ELLEMemoir
ELLE.COM/UK September 2O19 61ou don’t diminish when you have a child, but you do change.
When you have been in the stirrups giving birth, wasted on morphine,
do you ever feel lovely again? I wondered if I gave all my beauty to
my son when he was born, although I gave it willingly, as a tribute to
him. My tooth wobbled; my eyesight disintegrated; my hair literally
fell out. I was gaunt with tiredness, puffy in the face and fat.
I was 45 last New Year’s Eve. I felt both better and worse. I had less
fear, but also less hope. It was a deep winter, and my writing, which is my
trade and my joy, felt listless and heavy; my son was alien in his energy;
my husband was silent. I understood myself better than I used to, and
that calmed me. But I felt sad and sexless, and I knew I looked awful.
I thought nothing of wearing my husband’s ragged clothes; I became
a stranger to make-up, and sometimes even brushing my hair. That is not
a moral judgement. It is a dull fact. I felt alienated from fashion for manyyears. It was a friendship I no longer cherished. I wasn’t always like
that. I once loved fashion and knew its power to change and enchant.
I remember the bright costumes of my childhood, poised in time:
a red and white towelling playsuit in 1976; a polka-dotted Southern
belle dress with bonnet in 198O; a black velvet suit with a peplum and
bustle in 1987. At 13, I dressed like Joan Crawford at 4O. Perhaps that
was the problem. I had too much, too young. I knew the language of
fashion before I could read. My mother and grandmother owned
a boutique called Golden Lady in Teddington, southwest London, and
I toured the factories of the East End with them, looking for dresses, before
all the textile manufacturing moved to China. Like many working-class
women of that time, my grandmother could sew to couture standard.
My mother – her daughter – emerged from their terraced house in south
London like a jewelled flower. A dressmaker’s dummy stood in theY
PHOTOGRAPH by HANS FEURER
Cloaked in self-loathing, Tanya Gold felt she didn’t deserve to be fashionable any
more. But just as she was about to close the door on a lifetime of dress-up,
an unexpected trip to the most stylish island in the world changed everything
A FA RE WEL L^ to^ FA SHI ON