Note: I recognize that my views are skewed by the privilege of being able to think about clothes as fashion and expression rather than just necessity. That privilege is part of a system that excludes and works at the expense of many people in the world. The injustices surrounding clothes are well worth unpacking but will be saved for another essay.
I see clothes as an omen…I see an image of myself and what I’m doing: paying for a coffee, waiting for the train, hunched over my desk, carrying my daughter on my hip—and I realize these little films starring these articles of clothing unfold within a space of time. – Leanne Shapton, Women in Clothes
**
In the fall, my colleague returned from a Congressional meeting and mentioned the suits.
All the young women in the room seemed to be dressed identically: black power suits over bare legs, statement jewelry, scarves wound loosely for pops of color. No flip flops or jeans here – if you held a job in that building the expectation was not only a Master’s degree, but also a sleek black tailor fit, a ritual of dressing up almost like clones.
Her remark led to a conversation in the office about clothes: the role of them in our lives; the importance, expectation, and standards of dress in professional settings; and how perceptions are influenced by what we put on.
We discussed the harmfulness in the centrality of fashion to our western culture. There are impossible beauty standards. There is privilege in being able to see clothes as fashion and not just necessity; that bracket excludes the majority of people around the world. In the U.S., many are held to unfair standards, deprived of jobs on the basis that their wardrobe isn’t professional enough. Shouldn’t people be picked on their skills and character alone rather than for how well they can wear a string of beads?
But for better or worse, there’s no denying that clothes do matter in the western world. They aren’t just a practicality for keeping us warm and decent. We live our lives in clothes. We collect them, share them, scuff our shoes in daily pursuits. They carry memories of what we did while wearing them. They can help to communicate our moods and personalities, have the power to affect our confidence and perceptions. Why else did all the women in that courtroom dress alike?
***
Women in Clothes (2015) is a book of essays, interviews, conversations and portrait series with more than 600 women about the role clothing plays in their lives. Editors Sheila Heti, Heidi Julavits and Leanne Shapton present a stunning case for what dress and fashion signify for women in American culture. From twenties to eighties, from Muslims to atheists, from fashion designers to garment workers in Cambodia, they leave no button undone.
Essay names like “What I Wore to Fall in Love,” “You’re Lying with Your Face,” “The Delirium of Desire,” and “Men Looking at Women,” read more like poem titles. When do you feel most attractive, what do you see in this picture of your young mother, what’s the difference between style versus taste, and what inspires you? The book made me feel hopeful, as though I was not alone in the art of dressing, in both its pressure and allure. These are questions to ponder.
And so I did, as I woke up each morning and went to my closet, as I walked DC in black boots marked by snow salt, as I put on different masks for work and nights out, as I gloriously stripped everything off for sleep. How do we find – or lose – ourselves in clothes? What are the stories we tell?
***
The imprints of time and memory: the butter-soft leather jacket you bought 90% off and wore to a sweaty concert on New Years Eve, and on sidewalks in the city, and everywhere; the red lace dress in a line with identical bridesmaids; the blue patterned pants lost to bicycle grease after rides to work day after day; the new pair of shoes that keeps you looking down at your feet; the magic in a dress that fits like a glove, the color green on a brown-eyed boy.
***
Dressing Rooms, 2007
She stands in her underwear next to pile of blue skirts. It is a week before she starts her first day of high school in Peru, and the uniforms are navy blue, white and puke, all pleats and itchy wool. Each piece is wrapped in plastic like a treat.
In the bathroom mirror, she feels out of balance, in need of something to fine-tune her edges. There is too much of her. She stands at the sink, tucking the cotton shirt in and out of the skirt’s tight band. The fabric sinks into her belly button. She wants to undress. Every day she will have to wear this uniform and people will see her. At least they will all look the same. Two ladies who speak little English measure and prod at her limbs.
“This is too small,” they say. “Maybe a size bigger.”
All the ladies are staring. Her mother is staring. Her mother’s friend, her sister.
“The sweater is kind of itchy,” she says, feeling her throat begin to close.
She pulls the skirt down but it claws at her waist. She wants to be a two or a zero but they give her a six. In America she was a four. Soon she will turn 16. She cannot stop thinking about the numbers.
***
The goal is to strike a balance so that our clothes amplify, not define, our personalities. The messages we send with our clothes and our bodies cannot ever truly be ours alone because the world will always interpret them. We are always, in a sense, dressing for others. Clothes alone cannot create the confidence. They can only enhance what we are already comfortable with.
“We are always asking for something when we get dressed,” writes Leopoldine Core. “Asking to be loved…to be admired, to be left alone, to make people laugh, to scare people, to look wealthy…It’s the quiet poem in the waiting room, on the subway, in the movie of our lives” (Women in Clothes, 24).
Our fabrics decorate the outside of something humming within, something much more worthy of love and time than the right skirt falling just so. Core says: Let the inside pour out of you. Maybe confidence is learning to wear your grandma’s ugly old wool sweaters with the sailor buttons – because they remind you of her, because they hold a history and feel as though she is wrapping you in a hug each time you put them on. And in that way you tell and live stories, through and within the clothes.
***
I was twelve when I began to collect fashion magazines: Teen Vogue, Seventeen, YM, CosmoGirl! My older cousin read them and I begged for the subscriptions that arrived to her house. On a family vacation to the beach in Michigan, my mother let me buy my first.
I took Teen to the beach until the pages were curled and sandy. I lay in bed with the magazine splayed open on my pillow and felt as though I had been welcomed into a brighter, glossier world. I was almost a teenager, almost part of a club that had before seemed elusive, and the pages held potential: the possibility of being the kind of girl who streaked her hair with highlights and ripped her jeans and was so happy.
Even the experience of reading was fraught with the sweetness of perfume samples, ones you could rub onto your wrists and smell all day long. I learned the power of pressure points. I was not tall or skinny like the models in each spread, but here were the secrets to tell me how I could emulate them.
This is what I thought it meant to be a teenager. My interests shifted overnight from my American Girl dolls to lessons in how to present myself, how to fit in and stand out at the same time, how to be original by assimilation. Now I saved my allowance for tighter tees with logos and graphics, for flared jeans ripped at the knee.
Before picture day in sixth grade, I needed sunless tanner. The product was new and all the companies had yet to perfect its glow. I bought a bottle without permission and slicked cream all over my face the night before school. When my best friend called me out on looking like an orange pancake, I felt panicked, as though I had been exposed. Beauty was supposed to be effortless. There is a shame in revealing that you care about your looks, especially at 13; how you interpret what you think the world is telling you to need.
Several years passed before I started to believe fully that I was more than the sum of my parts. I began to realize, a million magazines later, that I was tired of wanting what I didn’t have, tired of the consumerism and search for self-improvement masked by articles touting inspiration and confidence. It was all a paradox; the pages were tailored and glossed by hours and experts. This was not real life.
***
Dressing Rooms, 2013
I brought six shirts to Peru. Six shirts and two pairs of pants and one sweatshirt and two pairs of shoes, and for three months the same six shirts hung on a line to dry in the mountain’s strong sun. I pulled them dirty over my head each morning. How freeing the sensation to have so few clothes. When I returned to the United States, I would throw open my closet doors and think: what did you ever do with so many clothes? The rows of hangers lined by color were overwhelming.
In Ayacucho, I went in pajamas to the tienda across the street for a bag of bread, then pulled on my clothes from the day before. My mind was on the dusty road, the chickens that trailed behind me, the stars nailed against the sky at night, my host mother’s silver-capped smile when I came in the kitchen. My time became a singular call for living with my body as it was, rather than perfecting toward what my body could be. I felt like the right strings had been cut.
My house didn’t have a mirror. For the first time since middle school, I left bare-faced, without even bothering to look at myself. The strength of the sun and days spent on a church rooftop scorched my fair skin and bleached out my hair, but I wouldn’t have been able to tell you this until I returned home and my family shrieked at my tan.
At first I longed for my reflection: If I don’t look, how can I know if I’m okay, and if I’m not okay, how can I present myself to anyone?
But I was unlearning old mantras in the best of ways; no one treated me differently because I did not look like my definition of acceptable. My showers in bone-cold water were infrequent, once a week when I felt my hair thick with grease. The children I taught still played with my curls and told me they were beautiful.
My host mother Luz was in the kitchen, her questions of how I slept already on her lips. She, too, wore the same pink top from the day before. She wet a comb and pulled tiny rivers through her daughter’s hair before we all left for downtown. We filled our bread with fried egg and avocado. We filled the hollows of our bodies, bowed our heads and Luz prayed: Thank you, thank you, thank you. In my head I echoed her. Thank you, for this unbroken imperfect body you have stuck me in.
***
Now I watch real women. As Heidi Julavits writes in her chapter,
“I am always checking out women because I love stories, and women in clothes tell stories. For years I watched other women to learn how I might someday be a woman with a story…”
There isn’t shame in clothing, in style, in fashion. I think we just need to treat their roles carefully, to recognize their multi-layered effects, to not forget the ways in which they can be damaging to our minds and bodies. They are not the only lenses through which we should view one another.
In her essay “The Mom Coat,” Amy Fusselman writes:
“[Y]ou can’t actually make yourself beautiful. It’s similar to writing: what’s beautiful about writing is not the words. The words are a recording of the beautiful thing. The words are a recording of the beautiful thing in the person, the thing that becomes beautified only by action, and ultimately becomes the most beautified only by the most beautiful action of all – love. This thing, this transmitter of beauty, is ultimately unadorn-able and undecorate-able. It is indivisible and it bedazzles” (Women in Clothes).
Now I watch real women because they inspire me. I see that they are not perfect illusions, but imperfectly wonderful. For that moment they walk by me on the street, I get to understand the smallest fragment of their personality because of what they chose to wear that day. I get a fleeting glance into this one moment in their life. They are all shapes and sizes, they are tattooed and drinking coffee, carrying umbrellas, walking dogs in rain boots, dressed for work in black tights or about to jog Rock Creek Park in fluorescent laces.
They are inspiration without Photoshop and advertisements. The real, sweating, breathing, pockmarked, messy-bun individuals who go about their lives.
kate talks dc 