106 days: Living la vida toile

Soundtrack to this post: The Call / Regina Spektor

So the dress has been cut, which means that the pieces of the pattern I bought have been transformed, by the magic of scissors, from funny shaped scraps of paper to scraps of real fabric (also in funny shapes). ‘Real fabric?’ you’re thinking. Well yes, I’ve discovered that apart from fabric woven by fairies with golden threads and tears from sad (working) girls, there is another type of non-real fabric and those in the know call it ‘calico.’

Calico is a fabric made from unbleached and not fully processed cotton, which is kind of yellowy and smells like pee. According to Wikipedia ‘the fabric is less coarse and thick than canvas or denim, but is unfinished and undyed.’ In Mexico, calico is called ‘cabeza de indio’ which says a lot about the place I come from, but historical considerations aside, before a dress can grow up to become its full royal self it is first cut and sewn in calico to make a toile (pronounce it: tual) which is nothing more than a test garment. Like a crash test dummy, a toile experiences many cuts and rough treatment before it fits.

Toiles are born into this world knowing they’re imperfect and they are tried and adjusted over and over again until they’re perfect… and just then they are discarded.

Toiles suffer a lot.

I like to think there is a toile heaven when they are all made of the finest silk.

The idea of having a practice garment where you are allowed to make as many mistakes as you want without any fear or consequences has opened a whole new world of possibilities for me. Not only has it given me the warm and fuzzy feeling of entering a universe where clothes actually fit me in every curvy way, but it has also sent my mind raging with the fantasy of all things toile I could have. A toile career, a toile pet dog, a toile marriage… a toile life! Wouldn’t it be brilliant to have a bit of practice for the important things in life? Maybe it’s because I’m finding it so hard to get things right the first time round.

Some days ago I heard someone say that the worst bit of growing old and dyeing is that all the knowledge you’ve amassed through out your life about life itseld will get lost. All the things you’ve learned from your mistakes, your ‘life’s know how’, will simply die with you. To me this is the epitome of ‘if I’ve only known this sooner’ and the recognition that no matter how much you try to learn from other people’s experiences (others being your parent, friends… famous people cheating on their spouses…) you’ll never really understand what is that your meant to be doing with your own life until you’ve tried it. Being married, for example, people think they’ve got the whole toile marriage thing covered by living together. Marriage is an out dated institution they say and at the end it’s just a party where you spend loads of money. Nothing changes when you get married, they say, because you’re just signing a paper. I never did the toile marriage, I just went ahead and cut the real fabric and by god did it change things. In particular my life long habit of running away.

Getting married has made me stay.

Every time I have a big fight with Eduardo and think ‘this is it, this shit is over, I can’t take one more second of this crap anymore, I’m going to pack my shit and leave and we’re going to get a divorce and I’ll never see him again, because this is unbearable’, just when I’m trying to locate a suitcase where I can fit my books and my sewing machine, our life together flashes in front of my eyes (like if we were dying a la chick flick). It is in that moment, when I’m about to say ‘it’s over’ I think about our wedding and I put the suitcase back. It’s not the vows or the fact that we’ve signed a paper what stops me from packing my stuff and leaving, it’s the memory of us dancing to our first song that does. Because no matter how much I hate him – and I do hate him a lot sometimes – I can still feel his hand on my back pressing through my wedding dress ever so slightly. I can feel him breathing and my heart pounding and I remember how excited and moved we both were by the fireworks and the sea and people smiling at us because they knew just as we did that we loved each other so much. Yes, it’s awfully corny, but when I remember that moment, I get transported back into that dress and his hand pressing my back and I remember how much I love him.

I’ve never finished packing my bags.

But there’s no way of knowing that getting married will make you stay when you’ve always run away. It’s just one of those things you have to experience to know. So is it better to have a toile marriage than go ahead and because of inexperience ruin the real fabric? I don’t know. Probably not because toiles, even if they are perfect, are only that, a test. I might be wrong, but there’s no way of toiling yourself out of marriage. It’s as simple as that: you either want to own that dress or not. If you do it’s fine, but if you don’t then its fine as well… but don’t pretend you’re wearing a toile marriage because it’s ‘smarter’ than wearing a real fabric marriage. Let’s put it this way, if toiles were as good and durable as clothes made of real fabric we’d all be buying them on H&M.

Now having a toile career…where I could have known how things where going to turn out and then have another go at it with a better understanding and more experience… that would have been fab!