loose threads. In repaired zippers. In a pocket sewn shut with navy blue thread when the original had been red. Someone loved this. Someone mended this. Someone gave this up. Now it’s mine.

And now, when I wear something “new,” I ask myself:

Is it new because it has never existed before? Or is it new because I’ve never seen it this way? Because I am new?

Time doesn’t just pass. Sometimes, it returns. Wearing the same shirt. The same button you thought you’d lost. Sometimes, it finds you again in your mother’s dress. In a little girl’s twirl. In a seam that you no longer remember stitching. And if you’re paying attention, truly paying attention, you’ll see:

Nothing is ever truly lost.

Not the dress.

Not the girl.

Not even time.

(Read Part I, Part II, and Part III)

Written by Queen for I Will Circle Back.
If this piece resonated, hit the ❤️ or share it with someone navigating their own partings.