Fashion repeats what was going on thirty years ago. Just as the work of past times—hunting, fishing, sailing—are today's pastimes, so fashion repeats tribal history. Fashion revives the recent past so that it may be purged of impurities. Finnegans Wake makes much of the Washers at the Ford, whose gossip parallels their endeavors to wash the dirty linen of the tribe. Gossip is a re-membering of the tribe: it serves to purify the dialect. The purging of "dear dirty Dublin" involves a good deal of doubling back on the recent past.