In a tall section of my wardrobe, there are seven handmade dresses.
My lockdown dresses: I made them, one after another, during those long months of Covid confinement, with the sewing machine out on the dining-room table, fabrics spread all around it, strands of thread and random off-cuts on the floor, and an audiobook playing over Bluetooth. While the activities of my perennially occupied house went on in the background, I would be completely immersed in the fabric and literature. One enriched the other; they made each other possible. The story needed the physical concentration of the sewing, and the sewing needed the cerebral distraction of the story. Both were engaged in the making of an actuality that did not exist beforehand.
One of the ‘dresses’ is actually a jumpsuit, in a jade-green material that I found at a Peckham African-fabric stall. The others are a range of colours and designs – there’s a flame-and-mustard number, a psychedelic green with deep pinafore pockets, a subtle, sleeveless cream one with a statement silver button at the ribcage, and a boxy boat-neck midi in a spiralling display of yellow and electric blue that always receives comments.
I have never been especially precious (outside of environmental concerns) about my clothes being duplicated – whether this dress or that shirt is also owned by other people – but there is something special about being able to say that you made whatever you are wearing yourself, about the fact that it is not readily acquirable on the high street, not manufactured, not even a product in the industrial sense. It is an expression of yourself, an act of the imagination adorning your moving, breathing body. It’s a primal way of dressing.
When I was a child, I wanted to be not a writer but a fashion designer. I used to draw pictures of specific outfits that came to me sometimes in dreams. I would feel an urgency to record these clothes on paper while they were in my head, in the same way that later, when I began to write, I needed to scribble down a phrase or a line before it had a chance to disappear.
I still have these ‘visitations of attire’ in dreams, but now, perhaps because I have become used to building characters through writing novels, the outfits that come to me are worn by someone in particular. For example, there is a woman in a rust-coloured shawl and red gloves with a rushed way of moving and a severe expression on her face. And another, wearing an almost-transparent blouse the colour of champagne and a forest-dark, high-waisted skirt down to the floor. Who could they be, these people? What are they trying to communicate to me? Such questions are the beginnings of stories.
The clothes I dream up are not available in their exact tone or aura in any shop, so I attempt to make them. This is a powerful reclaiming of a personal identifier and a method of expression that has been taken out of our hands by the fashion industry, which, in guessing what we like, also imposes and defines what we like – though designers such as Simone Rocha, Grace Wales Bonner and Molly Goddard come closest to approximating the look and feel of what it means to handmake a garment. But we can go further than what is on offer from the rails or catwalks.
Sales of sewing machines and garment-making patterns soared during the lockdown periods, giving rise to a modern ‘sew-it-yourself’ movement where more of us were returning to the needle and thread, to the lessons we may remember from our childhoods, our mothers, grandmothers, aunties and, usually on rarer occasions, fathers or uncles. It was my father who taught me how to darn socks – not a chore I still do, instead I buy more socks because life feels too short, but I have made a point of teaching my son to sew.
Another male sewist in my family was my Nigerian grandfather, who was a tailor. Sewing is in the blood: my mother taught her children how to sew, after herself having been taught by her own parents to weave and use a sewing machine by the age of 10.
I remember clearly from my childhood the black Singer sewing machine at which she would manoeuvre her fabrics, bent over in steady, profound concentration. Later, it became a tradition for us at family weddings that we, her daughters, would each make ourselves a dress in the same fabric, which meant poring through the pattern catalogues at John Lewis, buying the right-length zips, the clasps, interfacing, lining and thread, then, on the big day, exploding together in a spectacle of matching Ankara or African Dutch wax that has created the most joyous family photographs.
Making clothes can not only make you more self-connected, the quiet and calm absorption of it having a positive effect on your mental health, but when done in tandem with others it can also bring you closer to people, as any tensions or creases are smoothed and ironed out by the warmth of a shared creative objective.
While making those seven lockdown garments I went through many audiobooks: Imbolo Mbue’s 'Behold the Dreamers', 'Middlemarch', 'Silas Marner', 'Tess of the d’Urbervilles', Anne Tyler’s 'Saint Maybe', Colson Whitehead’s 'The Underground Railroad' and Octavia Butler’s 'Kindred' – the list goes on. With each dress I wear there is a memory of the landscape and texture of the story I was engrossed in during its making, such as Thomas Hardy’s rural landscapes or Butler’s tortured time travel.
Clothes are such an important part of storytelling, giving an insight not only into the social and historical background of the characters we are following, but also of their inner worlds and outward personalities. At the same time, the clothes themselves contain their own origin stories, as well as remnants of ourselves at the moments when they entered our lives.
After the seventh dress, I became tired of sewing. I had travelled so many lengths of seam and hem and dart stitching that I could barely look at another dress pattern. Their instructional, step-by-step language was suddenly hard to read. As the pained stillness of the world receded and the everyday noises of societal activity returned, there was less space, less of the patience needed for that deep concentration. The dresses themselves, though, have becomea very special and grounding aspect of my wardrobe. I reach for them when I want to wear something colourful or centring, or when I need to feel a visceral connection with my Nigerian identity, or simply when I want to experience the calm evoked by the memory of those quiet, intense hours spent in fabric and stories. Soon, I suspect, I will get the sewing machine out again, because I have begun to want to return to that place. I have two patterns left over, waiting to be made, and once I’m finished with those,
I’ll probably buy more. When one story ends, another begins.
Diana Evans is the author of ‘A House for Alice’ and ‘Ordinary People’.
