Wardrobes and soundtracks: resources for memories of youth

Jenkinson, Jo ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1758-0067 (2023) Wardrobes and soundtracks: resources for memories of youth. In: Memories of Dress: recollections of material identities. Bloomsbury Academic, pp. 99-116. ISBN 9781350153790 (hardback); 9781350153806 (ebook); 9781350153813 (ebook)

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Abstract

This chapter explores how the clothes we wore, and music we listened to in our youth, may act as memory resources. Seven women were interviewed with a ‘memory toolkit’ of family photographs featuring dress alongside surviving items of clothing (wardrobes) and musical playlists (soundtracks) associated with their youth. The multisensory interview experience relied on tactile, visual and auditory stimuli, with the content of the wardrobes and soundtracks working alongside each other as memory resources. The mnemonic spaces accessed and drawn upon in the interviews are conceptualised as the ‘memory wardrobe’, where memories of dress, whether physical, visual or imagined are metaphorically stored, and the ‘memory soundtrack’, which includes musical playlists experienced in the mind or played through analogue or digital technologies. This chapter proposes that dress and music have value as ‘tokens of youth’ in our present, remembered and future experience. That the peak experiences of youth, recalled through the lens of dress and music, support consistency of self and connection to our youth throughout continuing life trajectories.