The Pink Plaid Pant Suit

It was 1974 and I was 7 years old, wandering aimlessly through the dimly lit store as my mother shopped.  Artie’s was an independently-owned retail shop just outside of Northwest Philly, like a Marshall’s blended with a thrift store – with clothes everywhere you looked.  To find the right piece of clothing in the right size required patience, grit, and dedicated time to rummage through the numerous piles stacked on tables.

The pink plaid pant suit was hanging on a rack at the side of the store, toward the back, in plain sight.  It was love at first sight, and miraculously, it was exactly my size.  I shyly tried it on in the back while my mother shopped, wanting to keep it on forever.  I was no girly girl, nor did I care much about clothes, but this piece of artwork called to me like a message from the heavens.  It was a thing of beauty.  It was rooted in time and place, though certainly uncool even for its era.

My mother refused to buy it.  Though she didn’t say so outright, I could tell she thought it was hideous.  But I begged, and she finally relented.  I remember the thrill of walking to the counter and placing it by the register with pride.

But somehow, in the fifteen minutes it took to drive from Artie’s to my house, my perspective shifted, and I saw this item from my mother’s lens.  It might have been something she said, or maybe what she didn’t say.  But when we arrived home, I hung it in the back of my tiny closet and closed the door.

It was a moment of reckoning.  A loss of innocence.  In the words of writer Elizabeth Bowen, a “death of the heart.”

I don’t think I wore the pink pant suit even once after bringing it home.  It stayed in the closet for years, inviting self-mockery.  What I had thought was beautiful was ugly.  I couldn’t trust my intuition.

As an adult, when I’ve talked about the pink pant suit, it’s been in the context of a joke.  A funny, self-deprecating story.   

But the story is more than a joke about having questionable fashion sense as a 7-year old.  The story describes how tempting it is to hide the parts of ourselves that don’t conform, how the desire for approval can obscure what brings us joy – and how it’s never too late to reclaim the weirdest parts of ourselves. 

I’m guessing that the pink plaid pant suit is long gone from this world, but in my imagination, I wear it proudly.  I hold it in my symbolic treasure chest of things that are small and misunderstood, but boldly speak the truth.