Lost in Translation

BRACES, PANTS & FLATS: You know: suspenders, underwear and apartments

It’s a crisp October. I’m 18 years old and still in awe that I am living my dream come true by attending fashion school in London. Being in the middle of the capital my college has no campus. Instead the university owns several buildings scattered throughout the city within or at least closest to areas of diverse interest to its student body. My two main buildings are located on one end of Oxford Street: world-famous for shopping. In some cases there are literally two or three of the same store: two Gaps, three Zara’s, three H&M’s, and five Starbucks’! And we’re talking flagships, not just boutiques. From my school’s front steps you can see it straight ahead: Selfridges. A six level behemoth of a department store containing, among other things, 1368 designer’s lines (clothing, bags, shoes, cosmetics and accessory collections combined) organized by grand sections all sprawled over an entire city block. Inside is sheer heaven. Besides a section of the entire already hard-to-find collection of Elle Macpherson Intimates they even have a DSquared2 concession! That brand is H-A-R-D to find anywhere let alone in stores.

I feed my incredulity by people watching: I note the endless interpretations of the t-shirt-and-jeans mantra accessorized and exhibited in as many different ways as there are people in the streets. My orientation is filled with students who have mastered the art of individual styling. One student I see in the library has all of his hair shaved off except for an island of ink black and electric blue 4 foot long dreads—are you ready for this—each encased in bubble wrap. I have found my little patch of paradise on Earth and it is simply abundant with epic style and shopping! I drag my mother and oldest sister around the streets thinking isn’t this fabulous? Isn’t everyone so funky, so chic? THAT is fashion right there! I have an embarrassingly euphoric grin plastered on my face, oblivious to the real embarrassment that would shortly ensue.

We walk into a store called NEXT and I’m charmed right down to my socks by the trendy yet grown-up selections their juniors section has. I haul all I’m allowed into the changing room. Satisfied with my newly acquired reflection, I walk out confidently and noticing I don’t see my mother and sister nearby call out: “Mom, what do you think of these pants?” Immediately I notice something a little strange. The store isn’t exactly quiet but there was definitely a change in noise level, some people are looking disapprovingly in my direction, and is that…snickering I hear?!

I feel my face flush a little and say a little thank you prayer that my skin is so dark. I can’t help but obsessively go over my actions in the last two minutes. I am wearing a piece of clothing incorrectly? Was there some weird stain left on the clothes before I tried them on? Is shouting something the British frown upon indoors? The saleswoman then approaches me and remarks
“Those trousers look fine”.
It takes me a moment to process what’s just happened. But I thought they called them ‘knickers’, I think to myself, annoyed. I watched all those British comedies and movies and looked up little pop culture tidbits on the Internet and not once was there a mention to avoid this embarrassing yet avoidable situation by using the correct terminology. You see knickers are equivalent to ‘lingerie’ or other cute girly underwear while pants apply to men and women to mean plain everyday underwear. I chose to live in England for the thrill of living abroad without having to learn an entirely new language. The irony. What else did I need to learn right away? Only shirts button up while a top refers to anything you would wear on the top half of the body. And oh my goodness, the word fanny is NOT interchangeable with bottom the way butt, rump, or behind is. You’d have to travel 180 degrees from the latter’s location to get to the former’s location. Thank goodness I was spared that humiliation.

My ego’s a little bruised but I’m still excited to be in a school that allows me to feel much more independent, I reason. My student halls [of residence] (dorms) is all the way across town and self catering which means I need to take public transport to Uni (College) and cook for myself every day. I love to cook. My careers were a choice among fashion stylist, chef or interior designer/decorator. I picked styling because I figured I can still cook for me and decorate wherever I live exactly the way I want to. Food is definitely something that is universal, a language all tongues can share, if you will. Knowing exactly what I want to cook we head out for food shopping. This at least will be easy, the most I need to do now is get used to the unfamiliar supermarket names: Sainsbury’s, Waitrose, and Tesco to name a few. Even my first trip into the grocery store turns into a vaguely familiar elementary school French lesson where my teacher held up flashcards with pictures of recognizable foods and animals but with strange looking words underneath substituting their English identities. I peek at the labels of foods I recognize by sight but not by name: aubergines = eggplants, courgettes = zucchini, coriander = cilantro. Flapjacks, to my dismay, are not slang for pancakes. They’re these really dense cake-like squares. Swedes it turns out are not just the lovely people up north but are root vegetables that look like round turnips with a deep green top. Chips are crisps and fries are chips. Cookies are biscuits and biscuits are non-existent. (No really, I was laughed at when I tried to explain that they’re remarkably like English scones but they’re not scones. No one could fathom what I was talking about). I decide to play it safe and keep my ears open and my mouth shut.

A few months later I find I’m laughing about how naïve I was. I had just assumed it would be the European designers’ collections and buyers’ decisions that differed from American fashion. I didn’t consider there being a sublanguage for descriptions of garments, their silhouettes or even the stores they’re stocked in. I am so thankful for this opportunity to really live in a fashion world uniquely its own and I’m eager to sample where else it offers its different flavors.