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Friday 10th September 2004 - 11:24am

A Little Bit Clothes To Home

We all own them. We just don’t talk about them. Washing day clothes. The clothes you are forced to wear when you have absolutely nothing left. The shirt with the bleach stains all over it, the shorts with the nasty hole right over your own nasty hole and the underpants that feel a constant need to travel north.

This is the outfit we wear on washing day, so not only are we forced to do an entirely unpleasant chore, but we are also forced to be uncomfortable, stained and over-exposed while we do it.

So why do we own these clothes? If they’re so damn uncomfortable that we can barely stand to wear them, why not throw them out? Then the second last outfit, which is still bearable, becomes the last outfit, and we don’t have to act like we’re engaged, as we spend all day picking our ring.

But it’s not as simple as that. It isn’t just like we have all good outfits and then one washing day shocker. All our clothes are graded in order of preference, and the washing day outfit is merely the bottom rung. We have our good shirts, our good jeans, our favourite underpants and our good socks – and then there’s the okay underpants that were the favourite underpants before the new ones were bought, plus the socks that are still in good condition, but there are several pairs all the same colour and one of them may have gone missing so you’re not quite sure whether you’re wearing a matching pair. And it just gets worse from there. All the tears, the stains, the poor treatment – it eventually takes its toll. It’s true - just look at Courtney Love.

And still, we don’t throw them out. No, we hang onto them. Not only that, we turn them into a sort of uniform, and wear them out in public.

But while we feel that we’re doing our clothes the greatest injustice by treating them as poorly as we would a pair of tracksuit pants or a hypercolour t-shirt, the clothes themselves are quite grateful. Because while we think that being the washing day outfit is worst thing for a garment to be, they know there is one step worse. That step is - the dipstick wiper. That grotty brown rag in the garage that used to be yellow that you use to wipe the stick after you’ve checked the oil in your car.

That’s the clothing version of hell. Or, at least one of them. The other clothing version of hell is being a dress worn by Donatella Versace.

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