We recount fashion and its places as spaces transcending
our capacity for movement, as though the sets of a runway show
belonged to extra-experiential dimensions our sense of orientation
fails to recognize. When Dior announced the choice
of its next location, that geolocation system short-circuited.
Jonathan Anderson chooses Ireland, homeland of the
towering Carmel Snow, the first to define Monsieur
Dior’s style as “a new look.” The anomaly in the system? An
overlapping of addresses: the address entrusted with the show,
dearer to me than that of home, is Trinity College’s. There exist
places that do more than receive us: they keep us, sealing within
their stones the part of ourselves we dare not carry elsewhere.
Trinity College is, for the one writing these
lines, among such rare reliquaries of the soul, the place where a
promise was laid down with the very reverence with which
William Butler Yeats, in He Wishes for the
Cloths of Heaven, longed to spread at his beloved’s feet a
mantle woven of light and of heaven’s shadow, begging her to rest
her step upon it with the gentleness owed to another’s dreams. I
too, on a day now impossibly distant in my adolescence, laid down
in that place the most precious fabric I possessed, unaware whether
I would ever return to gather up its threads.
It was during my senior trip that I saw it for the first
time, and what took place was less an encounter than an immediate
recognition, the same silent turmoil with which one falls in love
in Shakespearean drama, when the soul discerns, in a face never
seen before, a fidelity already written elsewhere. Before taking my
leave I promised those granite walls that we would find each other
again three years on, my bachelor’s degree complete, with the same
solemnity with which one promises a beloved to meet again beyond
distance and beyond time.
That promise unbound itself slowly, page after page, when
destiny led me back there for my courses in Comparative Literature.
I learned to turn centuries-old manuscripts wearing white gloves,
priestly vestments donned to approach an altar far more than mere
philological safeguards. Every leaf turned with that liturgy was a
threshold half-opened onto my dreams, never flung wide all at once,
and through that seam of light I came to understand how fashion had
always been a language literature had long practiced, stitched into
the description of every garment the novels I loved had given me,
into the silk or the rust of a fabric able to reveal a temperament
better than a hundred adjectives. I recognized in those yellowed
lines the very alphabet with which I now narrate the collections,
learned among pages that smelled of ancient dust and of things to
come.
The promise fulfilled itself with the silent punctuality
reserved for things already written elsewhere. Admitted to the
university, arrived in Dublin with two suitcases and a heart unable
to contain itself, the first private liturgy I performed was to put
on my headphones and let the soundtrack of October Sky
carry me, a hushed hymn devoted to anyone who pursues a dream even
when the entire world seems to deny them the right to it. I walked
alone toward the Long Room, the beating heart of Trinity’s library,
beneath vaults of dark wood and rows of marble busts that watched
over my passage like silent keepers of a story already written. It
was there that, for the first time in my life, I wept tears dense
and unending, tears of a joy for which I did not yet possess a
name. They were tears of a home truer than the one left behind.
Those were happy years, because there survived intact the promise
of a future I glimpsed whole within fashion, a future that was then
merely desire and is today the craft that steadies this pen.
Today, upon learning that it will be the Long Room itself
to welcome Dior‘s show, I feel the need to perform
the gesture Yeats, in When You Are Old, reserved for those
who had loved in truth, to lean beside the fire when the hair has
long turned gray and to seek, among the lines of an altered face,
the memory of a wandering soul loved longer than the grace of a
single day. Though I am not yet that woman bent over the hearth, I
already sense the gesture within me, for I see with identical
clarity the possible unfolding of that show and the girl who ran
toward the Long Room with her headphones still on, unaware that the
two images would one day mirror one another. What renders this
circle all the more necessary is Carmel Snow
herself, born a few steps from that very library, who in 1947
handed Christian Dior the name capable of making
him eternal. A name that blossomed, like every decisive thing in my
life, on this small island that seems to have always kept watch
over the debuts of those who still believe in their dreams.
And so I renew, with the voice of that eighteen-year-old
I have never ceased to be, my promise to Trinity.
See you soon!