Bon Voyage, Old Self

Travel, reinvention, and the difficulty of fitting our many identities in carry-on-only-sized luggage.

The week before I travel, a small corner of my house starts to resemble a packing and sorting depot as the packages pile up, little stacks of brown cardboard boxes containing all the things I’ve ordered online that will need to be returned. I’m not much of a shopper, but this is precisely why the frenzy becomes so extreme, because I only shop immediately prior to going on a big trip which happens an average of once a year. There’s something about the finite period of time, the potential to actually pick out with some intentionality what you might wear, a week in which some control can be exerted over one’s identity, or at least how one presents it, that gives me a burst of enthusiasm for shopping and styling that is otherwise lacking the rest of the year. It’s for similar reasons, I suppose, that when I moved into my house I had no problem assigning vast amounts of time and money to its improvement and decoration, but now cannot seem to get around to tightening a loose screw on a hinge in under six months, and resent the price of everything. When I first moved in, the house was “what I was doing”, was the main event, a creative enterprise that I’d get to show off as completed at some point. Now it’s just the backdrop against which my life happens, its many outstanding demands having slipped too far down the list of priorities, the audience that awaited its grand reveal long having since dispersed. The same is true for dressing. On vacation, it’s part of the experience—a wardrobe to match the location, the weather, the culture—and there’s the sense of there being at least some sort of audience, at least someone to notice the fact that you’ve changed out of your bathing suit and into a flirty dress for dinner. In everyday life, more often than not, dressing is just the thing I need to do to ensure I don’t go out in public naked.

A week is manageable, I can pull off being a “put-together” person for a week, can assemble something cohesive the way costume designers did when I was an actress, putting together a capsule wardrobe for a character, but where the character is me—or a slightly idealized “me”, the me I might be if I had the bandwidth to focus on such things the rest of the time. It’s a week out of ordinary life in which no matter how hard I try my wardrobe relies heavily on a rotation of two t-shirts and two pairs of jeans. Any time I try to increase this to three, something will immediately happen to one of the other ones, bringing the number safely back to two. Evening clothes are something different. I do have a rack of exquisite things to wear of an evening, if only someone would invite me out to something at which it would be appropriate to wear them. The mainstay of social interaction in L.A. is eating out, but this is rarely an excuse to dress up. Even at the best restaurants, you’re likely to see someone in jeans and a t-shirt, and he’s usually the richest person in the room, some unimaginably wealthy director or producer who hasn’t seemed to notice that it’s not 1996 anymore, who will still throw a plaid shirt over that t-shirt in colder months, his fashion sense having been frozen in time the year he made his first million.  

This summer, I find myself taking two trips in quick succession and this has thrown off my usual ritual. All the shopping, the plucking, the grooming took place last month, in advance of a trip to France. Just two weeks after returning, I’m trying to muster the enthusiasm to pack for my annual return to the U.K. and it’s as if I just don’t have the heart. It’s as if the game is up, the character no longer viable, the production wrapped. Where once I folded each piece of underwear with eager anticipation, now I’m hoping I’ll at least get around to washing it all before it goes in the bag. One crucial difference between the trips is their purpose: France was a solo trip for me, a chance to reclaim my identity outside of “mother”, a pleasure trip to visit friends. This second trip by contrast will largely, though not exclusively, be about visiting family, those people who have known me the longest, who have their own ideas about who I am and how I dress, and it is this, I suspect, that is also exerting its subtle influence on me. When I arrived in Paris, I realized I had subconsciously bought new jeans and sneakers just like the ones my host friend wears, as if some sort of sartorial entrainment was at work behind the scenes, subtly encouraging me to fall into rhythm with those I was about to see. As I prepare to commune with my mum’s sheep in rural Scotland or slip into life in Norwich with my dad, it’s as if my own sense of identity has become cloudy, my means of self-expression unclear, there’s just enough uncertainty about who I am in those contexts that my mind becomes jammed when trying to decide what to put in my hand-luggage-sized bag (though on a previous visit to my mum’s I bought a pair of Hunter wellies that will be waiting for me when I arrive, a little statement of my bougie tastes, the fulfilment of wishes from childhood when money was tight, and the wellies cheap). Two days into my visit to my mum I will be wearing her waterproofs and my hair will be messy. At my dad’s, my hair will be neater, but the new t-shirt I bought for France which is loud and neon pink will most likely stay in my bag.

Yesterday I noticed a hole in one of my old t-shirts meaning that true to form, despite my new neon pink friend, I’m back to a two-t-shirt rotation. There are forty-eight hours left before I leave for this trip, time enough to buy a new “third”. Will I? And if I do, will it fit in in Scotland? In Norwich? Or will I be bold and pack something that doesn’t fit anywhere other than on my own body?

Woman with bag by Giovanni Graziani