Dress by P J Harvey, is a piece of my musical puzzle. Not that I would command that Dress be played at my funeral, but, future planners, I wouldn’t rule it out either.
I try to make magic with words but musicians transmit the emotions we are stirring to the surface in an instant, in an intro, in an outro.
But Dress does something more, it takes me right back. Like a bit of wisdom that went unheeded. I feel wise, defiant and angry whenever I hear it. It puts me in a good mood, reminds me that my intuition guides me well.
Reminds me of being fourteen in 1996.
I finally had a figure. Prior to that, I saw myself as a collection of awkward body parts held together in a puffer jacket and saggy leggings. I’d recently bought a green dress that I loved, it just fitted nicely which was very fortunate for a typical hippy dress from Glastonbury. It was just a pretty mineral green and smelled of Nag Champa.
That summer, various youth theatres across Scotland and Northern Ireland came together in Stirling. We were to spend a week together at close quarters without any adult supervision. We all had crushes and an opportunity to finally act on them.
I really had no business being at a Youth Theatre event at all. In terms of pissing in the wind, I surpassed even the boys, but I hadn’t realized that yet. I thought I had at long last found a circle of friends and a gateway into the arts. I loved storytelling, I loved language and I dreamt, as I suspect all kids do, of a creative band of which I might someday be a member. I knew about sexism but I was too naïve to see it.
‘Put on a nice little number and ask him out.’
That was the advice I received on day one, from a boy who was only two years older but seemed middle-aged on account of his side parting and waistcoat. He insisted on the ‘nice little number’ being key to winning to object of my desire.
I wore my favourite dress at every opportunity and when it was dirty, I wore a Smashing Pumpkins t-shirt with a pair of jeans. His advice was worth taking, I thought, if only I had a more extensive wardrobe.
I did come away from that week with a boyfriend who told me, towards the end of our month together that ‘I only asked you out because you were wearing that dress.’ A boy who also spilled cider down me because he didn’t want me getting drunk and embarrassing him. Then he discarded me and as I wept, wondered if perhaps his friend might like to go out with me instead.
The heartbreak cleared very quickly. Replaced with anger, with myself as much as with him. I wasn’t raised to believe that I was an accessory. My family was full of successful single women - I had no excuse.
But to be adored and desired is beguiling to an insecure kid. I’d forgive him anything. I was too young to see the ebb and flow of praise and validation as the mechanisms of easy manipulation. The kind of guy who would ask you out because of a dress should probably buy their own dress.
If fiction teaches us anything it is that we will only learn the hard way, I’m thinking of Natasha and Anatole, Bathseba and Troy, and in both of those cases the villains cast the true love in the light in which they shine, that’s true to life too. Mind you, the boyfriends who came after, paid for my earlier humiliation – I wasn’t easy to charm and I was quick to accuse boyfriends of ‘buttering me up.’
In the summer of 1996 I started to value people, properly. Not so much that I told them, not so much that I supported them, that would come later, but I was at least drawn to what mattered.
Meanwhile, the older boy who had told me on that day to wear a ‘nice little number’, had also got himself a girlfriend that week. A kind, self-sacrificing girl who believed this older boy looked after her and could guide her through anything. In reality, her own sense of agency was dying at the hands of this overbearing young man. I felt she was missing out on a lot of fun, she’d missed drinking, singing, seeing live bands and being sick. I knew that this concern got back to him so when I saw them together, I didn’t see the point in pretending that I thought otherwise. He was smug and convinced that I was somehow envious that I did not also have a boyfriend who would buy me a nice dress. Yes, he bought her many things but when we talked it was again, the dress.
‘Does your boyfriend buy you nice things? No.’
I could not convince him that I was perfectly happy, sitting with boys in bedrooms listening to music. In fact, to go back again to that fateful week, a very drunken boy had crawled towards me while singing ‘Hello I love you’. It was delightful. I liked the song, I liked the band and in that state he wasn’t intimidating. Later we briefly dated and he was lovely. (Pop fact: The Kinks sued The Doors over Hello I love you and to this day Ray Davis receives royalties for it). To the boy who bought the expensive dress, this was not how it should be. I shouldn’t find drunken boys sweet, I should distain them. Boys should, like him, work hard in order to buy their girlfriends nice things. He will choose the dress and she can show her appreciation by wearing it.
My friend found her courage, stepped away and never went back. Plenty of girls do not.
There are girls who repeatedly seek to please those who will only discard them. My heart goes out to them now though it didn’t then. It just takes insecurity and loneliness and you engaged in a performance that masks the very heart of you. Stepping into a role that hides all the things that someone will tenderly love one day. The performance goes on and the girl spilling over in the dress does not control it. A big part of the deception lies in making her believe she does.
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