The hunt to find outliers of store-bought sameness

I rarely enter a shopping mall; even more rarely do I set foot in women’s clothing stores because, at 75, I am hard pressed to identify anything else I would ever need to purchase.

However, I am learning how to navigate between want and need, a navigation that engages respect for enoughness and the aliveness that comes with repurposing a wardrobe that is at least 60 years old.

In this, I discover that everything old is new again, including what I have always felt were the best-ever, one-of-a-kind, bell-bottom jeans, worn at a 1970s hippie-dip, outdoor folk concert I simply had to attend in “costume.”

Costume leads me to think of Halloween. Every year, I look to see if children’s costumes are homemade, store-bought, or maybe in combination. In the past, I would marvel at the inventiveness that repurposed bits and bobs into unique compositions, and though there were few arriving at my door this past October, a young lad in a remarkable papier-mâché moose skull — a tree branch curling at either end to simulate antlers, skilfully attached — appeared around 8:15 p.m.

I greeted him enthusiastically with handfuls of sweets. Earlier, I had watched a bit of a video that showed trick-or-treaters who, when given the choice between candies and potatoes in a single bowl, chose the potatoes, and I did think for a moment I might add potatoes into the mix. Maybe I will try the combo next year. (I remember Halloween apples, the fear they might harbour razor blades and the removal of the apple as treat).

A third-act woman thinking of next year and options. Such musings lead me back to the mall. From store to store — black, beige, grey and brown (trending this season), one women’s clothing store pickings an exact replica of another’s. I look for alternatives: discover two red, midriff-baring tops, one royal blue sweater, uncropped, and a shrug in a pink as pale as pink might be and still lay claim to pink.

I sit down on a bench to ruminate, wanting a fuller range of colour, shape and style, though I understand that narrower visions dominate the mall and its 21st-century cousin, the big-box city.

In my younger second act, more anxious to fit in, I curtailed critique and accepted only myself as flawed. Older now and seasoned, I am increasingly dismayed by the claustrophobic spread of mall cloning, far less accepting of the conditioning that dictates the “must haves” fashion industries devise.

Though third-act women are so often presented as feeble, invisible and inconsequential, I am not stilled by such dismissals, but remain inspired by the insight, toughness and experience enlarging my capacity to dream of invention and less monochromatic and homogeneous choices.

I want the artistry that animates the occasional pop-up devoted to local makers, the all-sorts and out-of-the-blue that can distinguish holiday craft markets. I cherish the unexpected find in thrift, vintage and second-hand stores, which unite seemingly incompatible combinations, both functional and eclectic.

I recall the cockeyed, ingenious Halloween creations I have celebrated in my time: an elder brother in corset with straw hat and hockey stick; a school chum in cardboard box with shipping label; my own children sheeted as ghosts with bar codes and washing instructions; two young girls in elaborate hats made of tulle and ribbon with on and off switches, illuminated from within by some kind of lighting contraption whose workings they tried to explain as I enthused.

I wish for more of that to counter factory models, assembly lines and profit margins. Is this just the lament of an old woman yearning for a world almost extinguished by trends that favour the disposable and the machine-made?

I remove the word “just” from that sentence. I lament the loss of non-virtual spaces where the commercial and the homemade might creatively intersect, where efficiencies that endorse conformity might be contested, perhaps derailed.

Fuelled by the antlered moose at my front door in October, my early November visit to the mall and the elasticity of my crone stage, I look for the gorgeous loopholes of the in-between and the what if Halloween embodies, those loopholes within the dominant narratives that can welcome handiwork beyond carbon copy and the work of artificial intelligences that dictates the purchase and parade of storebought sameness.

arts@freepress.mb.ca