by Una LaMarche
Now that I’m in my thirties and have a child, most of my purchases are of a practical nature, even though as a kid I distinctly remember watching my parents ooh and aah over dish towels and historical novels they received as gifts and making a mental note:
Stay cool, self. Don’t be that guy. Always demand amazing toys and salacious Hollywood autobiographies!
But age has a way of humbling you, and also I legitimately want socks for Christmas. I don’t see why this is so hard for my inner child to accept.
Of course, there are times when I look down into my weeknight drugstore basket and see my merchandise the way a stranger might, nothing more than a depressing sum of its parts—like the time I stood in line behind a man in a West Texas Walmart as he bought a loaf of white bread and a box of bullets. I judged him then, but are a bottle of Drano and a discount double-feature DVD of Tom Hanks movies really any better?
Hey! these items say, I enjoy bathing my seventeen cats while sobbing uncontrollably to ’90s romantic comedies!
Or: Cutting locks of my own hair to send to Tom Hanks has really done a number on my drain!
At least I wasn’t also buying condoms. I know I should be cool about it by now, but no matter how old I get, buying condoms is never not embarrassing.
First you have to find the condom aisle, which is different in every drugstore (in the worst cases, they are stored right in front of the pharmacist, who stands there and watches as you silently weigh the pros and cons of ultrathin vs. ribbed). If there is someone already standing in the condom aisle but not buying condoms (say, a fresh-faced teenager perusing the feminine hygiene products or an elderly man looking for Gold Bond . . . hypothetically) you have to stand there pretending to look at something else and wait them out. By buying a box of condoms you are announcing to all strangers in view: I am planning to have sex soon. If you linger before choosing, you are announcing: I am deciding what specific type of sex I am going to be having soon.
Of course, worse than strangers not buying condoms are strangers who are buying condoms. Right next to you. Standing next to a stranger in front of the condoms is not only saying, I am planning to have sex soon. It is saying, We are both planning to have sex soon. And if one or both of you have penises, you have to send out extra brain-wave messages to any other strangers who might be watching: This is not the person I will be having sex with soon. Why would we buy twenty-four condoms just for today? That is clearly too much. Even for a nymphomaniac. Which I am not. He might be, though. Who knows? Ha-ha-ha. Please kill me.
Then, once you finally have your condoms and have fled the aisle, you must check out. You are forced to actually hand the condoms to the checkout person. Here, you are saying. These are the condoms I have chosen with which to have sex soon. One of them will soon be in contact with my genitals. Please hold it for me while I look for my wallet.
Condoms and Drano are actually among my more exciting purchases these days. The child who once demanded a make-your-own-dollhouse kit that she started and promptly put aside in order to tattoo her Barbies with obscenities must be weeping at the fact that I will gladly drop one hundred times her weekly allowance on an ergonomic desk chair, or that my Christmas lists now include acupuncture treatments, with as many exclamation points as I once reserved for troll dolls.
But I like to think I learned something over the intervening years—something that certainly does not require thousands of dollars of credit card debt or a closetful of ill-fitting pants to absorb. The things that make me truly happy can’t be bought, at least not outside of an illegal black market or Harry Potter wizard store. My husband. My son. Thunderstorms. Shooting stars. Sleeping in. The ocean on a cloudy day. A flattering sailor suit for a woman.
Some things are just too beautiful to be owned.
Designer Impostor
My husband, Jeff, and I share a pair of sweatpants. On me they are big and roomy; on him they are as tight as ’70s gym clothes. For me they are sleeping sweatpants and eating sweatpants, and every fourth Monday or so they are my half-assed yoga-DVD-doing sweatpants. For Jeff they are his playing-my-nerdy-war-game-on-the-Internet sweatpants and also his I-don’t-feel-like-putting-on-underwear sweatpants. Sometimes they are my I-don’t-feel-like-putting-on-underwear sweatpants, too. We both go commando in these sweatpants, often without washing in between. And yes, since you ask, the magic is gone.
You can wipe those tears of jealousy away. I’ll wait.
I don’t think there is a more perfect item of clothing than sweatpants. They are stretchy and comfy and perfect for all occasions. Or at least, they will be once the genius who popularized formal shorts finds a way to market formal sweats (come on, asshole, you owe us).
My very first pair of sweatpants made me so happy that I wore them for first-grade picture day.
My next pair of sweatpants was my so-called “warm-up” sweats for high school track. Underneath them I wore tiny shorts made of factory-rejected Glad Cling Wrap, which was an added incentive not to ever take them off. Long after I quit track I kept my sweatpants. They came with me to college. They absorbed the smoke from my first joint and did not judge me when I gained ten pounds in my first semester (probably a direct result of the entire blocks of cheddar cheese I would consume while stoned). They became my study sweatpants and then, senior year, my mourning sweatpants when I first got my heart broken for real. The summer after college I cropped them, because nothing is sexier than cropped, saggy sweatpants. I took to wearing them to the corner bodega with tank tops and those flimsy Chinese slippers, and as I stood at the register clutching my toilet paper and Cheez Doodles, I noticed that not even the old men sitting outside on milk crates with their ten a.m. beers were looking at me. They became my invisibility sweatpants. My freedom sweatpants, if you will. One day, under circumstances that I have since forgotten or blocked out, I discovered that I could pull the elastic waist up over my boobs and create a strapless, cropped-sweat unitard. I wore it on my first date with Jeff.
Kidding. He wishes.
I don’t have any photos of these magical sweatpants, because they were too awesome. Their beauty could not be captured on film. When a hole began to form in the crotch circa 2007 I thought, Yesssss, now I don’t even have to take them off to pee! What I didn’t realize is that it also meant I couldn’t wear them to greet the Thai deliveryman anymore. Eventually, and with great sadness, I got rid of them. Which brings me to my marital sweatpants.
Jeff bought them a few years ago, for himself, foolishly thinking that I would not fall in love with them. They’re not much to look at—gray, bulky, nondescript but for an Old Navy logo on the left hip—but they are lined with cozy, fleecelike cotton and when I put them on they sink down to the floor, pooling around my feet so that it looks like I’m melting. The baggy hips conceal even the most egregious PMS bloat, and I could probably walk out of a grocery store with five pounds of potatoes hidden in the soft, elephant-like folds of the ass. They are my clothing nirvana.
I’m telling you this not for the evocative mental images, but rather to underscore the point that I don’t belong anywhere near high fashion. It isn’t that I have no style—I had a rocky adolescence, sure, but Jeff recently described my look as “the neurotic best friend character in a mid-’90s rom-com,” the highest compliment I have been given to date. It’s more that, while I covet clothing, I can’t shake my deep belief that the fashion industry is, for lack of a better word, dumb. I know: there goes my Vogue profile. But it’s probably for the best, as my sole pair of designer shoes was stained a fetching shade of brown after I donned them to stomp through mud at a friend’s rustic wedding, and now they look as if I wore them for an America’s Next Top Model challenge that required me to climb—fiercely!—out of a porta-potty. Also, I can’t pronounce a lot of the high-end brand names. When I try to say Proenza Schouler, it sounds like I’m having a stroke. And, hey, Monique Lhuillier: is it Lull-ee-yay? Loo-lee-yer?
Lwee-lee-air? I guess you can’t just go by Monique because of Mo’Nique, huh?
But I digress. The sad truth is that although my fashion history includes a silk tapestry-print vest worn backward in honor of Kris Kross, I love clothes. I loooooove them. Not just the ones made out of performance fleece, either; someday, I aspire to own things that I call “pieces” because they are classic and tailored, not because they’re secretly held together with staples. And, like any normal woman who has been conditioned by the media to hate herself deeply and who turns to retail therapy in the hopes of finding that one elusive purchase that will heal her pain forever (and also maybe make people mistake her for a taller Natalie Portman), I spend a truly astounding amount of time fantasizing about the wardrobe I would have if I (a) had the money and (b) had the kind of grace that would ensure that none of my pants could ever be described using phrases like “oatmeal encrusted” or “wet around the crotch area for unknown reasons.”
I fully identify with fashion’s allure, and I appreciate its ability to transform; without fashion, after all, there would be no makeover shows, which would be a travesty, because I get a nice dopamine buzz whenever someone walks out from behind a curtain in a tasteful pencil skirt and her family gasps and cries. Also, no one would ever use the word “reveal” as a noun. I don’t have a problem with people wanting to look better and feel good about themselves. I do, however, have a problem with people (specifically women) feeling pressure to look like sixteen-year-old Ukrainian models.
And this is where my problem with the fashion industry really comes into play. Because the way it’s set up now, a small group of the extremely wealthy creates inordinately expensive clothes that are overwhelmingly made to flatter clothes hangers. That’s not a slur I made up for models, by the way; I’m being literal. I once read a piece in a fashion magazine in which a designer was actually quoted as saying that the average body distorted the shape of clothes, and that they were designed to hang beautifully, not cling stubbornly to, you know, actual human flesh. Imagine if someone said that about a car: “Sorry, a ‘real’ body kind of interrupts the flow of the dashboard, ma’am. Is there maybe an underfed child who could drive this instead of you?”
Then there’s the fallacy that fashion lets you express your true self. I mean, sure it does, if you accept the fact that someone else is deciding for you who you should want to be. Every season, there are trends that trickle down the totem pole, from Prada to J.Crew to Lane Bryant to Walmart. (I like to think it’s the fashion equivalent of a papal conclave, involving Anna Wintour and the Olsen twins, and that everyone wears Star Trek glasses and plays air guitar like those futuristic elders in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.) All of a sudden, everyone is inexplicably dying for tartan jeggings or neon midirompers or the sturdy orthopedic sandals my mom’s elderly Polish cleaning lady wears. (That last example actually happened for the entire summer of 2011, and I saw them recently on Dakota Fanning. Dakota Fanning!) So consumers, regardless of their finances, end up looking more or less alike, and yet supposedly everyone is simultaneously expressing their unique and innermost soul sparkles. This is what The Matrix was about, people.
After reading the previous paragraphs, you might be thinking, Hey, you seem pretty biased, lady. You habitually wear sweatpants out of doors. I don’t think you should write about fashion, and also, I don’t think you watched The Matrix very closely. And you would be right.
But that didn’t stop me from going to New York Fashion Week and getting doused in glitter confetti while close enough to high-five Joan Collins. Because through a series of errors in judgment (mostly mine but also Arianna Huffington’s) I was, for a brief period circa 2010, considered a—wait for it—fashion critic. I didn’t think I was even eligible for the title, seeing as I once owned and frequently wore a pair of salmon-colored shortalls, but thanks to a stint recapping Project Runway for the Huffington Post, I currently have literally tens of people who care what I think about style (that’s French for “style”). This makes me both a hypocrite and a terrible role model. But it is a fact that Tim Gunn once complimented my sandals, so here are some professional fashion tips, from me to you. . . .
HOW TO LOOK LIKE A SEMIPRESENTABLE ADULT AT LEAST MOST OF THE TIME, BY NOTED FASHION CRITIC/HUMAN CLOTHES HANGER UNA LAMARCHE
Don’t Try to Look Like a Sailor
First of all, I don’t know who decided that wearing white pants was a thing. Unless you live inside a Ralph Lauren ad among nothing but sun-bleached rocks and immaculately scrubbed yacht decks, in a land where everyone is freshly waxed and possessed of a bounty of flan-colored thongs, white pants are not your friend. Secondly, anchors add about eighteen pounds, depending on the size of your boat (not a euphemism). Finally and most importantly, not even sailors look that good dressed as sailors. You* credit On the Town for your sexual awakening without realizing that Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly are sexy because they’re Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly, not because of their dress whites. Remember that third guy? The much-less-attractive one? How did that little diaphragm hat look on him? The prosecution rests.
Tell “Dry-Clean Only” It Can Go Dry-Fuck Itself
Fact: no one actually understands the process of dry cleaning. The cool hanger carousel totally sells it, and we fork over twelve dollars to clean a forty-dollar sweater, because the all-caps label ordered us to.
I like to picture dry cleaning as some combination of Breaking Bad’s meth lab and an antigravity chamber, in which clothes spin suspended in midair as the stains lift off like flights of doves made from a sludge of red wine and cake frosting. But no. A quick Google search reveals that dry cleaning happens inside a machine that looks suspiciously exactly like a washing machine, filled with chemicals that are decidedly wet. Hmm-mm. Simple coincidence, or massive con job? Before you decide, I’ll leave you with this nugget of dry-cleaning history from Wikipedia (emphasis mine):
The ancient Romans used ammonia (derived from urine) . . . to launder their woolen togas. . . . These laundries obtained urine from farm animals, or from special pots situated at public latrines.
Listen, designers, if I could clean my formalwear with pee, I’d do my own laundry at home while taking a shower. Put that on your label and dry it.
Rethink the Basics
While trends come and go, the general fashion consensus seems to be that every stylish woman needs a small selection of well-tailored, neutral, presumably “dry-clean only” staples. Surely you’ve read a fashion magazine article or two hundred describing in evangelical rapture the virtues of things like a sexy yet conservative black sheath dress, the “perfect” white button-down blouse, a pencil skirt tight enough to double as a gastric band, or a classic wool peacoat.
I own none of these things. Instead, my closet is a Muppet-colored rainbow of impulse purchases that never paid off: the hot pink Betsey Johnson miniskirt so short it barely clears my labia, found on fire sale for twelve dollars; the purple harem pants that look like something Grimace would wear to a Turkish bathhouse; the glittery bolero that makes me look less like a flamenco dancer and more like a flamboyant Amtrak conductor. When I need to dress for something that requires an air of gravitas—say, a work meeting or a funeral—I have to go shopping, and inevitably, while searching for an appropriately grown-up item, my eyes fall upon a festive poncho or a pair of bright yellow track pants, and the cycle starts anew.
I have accepted that I will never be the type of lady who owns something presentable in the color beige or who can walk more than a few steps in a pair of four-inch heels or who matches her bra with her underwear more than five percent of the entire calendar year (and only then by accident). But I have come up with a revised list of basic purchases that can prevent people like me from experiencing frequent sartorial shame in the face of non-Halloween events:
Women:
1 pair fitted jeans, low-rise enough so that you can eat a whole pizza and still feel good about your legs
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10 of the most flattering cheap T-shirts you can find, in colors that run the gamut from “papal audience” to “Pride Week”
1 knee-length shirtdress that makes you feel like an impossibly fetching librarian
1 nice dress that does not require constant boob shifting or more than one pair of Spanx, and also does not incorporate any of the following into its design: giant chest rosette; feathers; sparkle belt; ombré; chain print
1 pair cute flats you can walk twenty miles in
1 pair boots you can wear with both dresses and jeans
1 pair dressy heels that don’t give you bunions, flesh wounds, or scoliosis
1 purse that can hold both a book and a sandwich
Men:
1 pair dark jeans not large enough to conceal a canned ham (not a euphemism) in any area
1 suit that makes you do a sexy James Bond pose when you look in the mirror
At least 3 T-shirts with no writing, artwork (this category includes tie-dye), team or brand name of any kind, anywhere
1 button-down shirt with no visible stains
1 classy V-neck sweater (trust me)
1 pair sneakers
1 pair dress shoes
0 pairs Adidas slip-on shower sandals
Everything else is just gravy.
Embrace the Granny Panty
I harbor the delusion that I might, at any time, in any place, be required to strip down to my underwear. This belief is the driving force behind my daily selection of lingerie. Better not wear the threadbare Hanes with all the crotch holes, I think, furrowing my brow. Just on the off chance that the FBI raids Ye Olde Bagel Shoppe while I’m waiting for a cronut and needs to check if I’m wearing a wire.
