Threads that Tie Us: The Hidden Lives of Our Favorite Clothes
Clothes sprawl across the room, hanging off my closet doors and the couch. My rings and necklaces, scattered everywhere, glimmer. I roll out of bed and clump a couple of rings into my palm, and grab a knitted shirt off the couch. Holding it up to the sunlight and letting the rays shine through, I smile. Woven in the blue cami’s weaves are stories of nights and people nobody will know about as I strut around campus for the rest of the day.
A year from now, my blue top will have a whole new collection of stories to tell. Maybe it’ll watch me fall in love again. Maybe it’ll watch me cry and get back up on my feet. Every time I put it on, it breathes a new story through the soft hug it gives my skin. You and I are both wearing a hundred stories.
Are our clothes alive? What stories do they tell, and how does the universe speak to us through them? Can they act like our angels, tying us to places and people we were meant to meet? Let’s explore a couple of stories to find out.
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Jacky Moreno is a sophomore. She’s always baddied up – her brunette curtain bangs bouncing, and her hands and neck covered in beautiful gold jewelry. At first glance, you’d never know what her gold bracelet means to her.
“So I'm wearing a gold bracelet that has Saint Toribio on it. Saint Toribio is the saint for immigrants when they're crossing the border. Like, he pops up and guides them to finish the crossing,” Jacky said.
“If something happens, you pray to him while you're crossing. And in 7th grade, in December, I remember we were going to church. It was a cold-ass cloudy day in Salinas. It was, like, 12 PM,” she recalls. “And I was telling my grandma, oh, your bracelet is so pretty. Like, I really want one. And she was like, ‘Oh, you like it? I'll give it to you.”
It was Jacky’s first gold bracelet – and she was over the moon. In April of that year, her grandpa passed away in Mexico, and she had it on while crossing the border.
A couple years later, things for little Saint Toribio on her wrist went another direction… the bracelet had its own plans.
“Senior year, the day before my grandma comes back to the United States, I lose the saint, right? And my mom got me another one, but then that one broke when we were in Mexico. So I had already lost the saint, the original one I had, and then the replacement got lost again after we fixed it. I was like, f*ck, bro. I was so sad,” she said.
But earlier this year, Jacky’s mom had pretty major health issues, and had to go back and forth between Mexico and California for surgeries. It was something that kept Jacky up late at night.
“When my mom was going through it, I had prayed to this other saint; like, please find the bracelet. This past May when I went with my mom for a surgery in Mexico, my grandma ends up finding the original bracelet in one of her bags. But there was NO way it could have ended up in her bag, because we had lost it before we got to Mexico,” she said. “I’ve always been like, that’s crazy. And my mom’s better now. So now I always keep it on. Can’t lose it from my sight. But I think it ended up there on its own for a reason.”
So here, her bracelet found its own way to protect Jacky’s family through rough times – it showed up when she truly, truly needed it most. And now, she wears it all the time – this time around, knowing the magic it holds.
But can accessories and parts of fashion – from our jewelry to our clothes – keep people who are worlds apart still tied together? Let’s find out through sophomore Anushka Bhagavatula’s story.
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“I went to this camp, a sleepaway camp, the summer before I went to ninth grade. And I’d never gone to a sleepaway camp before, but all the kids always went on about ‘my camp this, my camp that’, so I was ready to finally join those kids because I was always so jealous of everyone who had their own sleepaway camps,” Anushka said.
“So I finally went to this camp, and I made these two friends. I got so close to them – like, closer than I’d ever been with anyone else my entire life before that. And it was a two-month long camp and we just had so much fun, just the best time.”
One of the two friends Anushka made is Anna. The last night, they made friendship bracelets and tied them to their ankles. “We both had said that day we were never going to take them off. And we said that, but, whatever… like people just say that.”
All three of them stayed in touch over Instagram, talking a ton for the first year after camp but slowly going back to their own lives, losing contact with each other over time.
“Randomly last year, Anna swiped up on one of my stories where you could see the anklet in it. And she was like, ‘wait… this is so random, but I still have mine on too,” Anushka recalled. “And we weren’t in contact for an eternity, so we were both like that’s so funny. Every time I looked at it I would literally just think about the summer we had together, it was the same for her. It’s funny because they’re such ratty anklets too,” Anushka laughed.
The chances of either one of them getting sick of the torn-up, faded anklets on their ankles after living with it for years was incredibly high… yet not in this universe. Their little 8th-grade selves continued to live in their hearts, never taking off their little tributes to their friendship. They lived completely different lives, unknowingly being a part of each others’ with every step of the way – literally.
But what about our pieces that have gone missing? I know my clothes have two feet, because I’m losing them all the damn time. But do the ones that sneak away somehow become a part of our stories as well?
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The next story stars me! About three years ago, I entered my first situationship-relationship type deal. We’d had a really fun run, experiencing most of our firsts with each other, and I think we learned what it was like to begin falling in love with someone.
I was young and stupid though, and always unsure about what exactly I wanted. I could never make up my mind about whether I wanted to be with him or not, and somewhere along the way, I lost him. He stopped waiting, and I lost my best friend – the only person in the world at the time who gave me his everything, and the only person who I truly knew and who knew me. It was a new kind of loneliness that forced me into thinking it was me versus the world for a long time.
Somewhere in the midst of his last paragraph are a couple words I’ll never forget – “our course has come to an end”. It was a sunny, windy day in the summer – and reading those words standing in the CVS aisle, my stomach felt like it was just stabbed with a sword… and then over, and over, and over. I was left gut-wrenchingly, catastrophically, soul-crushingly gagged.
My crazy 17-year-old self loitered around Chicago’s streets ugly-crying for probably the next 10 hours, hysterically sitting on fire hydrants and laying on fountain-sides; getting the weirdest looks I’ve EVER received. When I went home that night, I tossed his clothes down my trash chute. I did not feel relieved after.
Maybe burning them or shredding them to pieces would’ve helped more. I would have processed it, taken my anger out, and watched them wither away. But instead it was just a rushed process of grabbing them from my closet and hearing them plop down the shute. And just like that, they were gone.
Kind of like the clothes, I never really processed anything. After that day, I was filled with so much anger that it turned me cold and heartless for a whole year. I had forgotten about him… but had I? I had let myself lose hope in trusting people, became reckless with my habits, and stopped being vulnerable in the way I used to be.
Now, years later of course, I’m way past moved on and just look back at the times we had together with a nostalgic smile. But when I look back at old pictures and his sweater or flannel pops up, I feel a missing hole. I have grown into a much stronger, beautiful and matured person than I was back then – but I think it could’ve been fun to have those clothes along the way. To have left them sitting in my closet three years ago and glared at them with boiling anger, all the way to being able to wear them now and laugh about what once was.
But in the way that the clothes left me down that chute, I had to lose myself to find who I am now. It was all a part of the journey. Wherever his clothes are, I hope they’re doing good.
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So, fashion does indeed truly speak to our lives. It stores memories, and with its departure, takes some of those memories with them; like his clothes. It plays magic tricks, re-entering our lives when we are in need; like Jacky’s bracelet. It keeps people tied together across the universe, like Anushka’s anklet. Our clothes and accessories are more than just that – they are breathing souvenirs that stay with us, one way or another, for the entirety of our lives, and beyond that. The clothes you wear now were scraps of cloth or cotton on a sheep before you were born. They are living with you now. And when you lose them as you get older, your stories will still be embedded into their stitches. Your outfits are a mosaic of your life, each outfit a play of fate.
