Origin Story
In which a sweatshirt, an animal print, and a bookshop start a newsletter about queer motherhood…
I hate leopard print.
Ok, I don’t necessarily hate the pattern itself, but it feels wrong on my body. It produces a sense of ick in my veins if I attempt to clothe myself in fabric adorned with its reproduced spots.
I know I am not alone in this feeling (and there is probably a whole essay or book in there about the various intersecting histories and attachments to leopard print across class, race, sexuality, etc), but I also know that some people FUCKING LOVE IT.
As I lamented the range of maternity wear on a video call a few years ago as something limited to florals, sailor stripes, or leopard print, my friend—also pregnant at the time—sat in a leopard print onesie in her office chair, beside herself with delight. I’ve attended a funeral where the dress code was animal print and I stood in a joyful, broken-hearted room overflowing with beloveds covered in spots. (I wore zebra stripes, obviously, in honour of my son’s favourite animal at the time.) Another friend recently told me that her partner loves leopard print so much that she insisted on it for the pattern of their new baby carrier—and I keep meaning to forward her the link to this Carhartt jacket I found while perusing the latest styles last week as a Christmas present idea…
If you’re wondering at this point what this hot (or, more realistically, somewhat anodyne) take on leopard print has to do with starting a newsletter entitled Call Me Mama, well, we need to go back a few years.
My wife and I are new-ish mothers, Mummy and Mama, respectively, and a few months after our baby was born, our best friend gave me a sweatshirt for my birthday. It’s a classic grey crewneck cotton sweatshirt with the word MAMA emblazoned across the chest in glorious, black and tan leopard print. Of course, she did not know my deep distain for this style,1 and I did not let my feelings be known that day either. My wife and I had spent over two years trying to conceive and we had been godmothers to her children for almost a decade at that point. We were all SO EXCITED to share motherhood that I was not going to be, like, ‘Oh, hey honey, great idea, love it, but there’s no way I can wear this.’
Instead, I hung it up in my closet with the rest of my sweatshirts and worked up the courage to bring it into my usual rotation. I started at home, cradling my babe on the sofa during nap-time and passing parts of hours at our favourite place: the changing table. Occasionally, I would wear it out of the house to visit friends or family, or with my wife to the cafe: a space and time in which it was clear there were two of us and I was just indicating which one of those I was to those passersby. I once, accidentally, wore it to the one class I actually paid for in our son’s infancy—baby sensory, of course—and once to a meet up with the other new mothers in our antenatal group. Both times, I wanted to vom a little at the cliche of it all.
If that all seems a little overdramatic, then you’ve clearly never been in a room wearing something that encouraged people to interpret you in a way you found antithetical to your core understanding of yourself.
In theory, I understand that a grey crewneck sweatshirt with a leopard print MAMA design shouldn’t make me feel this way—and I could probably never publish this newsletter for want of spending years trying to understand the WHY of it all. Instead, the more interesting thing, to me, is how I found a place to wear it—and now FUCKING LOVE IT because of that.
I currently work as a bookseller in a little-known gay bookshop where I can often be found behind the till hawking all the queer books all day long. As the history records stand, I am the first pregnant person and the first parent to be employed in the bookshop’s 45 year history, and our son the first bookshop baby. I’m also pretty sure that when I reached the final months of my pregnancy, my coworkers quietly moved the till desk farther away from the wall to accommodate my ever-growing bump. And when I returned to the bookshop after six months of maternity leave (so my wife could have six months of shared parental leave), I came back adorned with my new MAMA sweatshirt.
I can’t remember if it was a conscious decision to wear it, or if I just thought ‘Ah, fuck it.’ and threw it on one morning when it was a bit chilly. Either way, once seated behind the till, I started to giggle.
‘Call me Mama,’ I thought to myself in a low growl reminiscent of Queen Latifah’s Mama Morton as I imagined someone reading my sweatshirt as an expression of kink rather than deliberate parentage. In this context, it was cheeky. In this context, it could be sexy. In this context, it mashed together my new motherhood with my ever-evolving queerness. In this context, it made me laugh — and that is always a win. It was a private joke where I was no longer the ‘yummy mummy’ I feared becoming, but rather the tomboy queer I’ve always been.
I have always enjoyed expressing myself with my clothing. When I was almost ten, I meticulously chose my school photo look for an exacting mid-90s California cool: light denim dungarees, one shoulder unclipped, a washed-out pink crew neck t-shirt, and my long, straight blonde hair swept over to one side. For 4th grade Erica, I was nailing it! When I was in high school, I would sometimes put together an outfit in the morning, walk out to the kitchen, and declare to my mom, ‘It’s a cute day!’ Colourful, eclectic, eccentric,2 whatever I was wearing had sung back to me from the mirror and I was walking a little bit taller. To this day, my mom will sometimes still reply via text with ‘It’s a cute day!’ when I send her through random photos from my life in London.
I love dressing for occasions, everyday, the weather, specific contexts. I have consciously and unconsciously known this about myself for a long time, but some surprising conversations, experiences, and readings recently has made me consider my sartorial decisions through new lens. One of those ideas has come from Charlie Porter’s fantastic book Bring No Clothes. In it, Charlie writes about the clothing of the Bloomsbury group (the chapters on Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell were my favourites, for reasons that will likely become obvious as this newsletter continues), but what has really stayed with me is Charlie’s proposed philosophy of fashion around tension.
He writes, ‘Every single garment can be described in terms of tension. That’s every garment ever made, and that ever will be made. // This tension takes many forms, from the nature of the cloth itself and the construction of the garment, to its visual effects, contrasts and harmonies, and its interpersonal and societal messaging (322).’
When I tell you that I am obsessed with this new philosophy of fashion, believe me! I expect that there will be more writing about clothing—mine and others, including my kid’s clothes—than I would have previously expected from such a project, but for this story, I’m mostly interested in Charlie’s point of ‘societal tension’, which translates for me, in part, as context. Sometimes, the greatest personal tension in my outfit is the pull between what I’m wearing and the space I’m wearing it in. Maybe that’s obvious. Maybe that’s not news to you. But it was a gorgeous revelation for me, that delightful friction that I often seek. I like being adaptable to different environments and so often change my style respectively, but even in my most ‘palatable’ of looks there will always be an Easter egg element—some humour, some sentimentality, some fuck-you—that retains an essence of my core understanding of self, even if it’s only me that notices.
But then there’s always such joy when someone else notices, when they’re in on the joke, too.
One day this spring, I was sat behind the till wearing my now slightly grubby MAMA sweatshirt when a customer—a broad, tall, bearded leather daddy of a man—looked at me dead in the eyes, with a slight knowing smile, and said, ‘I like your sweatshirt.’
Welcome, to Call Me Mama.
I let her know before I hit publish on this because she reads everything I write like the amazing friend that she is. Hi, honey!
These were other peoples’ words for my clothing which I realise now were probably code for ‘queer’ — but that’s another essay.
okay NOW talk about SKIRTS over PANTS.
love you :)
My relationship to clothing and print is so complex, and I always think about how I interpret it and how the room interprets me. A relief to read this.