Hooded sweatshirt.

A hooded sweatshirt with a zip fastening. Orange enough for an acquaintance with its wearer to begin some time before the conversation.

Charlie Kaufman’s screenplay specified the colour: the garment was to match Clementine’s newly coloured hair. Melissa Toth chose a stiff, substantial sweatshirt reminiscent of workwear. It held its shape and occupied enough of the frame to avoid being swallowed by its owner’s personality.

It also had a practical use. The film was shot in the winter of 2003, partly on a cold beach. While future audiences would examine the symbolism of the colour, the costume was attending to the preservation of the actress.

Clementine’s hair serves as a calendar: green, red, orange, blue. The film moves between different stages of a relationship, and her hair helps establish which part of the past we have wandered into. Such punctuality is particularly useful in a character who otherwise gives the impression of a natural disaster.

When she first meets Joel, her hair is green and her sweatshirt orange. At the encounter shown at the beginning of the film, her hair is blue, but the garment is familiar. Between these events lies a history neither participant can now remember.

This outward changeability was carefully manufactured. Winslet wore wigs with natural-looking roots; the vivid shades were achieved with dye intended for yarn. Convincing spontaneity required a well-organised department.

In a 2021 interview, the actress said she had kept the wigs and that her children sometimes tried them on. The production had acquired a second life as a source of family heirlooms.

A shooting draft contains a revealing stage direction: a memory begins with the appearance of the orange sweatshirt. Clementine then emerges inside it, and the room materialises around her. A person is reconstructed from an item of clothing. The Department considers this a professionally sound order of attribution.

In this scene, her hair matches the sweatshirt, and Joel compares her to a tangerine. Hence the nickname Tangerine. Affection acquires a colour code.

The garment has a less fortunate history, too. In the film itself, Joel recalls his first sight of Clementine: at the time, the orange sweatshirt struck him as wonderful. He would come to know it all too well, and eventually even hate it.

The sweatshirt did not change during the relationship. This was not forgiven.

Here the object earns its separate entry in the catalogue. At first, it makes someone distinctive; later, it provides a convenient place to lodge complaints. Neither fabric nor zip took part in the conflict, but by the end of a relationship there are usually few innocent possessions left.

In 2010, researchers Justin Feinstein, Melissa Duff and Daniel Tranel showed that patients with amnesia could continue to feel sadness or happiness induced by film clips even when they remembered little or nothing of what they had watched. The cause of the feeling was lost before the feeling itself.

This does not establish that former partners can be deleted according to a price list. The distinction nevertheless matters: forgetting why something hurts is not the same as ceasing to feel the pain.

Material objects, meanwhile, continued their ordinary lives. A September 2013 Nate D. Sanders catalogue offered a costume described as production-used: an orange sweatshirt and red knitted socks. The listing stated that it came with a wardrobe tag and four Polaroid continuity photographs of Winslet. Even oblivion requires supporting paperwork.

In 2017, guests at a special screening in Montauk received replica orange sweatshirts — as keepsakes of a film in which memories are erased. The organisers had thoughtfully ensured that the audience would forget nothing.

In 2023, Heaven by Marc Jacobs released an orange hoodie bearing the name Clementine. There was evidently a market for reminders of how difficult reminders can be to get rid of.