Best-seller author Jay Shetty shared an analogy by one of his friends. He says that grief is like a stone and you carry it like a pocket. You will always notice it, you’ll feel it, you know it’s there. Time goes by and you get stronger so the stone feels lighter.
This analogy allows us to understand that grief doesn’t disappear, and doesn’t go away. The stone will always be there to be felt —without the pressure of days and months passing, hoping for the stone to go away; instead, we learn to live with it because we become stronger and we learn how to establish a peaceful relationship living with this stone in our pocket.
Unlike other feelings and emotions like pleasure, disappointment, or anger, the sense of grief is often associated with the absence of color and modest clothes that cover our bodies. It is this absence of color that visually exemplifies what is happening inside our bodies. It is not a black attire that has sexy or visually interesting components. Instead, it represents the loss of something or someone. A chapter in our lives is ending, and we may not be able to express it with words.
It is no coincidence that there are so many books, schools of thought, and loose thoughts about grief and what happens after someone passes away. From religious beliefs to faith in lives after death, our brain is seeking for answers to questions we have that would help us understand what happens when someone has passed away.
Grief is an excellent example of a feeling that happens internally —through our head, our heart and our body, and it is expressed through fashion. Black as the dress code for mourning traces back to the times of the Roman empire, when the toga-pulla, made of dark colored wool was established as common attire for mourning times.
Throughout history, clothing has served as a visual language for grief.
While rigid mourning dress codes have largely disappeared in Western society, many still instinctively reach for darker colors during periods of grief. However, contemporary mourning fashion has evolved to become more personalized. Some choose to wear items that belonged to their departed beloved ones, others select pieces in their loved one's favorite color, and some commission custom pieces that incorporate elements of the deceased's clothing.
Memorial Fashion: Transforming Grief Through Creativity
When someone passes away, their closet becomes a time capsule—a preserved collection of choices, preferences, and memories. Many who grieve find themselves unable to let these items go, sometimes for years.
"I kept my mother's silk scarves for nearly a decade after she died," says grief counselor Leanne Palmer. "They smelled like her perfume, and wrapping one around my shoulders felt like receiving one of her hugs. I couldn't bear to wash them, knowing her scent would fade."
This feeling of attachment has been explored by entrepeneurs and small businesses who have explored the markets of cremation jewelry —personalized jewelry to preserve the ashes of pets or people who departed.
The Value of Clothes
Much has been discussed around the issue of what factors give value to a piece of clothing. Materials like silk or cashmere would make a garment more valuable, due to the natural worth of these primary sources.
Other clothes are valuable simply for the name of the designer or brand attached to them. A brand’s identity that is built in prestige and sophistication will have a strong reputation amongst its clientele, making the products very valuable. This is why high fashion brands have a very skilled marketing and public relations team working hard to maintain and uplift good reputation.
But memorial fashion looks into the value of clothes, not because of the brand or the material of the clothes, but because of the memories that these clothes carry. This is why the clothes of a departed beloved one may carry a specific value to their friends and family. It is about the memories that were created together, it is about the personal fragrance of the person who is no longer with us. It is about the power that fashion has to take us through the passage of time and make us feel a little bit closer to the person who is no longer with us.
Memorial fashion represents a particularly meaningful intersection of loss and creativity. Designers and artists have developed innovative ways to transform the clothing of their departed beloved ones into new items that honor their memory:
- Memory quilts stitched from favorite t-shirts, neckties, or dresses
- Jewelry created from buttons, cufflinks, or fabric scraps
- Teddy bears sewn from the flannel shirts of a grandparent
- Custom perfumes that recreate the scent of a loved one's favorite fragrance
Textile artist Mara Hoffman, who creates memorial quilts, explains: "When I transform a collection of clothing into a quilt, I'm helping create something that provides both comfort and continuity. It's a way to keep someone's memory present in daily life without the pain of seeing their unworn clothes hanging in a closet."
Historical Mourning Dress Codes
Victorian Era: The Golden Age of Mourning Fashion
The Victorian period (1837-1901) established the most elaborate and rigid mourning dress codes in Western history, heavily influenced by Queen Victoria's 40-year period of mourning following Prince Albert's death.
For women, mourning was divided into precise stages:
- Deep/First Mourning: 12 months of wearing non-reflective black bombazine (a dull silk-wool blend) with crepe trim. No jewelry except jet (fossilized coal), and widow's caps with long veils were mandatory.
- Second Mourning: 9 months of black silk or wool, with less crepe. Small jet jewelry permitted.
- Half-Mourning: 3-6 months transitioning to purple, lavender, gray, white, and soft mauves. More jewelry allowed.
Men's requirements were less strict—typically black suits, gloves, and armbands, which could be abandoned after the funeral for all but the closest relatives.
Children, too, were dressed in mourning attire, creating what historians call "a culture of mourning" that communicated social status as much as grief.
Pre-Victorian European Traditions
Before Victoria's influence, white was often used as mourning attire across Europe—a tradition that continues in some Asian cultures. In medieval and Renaissance periods, widows might wear distinctive "widow's weeds" for the remainder of their lives, particularly in noble families.
Cultural Variations in Mourning Dress
Mourning dress varies significantly across cultures:
- East Asian Traditions: White, not black, traditionally symbolizes death and mourning in China, Korea, and parts of Japan. Simple, unadorned hemp or cotton garments have been traditional, though these customs are evolving with modernization.
- South Asian Customs: Hindu traditions often prescribe white for widows, sometimes permanently in more conservative regions. Following a death, family members may avoid bright colors and new clothes for a prescribed period.
- Middle Eastern and North African Practices: Many Islamic cultures avoid ostentatious displays of grief in clothing, though widows may wear subdued colors. In some communities, blue (associated with protective powers) is worn during mourning periods.
- Indigenous and Tribal Traditions: Many indigenous cultures worldwide have specific mourning garments or body decorations, such as the ochre body painting in some Australian Aboriginal mourning rituals or the cutting of hair in certain Native American traditions.
In times of grief, the clothes we choose to keep, discard, transform, or wear become part of our healing journey. They are tangible expressions of intangible emotions. A full black outfit, a loose pair of pants with an absence of color, a cozy blanket to wrap yourself into and watch Netflix so that —at least for 45 minutes— you are living in an alternative reality. Our clothes are there for us during the process of mourning.
As we move through loss, our relationship with fashion evolves; this journey goes from the preservation of a loved one's garments to the eventual creation of new meaning through what we choose to wear. In this way, fashion becomes not just an aesthetic choice but a powerful tool for processing grief, honoring memory, and eventually, step by step, thread by thread, finding our way forward.
The garments we cherish during grief remind us that while loss may unravel the fabric of our lives, we possess the capacity to weave something new and different, yet beautiful in its own right, from the threads that remain.
.png)