The Decent Skirt.
There was a time when being told to “dress decently” was not a suggestion. It was an important instruction that came with every invitation I received and for good reason.
At the time, if you asked me to dress decently, you were essentially asking me to perform a miracle. My clothes could easily have been mistaken for my nephew’s clothes — mind you, my nephew was about six or seven years old at the time. That should tell you something. I had gotten so used to this lifestyle that, at some point, I genuinely had no decent clothes.
My tops were either cropped or showed a very generous portion of what they were supposed to cover. Sometimes they were both cropped and extremely revealing, because apparently I believed in efficiency. My dresses were so determined to cling to my body that you would think they had signed a contract with it. And my legs? My dresses were strangely allergic to them. They simply could not get past a certain point.
But in my defence, that was the dress code of the places I frequented — and, to some extent, the company I kept. I wasn’t exactly waking up every morning and asking myself, “How can I dress like a respectable member of society today?” I was simply dressing like everyone around me.
Then there was the kitenge skirt.
My mum had bought a large piece of kitenge and had it made into clothes for herself and my sister, and I was given my share to make something for myself. My sister referred me to the fundi who had made her dress, and I went with a very specific vision.
I wanted a long skirt. Not just long — dramatically long. The kind of long where you almost trip over yourself while walking. But there was a catch. The slit was supposed to begin somewhere dangerously close to my waist rather than my knees.
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And because apparently the skirt alone wasn’t doing enough, the top I had designed was equally committed to showing as much as possible. It was cropped, revealing and, looking back now, probably held together by prayer and a few stitches.
I presented the design to the fundi, and she got to work. Eventually, she told me my outfit was ready. Except it wasn’t. The skirt was there, but the slit wasn’t quite what I had requested. And the top? The top was completely missing.
She explained that the remaining fabric wasn’t enough to make it.I remember looking at the fabric she handed back to me and thinking, Madam, are we looking at the same piece of cloth?
Because to me, there was more than enough fabric to make the kind of top I wanted — which, in hindsight, was basically a few strategic pieces of material pretending to be clothing. At the time, I didn’t think much of it. Years later, I realised exactly what had happened.
The fundi was a Mukorino.
Her faith and my fashion choices were clearly not in agreement. I had walked into her workshop asking her to make something that probably violated several clauses in her personal dress code, and she had simply found a very polite way of saying, “I will make the skirt. The rest, you will have to take elsewhere.”
And honestly, I respect her for it.
Fast-forward to the day my mum invited me to a church event. She knew exactly what I was going to wear because, by this point, that kitenge skirt had become my go-to decent outfit. There was just one small problem. The slit. She had looked at the skirt and basically said, “Not in the house of God.”
Without telling me, she quietly took the skirt from my room and gave it to a tailor to fix. The tailor reduced the slit until only a few inches of my leg were visible. And just like that, my rebellious kitenge skirt received a church-approved conversion.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, was how I acquired my first decent skirt.
