Corona Clothing

It seems to me Corona Clothing is all the rage – though nobody currently calls it that. Rather, it is known as Working From Home clothes or What Day Is It clothes or We Don’t Have Enough clothes. Despite, or because of the pandemic, having the right kind of clothing is now, a matter of life and death. Helpfully, my inbox is full of ads & offers for clothes that will, ostensibly, save me from corporeal disintegration or endless pyjama days & even, despair over the mounting death statistics. So, if I wear the latest fine-knit gauze cashmere sweater & washed pink organic cotton joggers, will this mean that I, at least, am dressed in proper protective attire? Such sentiments I know, sound suspiciously like some morally-laden diatribe about essential versus non-essential clothing & the righteous sanctioning of the person who does indeed buy the fine-knit gauze cashmere sweater (which is really not my intention) because after all, if you do buy, whatever it is you are buying, aren’t you enabling our sclerotic, bear economy to trundle along, one purchase at a time? At some point, no doubt, we will all be instructed to shop. Locally. Globally. Frantically. As an act of national emergency, of patriotic necessity & as a way out of (another) recession. At present though, in these Covid times where a day is a month & a week a year & what I can do is restricted to Staying At Home & consuming a diet of death & disease through epidemiological models with curves that desperately – frantically – need to be flattened I think that maybe yes, finding the perfect azure blue dress that flatters & drapes – Just So – over an ageing, tired body, & wearing that dress on a future summer evening surrounded by friends & laughter & wine; finding something like that in Times Like These is the real purpose of Corona Clothing.