Form or Fancy – Lord Byron

While on break from school I have found myself reading even more than usual.  It is a great irony that those who spend their entire lives reading actually spend the least amount of time reading purely for pleasure.  It’s been too long since I’ve read a novel and not been preoccupied with what I might write an essay about.  But, I digress.

This week saw me reading Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage by that great Romantic, Lord Byron, and I came across this:

‘Tis to create, and in creating live
A being more intense, that we endow
With form or fancy, gaining as we give
The life we image, even as I do now.

And, aside from it being a fantastic moment in the poem as Harold stumbles upon the site of Waterloo, it got me thinking about self-invention more broadly.  To dress is, quite simply, to endow ourselves with form and fancy.  And those of us for whom dressing is a pleasure relish each opportunity to do so.  Our clothing ceases to be something material that adorns us, instead becoming a part of our very selves.

Take for instance tailoring.  Good tailoring gives the body a shape that is impossible to achieve otherwise.  I can’t remember who said it first, but a wise gentleman once quipped that if clothing didn’t make us look better we’d all be running about naked.  Quite.  But it’s not that the curve of a brilliant coat is pure artifice – it is how we imagine the body to look and we sculpt ourselves appropriately.  I’m not talking about some crazy notion of an “ideal body” that we construct and strive for, but rather each individual using cloth, color, and an infinite array of other tools to make the image in the mirror match that in the imagination.

I remember the first day real day of autumn this year my girlfriend giving me a little chuckle when I told her that I finally felt myself again.  When I left the house in the morning and caught a glimpse in the mirror of flannel trousers, dress boots, coat, and tie, it looked “like me.”  And that for me is one of the greatest pleasures of dressing.  Life is a canvas, and the things with which we fill it our paint.  I bet Napoleon and Nelson would agree too.