THE HOUSEWIFE

from BIAS: Journal of Dress Practice Issue 8 - Fashion + Systems

MARCH 8

THE HOUSEWIFE

BY ITALA AGUILERA

When my grandmother married my grandfather, she gave up her life, her desires, and her freedom in order to be a housewife.

Marriage was (and probably still is) thought of as just a ritual you had to go through, a common practice, a simple transaction; it was necessary to put on that dress and show your family and friends you were part of the system, just like them. When my grandmother put on that wedding dress, she didn’t know the real implications marriage would have on her life. She didn’t know she was going to become prisoner of her house.

In what I believe was an attempt to keep her sanity (or perhaps was just a manifestation of her repressed creative impulses) she started compulsively collecting dolls, figurines, and various objects; up to the point where one couldn’t walk through her room because they completely covered the walls and the floor. I always thought of those figurines as a form of resistance: if she had to be confined in the household; she would slowly invade the house, quietly reclaiming it.

My grandmother passed away many years ago, but the figurines remain.

This wedding dress is my way of telling her story. I collected some of her objects and reproduced them with a material that I believe to be sacred: ceramics. I crocheted them together with wool yarn. The handmade processes and materials used take the dress to a sublime dimension, like an altar made for my grandmother.