Pins, clips and trans-generational identities
When in high school and university, my mom was, as her older and critical sister puts it, "a fashion icon". Designing and sewing her own clothes, driving her future mother-in-law crazy with her choice of wedding outfit (burgundy long knit hippy dress and black fake-fur short coat), fashion was an important part of who she wanted to be and how other people (including the nagging older sister) saw her. She wore her almost black hair very long and jewelry was in line with her style: bold and artistic. But as my mother never wore nail polish or lipstick out of some incomprehensible principle, she also never pierced her ears. All through the seventies and eighties she wore the clip-on earrings, some of them made by hand by her similarly fashion aware and creative friends. When I was growing up, the first earrings I secretly tried on, were exactly these. Then the first years of primary school rolled out and one day with my cousin we sneakily took the bus into the centre of town an...