Commission: 'My Mother's Wedding Dress: The Fabric of Our Lives'

When researching issues of materialistic waste I found this book called 'My Mother's Wedding Dress: The Fabric of Our Lives' by Justine Picardie; it is a sort of biography based around her relationship to clothing.
It primarily looks at the way clothes go out of fashion, the re-use & recycling of family heirlooms and clothes found in vintage & seond-hand charity shops & the way that things can be kept for years as ways of keeping memories but can then be lost, waste. 

When reading the book I picked out a few quotes which I found really related to my Commission theme of materialistic waste,

When I was eighteen and started to wear the dress- a narrow, corseted sheath, just above knee-length, hidden bones within its bodice and waist- I thought about my mother, and how slender she had been on her wedding day, no more than a girl herself, even though she was meant to be all grown up.

Her mother had kept her wedding dress which wasn't a stereotypical wedding dress, for memory purposes, thinking that she may wear it again for another event; in this case her daughter re-used it as her university graduation ceremony which created new memories in the clothing and although used again was being wasted, unused for years.

What became of the black dress? It has gone and disappeared, lost like my parents’ marriage, yet it lives on in my memory, and in photographs of my mother’s wedding day, and of me, when I wore it to my university graduation ceremony, a few weeks before my twenty-first birthday.

Here she explains that the dress once treasured by both her mother and her has been lost, I like this idea that for different people there are different memories. For her mother it is a reminder of her broken marriage while for Picardie it is held dearly in her memories due to the association she makes with happiness in the wedding photographs.

… my mother managed to rescue one page from an album, which shows Pat in what looks lika a long lace dress and wide-brimmed hat. (‘A beautiful coffee-coloured lace dress,’ my mother says, ‘I used to admire it so much as a little girl, and then one day it disappeared. Whatever can have become of it?’)

 Again she recounts a similar experience her mother had with a relative's dress, similarly she through a photograph she remembers lovely memories of her and the outfit but was lost at some point, kept treasured as a keepsake but never again used and now wasted.  

(Since her wedding) I never saw my mother wearing her black wedding dress again; and it never did come in useful for her, as a party outfit or otherwise, as far as I could see. But she kept it safely, despite all the moves we made.

Reiterated in this quote Picardie's mother never did wear her wedding dress again even though it wasn't even a stereotypical wedding-style dress, fortunately her daughter was able to use it otherwise it would still have been going to or lost never worn for a second time. This story highlights our materialistic society and the way in which we waste clothes that only seem to have one-use eg. wedding dresses.  

All those second-hand clothes are gone now, abandoned or lost or fallen apart; and I mourn none of them, not deeply, except the wedding dress. I feel that in losing it, the past is eluding me; as if I have lost a piece of my heart.

Picardie 'mourns' the loss of her mother's wedding dress asif it was the death of a person despite the fact that she has a photograph of it again highlighting our materialistic society. Through her recycling of clothes bought in second-hand shops she has raised the issue of money to me, not only is material being wasted but so is money when considering items of clothes that only get used once and then stored away rather than handing on to another owner.  

The emperor’s new clothes- ‘I imagined the Emperor dressed up in finery – not naked at all – but underneath his new clothes, there was nothing; truly, nothing, no skin, no flesh, no bones, just emptiness. And from then on, I knew that nobody meant exactly that: no body, a condition that might be hidden by clothes. 

This is my favourite quote of the book due to the quirky story she tells, rather than naked she imagined the Emperor in his finery with nothing underneath; there is this idea of emptiness, rather than the clothes wasting away the owner wastes away like memories can fade. I like this concept that nodoby truly means no body; an empty void where memories have been lost. 
This has given me new conceptual ideas for my shoot, the loss of clothing & memory and therefore both mental and materialistic waste could be represented through a body-less dress inflated as if still being worn. 
Her stories are very personal and I have a personal connection to similar items such as wedding & christening dresses; this has also made me begin to consider hoarding of unneeded things which I want to explore. The bodyless dress creates a sense of anonymity, untouchable, fragility floating in a space disconnected from time. 
Picardie often related the clothing back to an image which I find interesting; I like the idea that I could pose the treasured clothing I have in a similar way to photographs I have of them as if they encapsulate the memory portrayed in the image.