The suit is nine years old. It was my mother's interview suit in the nineties, taken in at the waist by a tailor near Zoloti Vorota who asked no questions and charged me accordingly. I wore it to my first casting because I owned nothing else that fit, and the photographer, a serious Estonian who smoked like it was a second job, looked at me for a long time and said: good, now we only have to decide the light.
I didn't understand him for two more years. I kept waiting for the jobs where they'd put me in something: tulle, sequins, the collapsing architecture that fashion calls a gown. Those jobs came and were fine. But the pictures people remembered, the ones that ended up printed and pinned and stolen for mood boards, were always the suit. Black wool absorbs light like it's owed something. It gives the gels nowhere to hide. Under a red wash the suit becomes a hole in the picture shaped like a woman, and my face becomes the only thing the light is allowed to keep.
We tested it properly last winter at Studio Halo: one suit, five lighting setups, nothing else changed all day. Red seamless first, because red is the least patient colour. Then the blue-orange split, which is the flattering one: everybody looks like a film still in split light, it's almost cheating. Teal after lunch, when my face had settled into the day. Smoke in the late afternoon. And last, when everyone was tired and honest, the low-key setup: one hard side light, black on black, nowhere to stand except exactly the right place.
Five setups, one wardrobe, and every frame looks like a different woman with the same spine. That's the argument, really. A wardrobe change alters what you're wearing. A light change alters what you are. Given the choice, and I do insist on being given the choice, I know which transformation I trust.
My mother saw the magazine and said the suit looked better on me than it ever did on her, which is the single most generous sentence in our family's recorded history. I had it dry-cleaned and took it home for Christmas. The suit, I mean. It has earned its own seat on the train.