Little Lanterns
A Personal Essay.
I’m very, very late in publishing this—and I hope, with good reason, that you’ll understand. A few months of unusual pain led to an unusual diagnosis, and now another unusual surgery. I haven’t had the mindset to write this without tightening into alarm, so I’ve approached writing with caution. And well, this is the beast that is endometriosis.
I’d always intended to close each month of Moral Threads with an essay—an attempt to metabolise all the stories shared. What began as a way to explore fashion as care has become, unintentionally, a structure of self-care. The red thread between these designers is the way they touch life’s pain with both hands and knead its texture, its process, into something approaching universal beauty—something that speaks beyond the self.
Because of the safety offered to me by each interviewee, I feel comfortable sharing my own story here too, and the ways in which their wisdoms have become little lanterns of orientation, resolve, and stubborn joy as I navigate a particularly thorny chapter of life. Loops of waiting, of uncertainty. Gridlocks of grinding pain. Unknowing, not knowing. Maybe not wanting to know? And yet, from my bed-hospital-tightknit confines, their worlds, and words, continue to wrap around me.
I reflect almost daily on Valériane’s positioning of dress as defiance. For years, like so many chronically ill people, I had arrived at medical appointments looking deliberately dishevelled, as if to say: look at me / believe me / I can’t take care of myself / help. But when I went to my first appointment with my new surgeon, I dressed precisely instead, clutching Val’s words like a talisman, lodged somewhere between skin and fabric, stitched into the very kilt she had made me.
Medicine has long been fascinated by the hysterical woman—by her excess, her desperation, her supposed unreliability. Even the language gives it away: Hysteria. Hysterectomy. A lineage that locates female suffering somewhere between pathology and performance. And within that system, a familiar dynamic can unfold: the doctor as saviour v. the woman as supplicant. For when you are in pain long enough, when you are dismissed often enough, it is frighteningly easy to slip into that posture of helplessness—to become the damsel in distress, waiting to be rescued.
What years of self-advocacy have taught me is that this dynamic is not inevitable. We do not have to be grateful, silent, diminished in order to be treated. We are allowed to question, to insist, to arrive as subjects—NOT victims. Dress, for me, has become one way of rehearsing this refusal: of walking into the room not as a problem to be solved, but as a woman who knows her body, her history, and her right to be heard.
I felt so strong when the surgeon asked me to lift up my clothes to show where the next scars will be—my girl Val—her clothes—had me protected.
When Zeid told me that all he wants is to make women feel beautiful, he railed rightly against fast fashion as a hollow vessel: soulless and careless, frivolous and frail. And I think about this often now, in relation to every piece of clothing that lives in my wardrobe: clothes are not neutral. They communicate in a language inflected by the lilts of their maker: an personal invitation to step into their world, before returning to your own. So I find myself, naturally, choosing designers who honour the female body in all its flux and fluidity—its swelling, softening, tightening, release. Issey Miyake (whose Pleats Please line I swear by for unruly bodies) considered his clothes incomplete until people danced, lived, grew in them. If he wrote the composition, the body is the instrument, and I am the musician.
And then there is Adeju, whose wearable wisdom taught me that clothing can be a form of sovereign intelligence. He speaks often of the violence of being misread, of the pressure to dilute himself as an African designer in Paris—but his garments refuse reduction. They move like negotiations between past and future: ancestral memory, present presence, future figuration. In his hands, cloth thinks through time—and through a body in constant negotiation: between visibility and erasure, between what is legible to others and what remains fiercely private. To dress, through Adeju’s work, is not simply to cover the body, but to assert a way of moving through time and cultures, on one’s own terms and values.
From the 17th of December I’ll be in hospital for surgery, but Moral Threads will continue. I hope you won’t give up on it—because the wisdom each interviewee has shared with me is exactly what keeps me going. These conversations have become small anchors, small lanterns, and I’m grateful to carry them with me into whatever comes next.
I can’t wait to keep sharing their stories with you, and to witness my own growth along the way. Please feel free to reach out with your reflections (madeleine.rothery@gmail.com)—these incredible humans have changed me, and perhaps they’ve changed you too.
As Ram Dass reminds us, “we are all just walking each other home.” <3
