IN HER CLOTHES | PART TWO

THE DRESS THAT FOUND A NEW STORY

Editor’s Note:
This essay is part of our The Circularity of Time (and Fashion) series - intimate reflections at the intersection of identity, memory, and fashion. In this second piece, Queen invites us into a fleeting moment that quietly reshaped her relationship with memory, meaning, and what it truly means to let go. A quiet hallway encounter becomes something much larger - a reflection on joy, generosity, and the life that begins when we release what no longer fits.

The day I finally learned to let go…it was a hot December day, thick with the noise of family, where nothing is quite in order and everything feels a little too loud. We had travelled to visit distant (but not unfamiliar, of course) relatives, and the house was full of children slipping through rooms and aunties laughing in corners while pots boiled over in the kitchen, as well as men half-watching football on the dusty TV in the living room as they chatted about politics.

It was a pretty typical day, and I’d been standing in the hallway between the kitchen and the living room, eavesdropping, when this little girl walked past me. She was barely seven, and she’d been grinning like the world had just been handed to her while twirling here and there, practically screaming at everyone who cared to look, “Am I not the prettiest princess you’ve ever seen?”

Normally, I’d have responded in the almost-placatory way we usually handled such displays, except that the dress she twirled in had been mine. My dress. My birthday dress from a year I could never forget, baby pink and slightly formal, with detachable sleeves that I used to think made me look elegant. And there it was on this girl, transformed entirely.

She was all teeth and smiles, hands constantly brushing along the hem like she couldn’t believe it was hers. I was taken aback by that for a moment, and then I realised it was mostly because it reminded me of how I had felt in that dress when I first got it and when I wore it for my birthday. So, more than being taken aback, I guess you could say that I was…I was simply stunned.

That’s perhaps where it began. By “it”, I am referring to the unravelling of my obsession with holding on to clothes that didn’t fit anymore. Because for all the five stages of grief I imagined I’d gone through in a split second of seeing the dress on her, I didn’t cry. More accurately, I couldn’t cry. I couldn’t feel angry or even jealous. I was merely disoriented in the way one would be if they encountered a ghost of themselves walking freely outside of them.

I mean, it was pretty similar, wasn’t it? There was my dress, looking as though it had been waiting all along to arrive on that day, in that room, on that body, the wearer carrying the same joy that had filled me back when it was still mine.

I watched as that joy belonged entirely to her, and for the first time in my life, I didn’t mind that I had lost something. In fact, I didn’t want it back, and it took that abrupt separation from the dress as mine for me to realise that I hadn’t even noticed when it was taken from me. This dress I had once fought so fiercely to keep during our yearly inventory, had been taken from me, and I was completely unaware.

What a funny thing, isn’t it? An entire year of emotional battles over something I didn’t even register had left my possession. What did that say about the value I thought I was defending?

With her, the dress was simply alive again. With me, it would have remained folded away in the darkness of my drawers. My mother had tried to say this to me many times, but it wasn’t until then that I properly understood why my mother kept asking, “Are you sure you’ll wear it again?” Because she knew the truth I hadn’t been willing to admit to: I was never going to.

I’d outgrown it as we do all things. And it had meant something once, yes, and maybe still did, but that meaning didn’t have to end with me. And all that meant that the story I’d created with it could be continued in a different way in someone else’s chapter.

I didn’t tell anyone what I felt that day. Didn’t say a word about it to my mother. I just stood in that hallway, watching my dress become someone else’s joy, and realised how wrong I’d been all along. How selfish, even if not cruel. Not because I didn’t want others to have nice things, but because I’d mistaken attachment for meaning, and possession for memory.

All my mother’s lessons finally made perfect sense because that moment taught me more than any lecture could have. I didn’t know the word “sustainability” then. Didn’t know about “circular fashion,” or “reuse economies,” or “ethical redistribution.” I didn’t need to. That hallway taught me enough. That memory of watching a cousin twirl with a kind of lightness I hadn’t felt in years. That was the lesson.

A lesson I understood in my bones. Understood that when we loosen our grip on possession, we make room for generosity. We allow our memories to expand rather than contract. We stop seeing ourselves as the final chapter in everything we touch and learn that, sometimes, the best thing you can do with something precious is to give it a second chance to be loved.

That day, I began to see clothes, and maybe people, too, not as things to own, but as stories to be carried. Passed on. Reworn. Retold.

And something about that made me feel not smaller, but lighter.

Circular Afterthought: The story of the girl in the hallway is one that’s really a small moment when you think about it, but for me, it sits inside a much bigger picture. My birthday dress would have been wasted in my drawers, but as my mother had passed it on, passed it down, I could see that it was living another life, and that gave me a chance, even unknowingly, to step outside of a system that thrives on waste. We’ve been talking about letting go of what we don’t use, but just as important is letting it become something new for someone else.

Written by Queen for I Will Circle Back.
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