Illness and dress

The last few days I have had a cold/flu – just waiting to see how it develops to give it a tag. I have had trouble sleeping the last few nights and felt dreadful in the mornings. Yesterday I had to go to a meeting which I thought was going to affect my academic position. I took some drugs to ease the thick head and dressed smartly and pretended not to have a cold. This morning, again I felt dreadful, but lazed around reading and embroidering. Once I got dressed around lunch time, things picked up. I turned on the computer, checked emails and I was away for the afternoon. My cold and thick headedness is still there but I had tricked my body into thinking things were not too bad.

As you can see in Recent Writings of this blog, dress is powerful. It is used as an indicator of mental health. When people are depressed their dress habits are often monitored. Their dress is used as an indicator of their function in society. If for example they wear the same clothes day after day, it is an indicator that all is not well.

For me, wandering around in my old pajamas was actually comforting. Pajamas also as worn when we are unwinding and going to bed. They can relax our bodies. The clothes I wore to my meeting the day before were quite firm and made the body stand up straight.

The photographer (whose name escapes me) of the  exhibition of Princess Diana held in London in 2007 and in the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney in 2008, stated that he began photographing Diana all dress up, but once he asked he to take her shoes off, her body took on a relaxed state and she began to smile with a sense of freedom. He attributed the success of the photos to the lack of shoes.

My own artwork on red shoes explored the stories people told me of their associations with red shoes. Although I have not made work on this theme for a long time, I still explore the body’s interaction with dress.

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