ABSTRACT
This chapter is based on a paper presented at the “Back to the Future” workshop held at McGill University in October 2008. Although organized within the context of a faculty of education, the workshop was both multiand interdisciplinary, eschewing a narrow focus on pedagogy in the context of schooling. The focus was much more on memory processes and their importance to all aspects of life. Like the paper I wrote for that occasion, this chapter is situated at the intersection of dress, memory, embodiment, and identity. I discuss clothes as objects-ones that act as memory prompts, as signifi ers, and sometimes as symbols that take on heavy and unmanageable burdens of negotiated meaning, both personal and social. Echoing Goffman (1959, 1979), I also argue that dressing the self is a performance of identity, and I describe how clothes function as modes of embodiment that are open to a variety of interpretations. By describing how garments worn by people we love become associated with memory and loss, this chapter provides a window into the ways we construct memory around objects as symbols of relationship. In so doing, we imbue clothing with the power to recall and reinterpret the past in certain ways. It is in the interpretation of clothing, in ascribing social and personal meanings to the wearing of certain garments by ourselves and by others, that we reveal just how much signifi cance we can invest in pieces of cloth.
