the ache to be adorned

personal style matters (to me, anyway)

The ache to be adorned is within us all.

I’m going to start where I finally got it, where I finally stopped pushing it away.

The first time I listened to this episode of the emerald podcast (without doubt, my favourite podcast episode of all time, one that feels more like an art piece) I was walking in a long linen dress, barefoot on the beach near my parents home. I’d recently purchased a bracelet, made to order from a small australian designer, strung with irregular pearls and shells. It felt both like an odd choice, and wildly special to me. From the moment I saw it, I knew.

I didn’t (and still don’t) own a lot of jewellery. Before I even had the words for it I regarded jewellery as talismanic, I think many of us do. My body always rejected cheap jewellery with rashes and irritation. I knew, and have always known, jewellery to be sacred, but struggled to spend money on something that I told myself was the ultimate luxury, that I didn’t deserve, that could be easily broken, outdated or lost.

The episode opens with a story about a girl on the moroccan coastline, 82 000 years ago. She collects whelk shells, strings them onto a thread of hide and ties the beaded amulet around her neck.

I looked down at the shells hanging on my wrist, the shells beneath my feet on the sand I’ve spent my whole life walking across and I got it, finally.

That day, I finally stopped fighting my weird guilt and shame around fashion, beauty and the insatiable urge to be adorned

(which always makes me think of this song, and another longing we often deny ourselves, no?)

a shell necklacke by aunty dulcie greeno c/o the national museum of australia

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It’s in our very DNA to want to reach for beauty, in some way.

It’s a shame how our cultures current definition of beauty has made this feel wrong.

It’s one thing, to be forever chasing youth or a trending, idealised body or face. To be mindlessly buying and consuming, to be piling shiny, plastic-y things on, only for them to be discarded, forgotten in a cycle or so.

This is the stuff of nightmares, for sure.

But there’s another version of this dystopia entirely: to cut ourselves off at the root, to deny the craving to express ourselves in pearls or gold, in glitter, in fabrics that hold our bodies close and warm, in the scent of jasmine or rose.

Like almost every woman I know, I’ve been inspired and enchanted googling cleopatras beauty rituals. I’ve had my breath catch in my throat upon viewing something beautiful: a porcelain vessel, a precious stone, a pair of handmade leather shoes, the outfit of a stranger, a wooden comb.

I’ve craved time to melt and luxuriate in massages and facials and ritual after ritual then felt guilty for wanting it at all.

If our ancestors used adornments to change and arrange consciousness, to protect and elevate, to express and curate the very fabric and breath of culture itself,

Then why does it feel so wrong?

A painting from the tomb of Nakht depicting three ladies at a feast. Wearing necklaces and perfumed cones in their hair.

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