The Language of Clothes

It was a hot summer in the hippie-dippie peace and love days of the early 1970s, and my schoolfriend Catherine and I had scraped together £35 each to spend a month in Andalucía. Romantic bookworms both, we tossed a few clothes, our battered paperback García Lorcas, and our dreams of olive groves on dusty plains into our backpacks, and set off. Most of our money went on a car the size of a postage stamp, which doubled as both transportation and our hotel room at night, Catherine as the driver claiming the privilege of the front seat, where the gear stick ground into her back but she was able to stretch her legs through the window, I, several inches taller but lacking the qualifying driver’s license, crammed like a pretzel into the back. During the day, we drove winding remote roads from one sugar-cube village to another, lived on oranges and chorizos and the occasional dive into a bar when hunger struck to splurge on pescaito frito, and had the time of our lives. Good lord, we were young.

(Photo by Shawn)

Sometimes, we would wake in the morning to find the owner of the land on which we had parked standing beside the car gazing down at us in silent bemusement. Often, locals would express concern at the foolhardiness of dos muchachas solas traveling the land without an escort. But despite many gloomy shakings of a variety of older and wiser Andaluz heads, nothing bad happened to us. We were uninterested in the tourist spots where English girls were known to be ready and willing, and when we occasionally did fall into conversation with the local youth, it very quickly became so blazingly apparent to them that our two heads were so firmly embedded in the highest of clouds in the firmament, that they could feel for us nothing but brotherly protectiveness. They would buy us a glass of wine each, tell us legends of bandoleros and gitanos, occasionally ask us to dream of them at night, and wave us chastely on our way. It might have been the sweetest summer we ever spent.

A more material threat than the Spanish boys, at least in our youthfully melodramatic eyes, was the shadow of the Spanish authorities. Those were the vividly technicolored us versus them days of the generation wars, when Americans didn’t trust anyone over 30, and we Brits hoped we d-died before we got old; days when chemical experimentation was popular, and we were darkly warned by those who purported to have experience that in the view of Southern European officialdom, every foreigner under the age of 25 was a potential drug smuggler; when everyone we knew at home knew someone who had a cousin who had a friend who had a boyfriend who had been rightly or wrongly accused of carrying illegal substances and was to this day languishing in a foreign jail; when it was generally acknowledged that to the dreaded Guardia Civil even the whisper of the abominated jipi – a floor-length skirt, an ill-timed eye-roll, heaven forfend a splash of tie-dye – would be a call for trouble as clarion clear as C’mon Baby Light My Fire.

We drove down as far as the southern port city of Algeciras, where we decided to ditch the car for a few days and take the ferry across to Tangiers. There was a customs inspection at the Spanish terminal: although we had nothing illicit to hide, and, truth to tell, wouldn’t have been entirely sure what to do with it if we had, we nevertheless agreed, thrillingly, that it would be unwise to take chances there. So we set about making ourselves look as inconspicuous as possible: we brushed our hair and assumed demure smiles; we hid away the dreamy cotton caftans in which we had been drifting through the days, and excavated from our backpacks the more conventional dresses we had brought expressly for such an occasion. These were conventional dresses early 1970s-style. They were of socially-approved non-iron fabric, were tailored close to the body, and clearly patterned with daisies in bright yellows and sharp tangerines. They also boasted skirts that barely skimmed our upper thighs.

Strange as it may seem, Catherine and I did not understand at the time quite how short our dresses were. We were children of the Sixties, and the only skirts we could clearly remember anyone’s wearing had brushed either the thighs or, more recently, for those counterculturally inclined, the ankles: even our fathers – even my father, for heaven’s sake – had given up complaining about this, and by now the only people we knew who still even appeared to notice the lengths of our skirts had been the nuns at school, and who listened to the nuns anyway? We were beacons of European decorum that day: we were non-jipis.

Properly dressed in such Euro-conservative attire, we sailed safely past the customs officials, and onto the ferry. Still triumphantly prim in our own eyes, we disembarked at the port of Tangier Ville … to find ourselves immediately set upon by a horde of small boys. Very small boys they were, tiny boys in fact, younger than our younger brothers, appearing from nowhere to swarm around us at crotch-level, grinning delightedly and groping us in places we innocent dreamers had barely known we possessed. It appeared that in Morocco, short skirts had not yet made their way into respectability.

We not so much ran, as bolted, to the first hotel we could find, ripped off our oh-so-respectable short dresses and hurled ourselves into the longest, baggiest, most jipi garments we possessed.

It was our first experience of cross-cultural miscommunication.