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In Praise of Old Custom: Mourning Clothes

It is time, I believe, to bring back mourning. Not mourning as in grieving – that has never left us, nor will while this world lasts – but the clothing which denotes its presence.

The West is not very good at either of them, for the most part. We expect people to “get over it” or “move on” in not much more than the standard three days bereavement leave, and as for the clothes – well. When I tell you there is a company offering such products as tees and tank tops with slogans like “live, love, grieve”, “grief vibes” and “grieving AF”, you will see how far we have come from the days when mourning clothing was both dignified and generally recognized.

In the foreground, a young woman in black trimmed with white. In the background, three young women in pastels.
One of these young women is in mourning. Guess which.

This can in part be blamed on the mass deaths of the World Wars – very bad for morale, living in a sea of visible loss – and, going further back than that, the Victorians. The Victorians were huge supporters of people taking time to mourn, but rather overdid it with their strict codification of mourning which was not necessarily connected with your actual emotions. (Not to mention the annoyance when some sour old distant relation dies the moment you get a new outfit, thus preventing you wearing it while it’s still in fashion.)

I do not propose that we return to the suffocating etiquette of the nineteenth century, but that we reintroduce a shared visual vocabulary of loss. To that end, a few suggestions.

Grief varies in intensity over time (hopefully in an overall lightening trend). Mourning clothes should reflect this.

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In Praise of Old Technology: the Fountain Pen

I am far from suggesting that everyone should be an old-fashioned fruitcake like myself, but if there’s one Old Technology I think everyone should use, it’s the fountain pen.

A black and gold fountain pen, uncapped, rests on a page covered in black handwriting.

The basic ballpoint – be it clicky or Cristal – is ubiquitous. More than 100 billion of the latter had been sold by late 2006, most of which will now be in landfills around the globe. If you get a free goody bag from an event or business, you can pretty much guarantee that there will be at least one ballpoint in there. At some point – when the ink runs out, or dries out, or you begin to feel oppressed by the sheer number of these things cluttering up your desk or other surfaces – it goes to the dump.

Millions if not billions of these cheap disposable pens are churned out each year, and millions if not billions of them go to the landfill each year, packed in with the trashy polyester clothing and the masses of disposable nappies, all merrily leaching their toxic guck for decades if not centuries to come.

The fountain pen, by contrast, is refillable, repairable, and, if properly cared for, will last for decades of use.

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A Remarkable Man

Relatively few people have ever heard of Sir Julius Vogel, and this is unfortunate, because he was a remarkable man.

Having studied metallurgy at the Royal School of Mines in London (his birthplace), he moved to Australia during the Victoria gold rush and became…logically…a journalist and newspaper editor.

The ODT's 100th anniversary supplement, showing the first front page and a drawing of the cottage where the paper was first printed.

After moving across the Tasman to New Zealand in October 1861, he co-founded the Otago Daily Times – now New Zealand’s oldest surviving daily newspaper – the following month, and plunged into politics the following year, becoming an MP the year after that. Over the next quarter of a century he would represent five different electorates in the New Zealand Parliament, ranging from “Dunedin and Suburbs North” in the south to “Auckland East” in the north.

Another of his electorates was Goldfields – a special interest electorate which covered the same geographical area as other electorates but was only open to voters with a valid miner’s license. No electoral roll was kept – just show your license and vote.

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