The Assistant

Vintage 1950s robin's egg blue elbow-length nylon gloves, and pale blue wrist-length leather gloves.

I can’t believe I didn’t know it was International Cat Day this week, on Wednesday! How remiss of me. My little ginger Mimi loves to get involved when I am taking photos of clothing – like most cats she is extremely curious, and her antics are often very amusing.

Recently I decided that I needed to photograph all my vintage gloves, as my collection has been growing exponentially with all the vintage pairs I’ve been finding in thrift stores of late. I decided to enter them all into the cataloguing app I use for my hats, to make it easier to see exactly what I have when planning an outfit.

The iPhone app is called 'What’s in my Wardrobe' and has proven indispensable when I am trying to find a particular hat, as they are all stored in different hat boxes. There are various filters to enable quick selection and location of any given hat. The app is not designed specifically for hats; one can also use it for any type of item, as long as one has time to photograph and enter all the data.

Accordingly, I laid out a calico dropsheet and began the pleasurable task of photographing all my gloves. I was clearly having too much fun for Mimi though, and pointing the noisy glowing rectangle thing at something other than herself, so she thought she had better investigate this untoward occurrence immediately.

“What are these long things?” she sniffed curiously. “I don’t know, but I like them, and they are mine – and they will look better if I sit on top of them.”

She did the exact same thing a couple weeks later when I was photographing some new hats, and I could not get rid of my unwanted photographic assistant! At least I don’t have to pay her.