Been there, done that, got the T-shirt

1 In 1944 during the second day of the D-Day invasion, my father landed on a Normandy beach in France with the rest of his regiment. The enemy defences had been weakened by the first day's assault, but in some places along the beach, there was still some resistance, with occasional gunfire. Within 24 hours my father had been wounded. "I forgot to dodge the bullet," he said. He and the other casualties were sent back to England to recover. Fortunately, the wound was superficial. The bullet had grazed the fleshy inner part of his left arm, and he recovered fairly quickly.
2 My father had been allowed to keep his old battle jacket, and when, as a child, I asked him to tell me about his adventures during the Second World War, he would always take the jacket out of the trunk in the loft, and show me the bullet hole. "Five centimetres to the right ..." he said, but was too tactful to finish the sentence, ... and it would have gone straight through his heart, a mortal wound. He said he kept the jacket to remind him how he had nearly died.
3 The original, prehistoric purpose of clothes was purely functional – they needed to be warm and waterproof, and to protect our modesty. Even today, we often have to make choices about dressing for comfort in low-maintenance clothes and dressing for fashion. In the damp and freezing countries of Northern Europe, there's a Scandinavian saying: "There's no such thing as bad weather, just the wrong clothing", implying because there's nothing we can do about our climate, we might as well bow to the inevitable and dress in warm clothes.
4 But today, do we still dress exclusively for comfort? Or do we also dress for fashion? Fashionistas – followers of the latest fashions – choose to wear the season's fabulous new designs and colours, often at the expense of comfort and practicality. Many of them love the glamour of the fashion shows in Milan, Paris, London and New York. They like to gauge and witness the latest trends as worn by models of uniform build and exquisite beauty, who are quite unlike most ordinary people. Some of the fashionistas end up as fashion victims, whose choice of clothes is dictated by a sense of extravagant style but who are so self-absorbed that they're unable to realize how inappropriate it is. They accordingly run the risk of inviting an unkind response.
5 Others choose clothes to make a favourable impression of some kind on the people they meet in particular circumstances, such as a smart suit and a crisp, white shirt for a job interview, or a beautiful gown for their wedding. Even people who dress down in the evenings or at the weekend – loafers, jeans, polo shirts – often choose colours, combinations and brands which suit them. Finally, those people who claim to have no interest in fashion usually choose sombre colours as a form of camouflage, to disguise themselves and to avoid attracting attention to themselves.
6 But fashion has two other, possibly more important functions. Firstly, it can allow us to express or reflect our emotions through the clothes we wear. Our favourite clothes are those which we choose most often to reveal positive aspects of our personality – fun and funky, or smart and businesslike. Our wardrobes are largely filled with our favourites, because they make us feel good and fit for purpose.
7 Yet surely alongside those favourite outfits are others which have fallen out of favour. Maybe there's a pair of jeans you can't get into anymore, or a sweater which has grown a bit too loose, or something in a colour or fabric which seemed fashionable at the time, but which isn't quite right for today. So why don't we throw these out?
8 This is the other important function of fashion: a sense of occasion. We bought those clothes when we were adolescents – slimmer or more carefree. We wore them on a romantic first date which didn't work out. We chose them specially for a wedding or a funeral, and keep them ready for similar future events.
9 Your wedding dress remains protected under wraps even though you're unlikely ever to wear it again (well, even if you remarry, surely you won't do so in the same dress!). There's the suit you wore for the interview for a job you didn't get. An old school tie reminds you of years of education, with its many emotional highs and lows. Maternity wear reminds mothers of their nervous excitement during their pregnancy, waiting for the baby to arrive. Baby clothes remind us of those few short years when our children were helplessly dependent on us, of how tiny they were, and how they've grown in every way since then. The old sweater belonging to a dead parent keeps alive the memory of their special scent ...
10 We keep clothes which remind us of the difference between what we wanted to be at one point of our lives, and what we are today. Dubious red trousers, purple tank tops, long necklaces, high leather boots, multi-coloured sneakers, a broad-brimmed hat bought after watching a film from the Fifties, shoes with heels so high that the first and only outing wearing them to a club one evening led to a night in A&E with a twisted ankle, the ubiquitous I ♥ NY ... Been there, done that, got the T-shirt.
11 Our clothes are indicative of our lives, the events, the emotions, the sense of nostalgia for yesterday's innocence and the chastening, humbling reminder of who we are today.
12 When my father showed me his battle jacket, I used to slip my finger through the hole, and as he told his stories of what he was thinking on that beach in Normandy in 1944, I was thinking of what he said, "Five centimetres to the right ..." and I wouldn't be here today.