Women in Clothes

by Sheila Heti

  FROM: Heidi Julavits

  DATE: Sat, Apr 21, 2012, at 9:25AM

  SUBJECT: Re: fashion survey

  TO: Sheila Heti

  i think these are all great! i’m just going to throw some other questions out there that may cant this in an “identity” direction:

  QUESTION 10 Do you ever find yourself channeling an old outfit of your mother’s (i.e., from your childhood), and is this a good or bad thing? (but maybe we don’t want to drag mothers into this.)

  Also, the idea of sharing clothes—I had a roommate once in my twenties and our closets became essentially conjoined—and even though I was the greater benefitee of this arrangement, the whole idea made me sort of uncomfortable, and I found it to be a boundary I didn’t like negotiating. Thus,

  QUESTION 11 Do you share clothes with friends or roommates?

  and QUESTION 12 What are the rules about “copying” an obviously original look? Say if your friend wears a down vest over a bikini top . . . Can you copy it? Or is it only ok to copy from strangers? xx

  FROM: Sheila Heti

  DATE: Sat, Apr 21, 2012, at 10:19AM

  SUBJECT: others

  TO: Heidi Julavits

  Heidi, I think we should ask Leanne Shapton if she wants to be in on this project. Leanne would be wonderful to get to pass the survey around, as she knows many people in lots of different countries, and many artists, too. Perhaps she could also provide illustrations, if we wanted them, and do the cover and lettering inside.

  Already Leanne has added some good ideas (I sent her a survey, too). She thought there shouldn’t be photographs of the women we’re profiling. That made me start thinking about the book differently.

  I think the one thing we want to steer away from is pronouncements on fashion from people like Coco Chanel or Diane von Furstenberg (“A woman’s style is in direct proportion to her misery” or whatever, i just made that up). I think we’ll want regular women, not only the most fashionable. People who aren’t that fashionable may be quite smart, nevertheless, about what they have on. We should send surveys to whoever we’re curious about and inspired to learn about and hear from. xo S

  On Sun, Apr 22, 2012, at 11:03PM, Heidi Julavits wrote:

  i so admire leanne and would kill to work with her.

  LEANNE First I took cues on how to dress from my brother and drawings from children’s books. Then, as a teenager, from movies. I knew other girls knew more than me. I had subscriptions to Seventeen and Sassy and loved looking at and reading them, but could not relate.

  Then at twenty-eight I bought a bikini with another tomboyish friend. A magazine could never have convinced me to buy a bikini, but the afternoon I shared with this friend did.

  When I started dating my future husband, he was the editorial director of an international stable of magazines. Many of the women he had dated were fashion editors, models, or socialites, women who knew how to put themselves together and wore and could afford beautiful clothes. Women who were photographed. During our first years together he bought me designer clothes, which I wore uneasily.

  I dove into fashion magazines and read them regularly for the next seven years, absorbing the language of promotion and hype and enthusiasm. I met designers and muses and terrifically photogenic people and went to fashion parties and the Met Ball and the Oscars and places where what women wear is noticed and noted. There was constant gushing about clothes and style, and beauty and power. But to me, only a handful of people looked truly great.

  SHEILA A problem I’ve always had with fashion magazines is that women are encouraged to copy other women. While I suspect that many men enjoy copying other men (consider the idea of the alpha male and beta males), and while part of what makes a man “superior” is how close he can get to “embodying manliness” (in clothing terms: the suit), I feel it’s the opposite for a woman. The most compelling women are the ones who are distinctive, who are most like themselves and least like other women. There is no other Marilyn Monroe. There is no other Anaïs Nin. And being as iconic and inimitable as they were would be better than being like either one of them. It’s almost as if fashion magazines don’t understand what a woman wants. I think she wants to be unique among women, a creature unlike any other.

  HEIDI I don’t check out men on the street. I check out women. 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.

  Even when I was very young, I knew I wanted to be a writer, and I wanted to be stylish, because to be stylish was to be poised on the precipice between reality and fiction. I grew up in a house that bordered a private school I didn’t attend. These girls, and the clothing they wore, told stories about places to which I otherwise had no access. To understand their style was to be a tourist in the habits and traditions of a strange world. To watch them was not terribly different from reading a book. I learned that style isn’t what you wear, it’s how you wear it. I learned from one girl that I should wear my big wool sweaters inside out so that the threads and seams were revealed. I learned from another girl that instead of tying my anorak arms around my waist when I wasn’t wearing it, I could tie them with one arm over one shoulder and one arm under the other, so that the sleeves crossed my chest diagonally.

  But style, I also learned, is not about strictly copying others, because style is not transferable. There are too many variables. I once followed a woman down the street in New York. She wore white clogs and a flowered headscarf and a long skirt. She had high cheekbones and a long neck; she looked like an early-twentieth-century immigrant from Eastern Europe who’d just arrived at Ellis Island, though of course she was probably an artist who lived in Brooklyn. I loved her style but knew that I couldn’t pull off a headscarf. My cheekbones aren’t high enough. My neck is too short. But the white clogs, those could contribute a small and beneficial mutation to my existing wardrobe. I bought a pair. Twelve years later, I wear them still.

  JANUARY 8, 2014

  Skype meeting.

  SHEILA: So right now I’m wearing this, like, black silk slip that I wore to bed last night, and then because it’s sort of cold here I put on these black tights, without feet, and then this scarf. Because I was only going to be seeing you guys over Skype, I didn’t feel the need to get dressed today. But I think it looks better than . . . like probably, a year ago, I would have been in a sweatshirt. I don’t know. I basically feel like if you guys came into the house now, I wouldn’t be embarrassed.

  HEIDI: Wait, you would or you would not be embarrassed if we came into your house?

  SHEILA: Wouldn’t. Even though it’s basically pajamas, it’s still an outfit.

  HEIDI & LEANNE: (laugh)

  SHEILA: I have a little more appreciation for the aesthetics of an outfit, and take more pleasure in it. I guess a year ago I thought there would be some big change in me once the book was done, but it’s more like a slight shift in the way I see things. I now feel like—my choices are my choices and that’s good and that’s enough. I realized there was nothing so terribly wrong with me. Whereas a year ago I felt like there was something terribly wrong with the way I approached clothes.

  LEANNE: Right.

  SHEILA: I think other women have that same feeling, too. Yet reading all the surveys makes me see that none of us are doing anything terribly wrong, and that realization gives you the confidence to make deliberate choices.

  LEANNE: I don’t care in the same way about dressing anymore, and that’s interesting to me, and it’s probably got to do with childbirth and having your body torn apart, but I agree with what you’re saying—you just have that thing on and you’re not going to be embarrassed.

  HEIDI: For me what’s changed is, well, I always thought that aspiring to have the right clothes and style meant trying to look like somebody else. But now my aspiration is to look like some former version of myself in a specific time or place. Not like “I wish I was fourteen again, so I’m gonn
a wear hot pants”—not that I ever wore hot pants when I was fourteen—but it’s more about trying to have some sort of emotional connection to a part of myself that I feel I could lose touch with if I don’t re-inhabit it every once in a while.

  LEANNE: I love the idea of a version of yourself.

  HEIDI: It’s not just an age thing, it’s also a place thing. This has been coming up a lot in the last few weeks because we lived in Berlin this fall, and I really don’t like being home. For four months I had worn only what I brought in this one suitcase, and while I never thought, “Ugh, I’m bored, I wish I had my other clothes,” I did have these moments of missing certain items, and occasionally I’d think, “I’m so excited to get home and put them on.” But instead I’ve come home and I just keep living out of my suitcase, which three weeks later I still haven’t unpacked. And those things I thought I missed so much, I haven’t even pulled them out of my closet.

  SHEILA: Why?

  HEIDI: The only analogy is like, when you haven’t seen your boyfriend or your husband or your partner in a month or more and then you see them and you have to have sex with them again. You want to have sex again! But the first time can actually be sort of awkward, and you put it off a bit sometimes, and then you’re like “Fuck it, we just have to have sex now, get this over with.” I’m sort of having that with the shirts in my closet.

  SHEILA & LEANNE: (laugh)

  HEIDI: I open the closet and I’m like, “Oh, I know we know each other really well, but I’m just not ready to have sex with you yet.”

  LEANNE: Have sex with your clothes already!

  LEANNE After those seven years immersed in women’s fashion magazines, I still dress as I always have—in used men’s clothes and lots of vintage—but I can afford better vintage, and can appreciate great design after paying attention to it. I still buy fashion magazines. I cut them up, responding to what I’m drawn to, and paste these clippings into scrapbooks. In this way, I’ve tailored my formerly uneasy relationship to the fashion world.

  JANUARY 8, 2014

  Skype meeting.

  LEANNE: Have I told you about my stoner/gay theory? Like, everything successful has to have some aspect of stoner and some aspect of gay.

  HEIDI: Male or female?

  LEANNE: Both.

  SHEILA: You mean successful in fashion or successful in anything?

  LEANNE: Anything. Just that, if you look at a painting, a book, a room, a meal . . . things that really appeal to me have a certain laid-back quality and also a certain kind of truth and surrender, and I realize it’s because I am not a stoner and I am not gay, yet I probably want to be a bit of both. So now I sort of dress like I want to impart a little bit of stoner into my wardrobe and a little bit of gay. That’s where it’s left me, because they are versions of myself that I’ll probably never be. So rather than how you, Heidi, are going, I want to be a version of me, I’m going, My dream version is just me, but that little bit more stoner, and that little bit more gay. I want to give expression to it in some small way. So like today . . .

  HEIDI: Yeah, let’s talk about the stoner/gay aspects today.

  LEANNE: Today my stoner aspect is maybe these army pants, and maybe the gay aspect is . . .

  HEIDI: . . . the dandy boots?

  LEANNE: I love equestrian wear—there’s a sort of S&M aspect to it. And it’s all a little bit androgynous.

  SHEILA My boyfriend talked about his interest in clothes (and my recent interest) as a “hobby” and said that the important thing about a hobby is that it allows you to relate to people you wouldn’t normally relate to. It gives you something to say to everyone you share that hobby with, which is important—to have something to say to anyone you might encounter in the world. I had never before thought about an interest in clothes as a “hobby” or that this was one of the important functions of a hobby.

  JANUARY 8, 2014

  Skype meeting.

  HEIDI: You know, a couple of years ago I decided I was going to be a gardener—I wanted to have a garden in my backyard. And I’m by no means a professional decorator or a stylist or anything, but I have some, possibly incorrect, sense of myself as a person with an aesthetic point of view. I figured, How hard will it be for me to make a garden? I’ll just go out and plant one. I gave no thought to making things grow, mind you, which I also could not do. My focus was more about how—inside this little container of land—can you create something visually pleasing. Then I realized I had never in my life, not once, looked at gardens! So I thought: Well, okay, where have I put my visual energies, where have I paid attention? And that’s when I realized: I’ve paid attention to women—at the expense of gardens, I guess. How women dress and present themselves is a subject of study, and for better or worse it’s where I’ve put my energies. That knowledge I’d gained felt really sedimentary, really layered, and it gave me more appreciation for the topic of dressing as something worthy of excavation or exploration. Seeing my thoughts about dressing from that angle—of trying to figure out how to grow a garden—ennobled all that learning in a way I’d never considered before.

  LEANNE: Maybe we should call it “Clothing Garden.” (laughs)

  SHEILA: What, the whole book?

  LEANNE: Or the intro. Maybe it should be a German word—Clothinggarten.

  HEIDI: It could be a German compound word!

  LEANNE: And actually, when you think about it, a clothes garden, it does make sense. It’s seasonal, and you do all these things, and then you prune away and you plant stuff and you nurture stuff . . .

  HEIDI: (laughs) It’s true!

  SHEILA: It’s interesting that we’ve all said the same thing of nothing much having changed in the past year. Like, in a nice way, there was no dramatic difference, we just feel a little more confidence and a little more ourselves.

  LEANNE: It makes me think—like the way your hairstyle always defaults to whatever hair you have, there’s probably a default to how individual women present themselves in dress. No makeover’s going to actually work, because you’ll just default to who you are, ultimately.

  SHEILA: What’s been kind of a revelation is seeing that other women think about this stuff not so differently from me, and have some of the same problems, the same anxieties. It makes it a bit more pleasurable knowing that everything you’re feeling you share with other women. It makes the act of getting dressed seem more like a communal thing.

  LEANNE: So thinking back to when you wanted to go to a store to find the book to tell you how to care about your clothes and be stylish and stuff—if this is that book, then what we’re saying is: Don’t bother reading this, you’re fine?

  HEIDI: (laughs) Stop reading here! Read no further unless you want to remain exactly who you are.

  SHEILA: Well, or even that the cultural difficulty of being a woman is that you feel you have to be a certain kind of woman. I experience the conversations in this book as a liberation from that. To me it’s also talking about how it’s okay to have your own identity in the face of all this pressure to have some other identity. Working on the book and seeing women on the street, I immediately began to feel I loved them more because I could see inside them in a new way. I had a new way of interpreting their outsides.

  HEIDI: What reading the surveys made me want are beliefs. Not rules or guidelines or tips, but beliefs. I was struck by how many people had idiosyncratic and highly personalized beliefs about clothing and its role in their lives. To me, that felt so . . . I don’t want to say spiritual, but it felt like people’s habits of mind were on display.

  LEANNE: I think what these conversations do is eliminate a certain amount of nervousness and shame around dressing. We’re surrounded by tons of imagery on a daily basis that says: Here are all these things you should admire, and things you can do to mask your insecurities and body, and you should not admit to feeling weird about this stuff. And this book is one huge admission. People might get some relief with it.

  SHEILA: What kind of relief?

&nbs
p; LEANNE: Just the relief of saying, “Yeah, I’m anxious about this, too.” Or, “Look! Now I don’t have to be anxious about this anymore!” Everyone is capable of feeling intimidated or scared or nervous about what they’re wearing, and feeling judged by or judgmental of others, and admitting to that gives such relief. You can laugh about it.

  COLLECTION

  TANIA VAN SPYK’s dress sets part I

  INTRODUCTION

  QUESTIONS

  The book is based on a survey we invited women worldwide to complete. The survey consisted of an ever-evolving list of questions.

  What is the most transformative conversation you have ever had with someone on the subject of fashion or style? • With whom do you talk about clothes? • Do you think you have taste or style? Which one is more important? What do these words mean to you? • Do you have style in any areas of your life aside from fashion? • Do you have a unified way of approaching your life, work, relationships, finances, chores, etc.? Please explain. • Would you say you “know what you like” in the area of fashion and clothing? If so, do you also know what you like in other areas of life, that is, are you generally good at discernment? If you’re not so sure about your clothing choices, would you say you’re better in other areas, or the same? Can you say where your discernment comes from, if you have it (or where the lack comes from, if you don’t have it), and why? • Can you say a bit about how your mother’s body and style have been passed down to you or not? • What is your cultural background, and how has that influenced how you dress? • Did your parents teach you things about clothing, care for your clothing, dressing, or style? What lessons do you remember? Did they tell you things directly, or did you just pick things up? • What sorts of things do you do, clothing- or makeup- or hair-wise, to feel sexy or alluring? • What are some things you admire about how other women present themselves? • Many people say they want to feel “comfortable,” or that they admire people who seem “confident.” What do these words really mean to you? • Do you care about lingerie? • Do you notice women on the street? If so, what sort of women do you tend to notice? What sort do you tend to admire? If not admiration, what is the feeling that a compelling woman on the street gives you? • If dressing were the only thing you did, and you were considered an expert and asked to explain your style philosophy, what would you say? • What is really beautiful, for you, in general? • What do you consider very ugly? • Are you generally a good judge of whether what you buy will end up being worn? Have you figured out how to know in advance? • When you look at yourself before going out, and you are trying to see yourself from the outside, what is this “other person” like? What does she like, dislike, what sorts of judgments does she have? Is this “outer eye” based on someone you know or knew once? • What’s your process getting dressed in the morning? What are you considering? • What are you trying to achieve when you dress? • What, for you, is the difference between dressing and dressing up? • If you had to wear a “uniform,” what would it look like? • What would you say is “you,” and what would you say is “not you”? • Do you remember a time in your life when you dressed quite differently from how you do now? Can you describe it and what it was all about for you? • What sorts of things do you do, clothing-, makeup-, or hair-wise, to feel professional? • How do you conform to or rebel against the dress expectations at your workplace? • How do institutions affect the way you dress? • Do you have a dress code, a school uniform, or a uniform that you wear for an extracurricular activity? • Are there ways in which you conform to or rebel against these uniforms? • Is it comforting or constraining to have a uniform? • Was there a moment in your life when something “clicked” for you about fashion or dressing or makeup or hair? What was it? Why did it happen then, do you think? • Are there any dressing tricks you’ve invented or learned that make you feel like you’re getting away with something? • What are some dressing rules that you wouldn’t necessarily recommend to others but that you follow? • Are there any dressing rules you’d want to convey to other women? • What is an archetypal outfit for you, one that you could have happily worn at any point in your life? What do you like about it? • Do you ever wish you were a man or could dress like a man or had a man’s body? Was there ever a time in the past? • If there was one country or culture or era that you had to live in, fashion-wise, what would it be? • Do you consider yourself photogenic? • When you see yourself in photographs, what do you think? • Send a photograph of your mother from the time before she had children, and tell us what you see. • Are there any figures from culture, past or present, whose style you admire or have drawn from? • Have you ever had a dream that involved clothes? • What would be a difficult or uncomfortable look for you to try to achieve? • Have you stolen, borrowed, or adapted any dressing ideas or actual items from friends or family? • Have you ever successfully given someone a present of jewelry or clothing that you continue to feel good about? • Were you ever given a present of clothing or jewelry that especially touched you? • If you were totally comfortable with your body, or your body was a bit closer to what you wish it was like, what would you wear? • When do you feel at your most attractive? • Is there anyone you are trying to attract or repel when you dress? • Do you like to smell a certain way? • What do you think of perfume? Do you wear it? • What’s the situation with your hair? • Please describe your body. • Please describe your mind. • Please describe your emotions. • What are some things you need to do to your body or clothes in order to feel presentable? • How does makeup fit into all this for you? • What are you wearing on your body and face, and how is your hair done, right at this moment? • Is there a certain look you feel you’re expected to like that you have absolutely no interest in? What is it? Why aren’t you interested? • What are your closet and drawers like? Do you keep things neat, etc.? • Can you describe in a basic way what you own, clothing- and jewelry-wise? • What is your favorite piece of clothing or jewelry that you own? • Tell us about something in your closet that you keep but never wear. What is it, why don’t you wear it, and why do you keep it? • Is there any fashion trend you’ve refused to participate in, and if so, why? • Looking back at your purchases over the past five to fifteen years, can you generalize about what sorts of things were the most valuable to buy? • Is there an item of clothing that you once owned but no longer own and still think about or wish you had? What was it and what happened to it and why do you want it back? • If you had to throw out all your clothes but keep one thing, what would you keep? • If you were building up your wardrobe from nothing, what would you do differently this time? • What’s the first “investment” item you bought? Do you still own or wear it? • Was there ever an important or paradigm-shifting purchase in your life? • What item of clothing are you still (or have you forever been) on the hunt for? • Do you remember the biggest waste of money you ever made on an item of clothing? • Was there a point in your life when your style changed dramatically? What happened? • Do you address anything political in the way you dress? • Did you ever buy an article of clothing without giving it much thought, only to have it prove much more valuable as time went on? What was the item, and what happened? • Did you ever buy an item of clothing or jewelry certain that it would be meaningful to you, but it wasn’t at all? What was it, and what happened? • How and when do you shop for clothes? • Do you have any shopping rules you follow? • How does how you dress play into your ambitions for yourself? • How does money fit into all this? • Are there any clothing (or related) items that you have in multiple? Why do you think you keep buying this thing? • Is there an article of clothing, some makeup, or an accessory that you carry with you or wear every day? • Can you recall some times when you have dressed a particular way to calm yourself or gain a sense of control over a situation that scared you? • Do you remember the first time you were conscious of what you were wearing? Can you describe this moment and what it was about? • Did anyone ever say anything to yo
u that made you see yourself differently, on a physical and especially sartorial level? • In what way is this stuff important, if at all?