by Sheila Heti
MILDRED WOLSKY STEINBOCK
I see a beautiful woman who spent her life completely unaware of that fact, who was as uncomfortable with her height as she was with the rest of her body. JEANIE KIMBER
COLLECTION
KRISTIN ANTHONY’s bracelets
ON DRESSING
MAGICAL
SADIE STEIN
Though I’ve had a lot of clothes in my life, a few have stood out—not the most beautiful or most flattering, just pieces that, for one reason or another, at a certain moment in my life were invested with special powers—had the capacity to transform me every time I put them on.
The first was from Urban Outfitters. I bought it the August before my freshman year of college. It was a synthetic black party dress with a vaguely ’70s cut, sweetheart neck, and Lycra underdress. The moment I put it on, I saw in the mirror the college woman I wanted to be. Not the nerdy, frowsy frump who’d been ignored by a high school crush and who shopped for clothes with her mom at the Salvation Army, but a sophisticated woman of the world with a curvaceous figure. I first wore the dress to an event for incoming students, and as I donned it, I donned my new persona: confident and assured. I wore the dress every chance I got. I wore it to parties and lectures—whenever I needed to feel pretty or adult or confident. I’m convinced it netted me a boyfriend. Being cheap, the dress soon showed the effects of wear, and its sleek lines were marred by the lumpy proof of my inexpert repairs. But its magic, to me, remained undimmed. Then, when I was twenty-one, I lost the dress somewhere in London. I was briefly bereft. But it was meant to be. The dress’s work was done. It had disappeared, never to be seen again.
It was three years before I found the dress’s heir. Dress 2 was a more sophisticated affair. In fact, it was the most expensive piece of clothing I’d ever owned. It was brown wool, severely tailored, with a tulip skirt that clung, then flared, and a high neckline saved from dowdiness by a keyhole, and a series of gold buttons at the neck and wrist. I coveted Dress 2 for months before saving up enough to buy it on sale. It entered my life around the time I took an office job, and seemed the perfect uniform for an efficient and asexual girl Friday. It became my trademark around the office, and lent itself to the slightly arcane, wisecracking patter I favored at the time. My boyfriend was out of the country that year, and I liked that the dress signaled that I was independent and unavailable. Dress 2, in short, made me feel like a million bucks. Then one day my boss showed up at work and, after casually saying, “I have a new dress,” removed her coat to reveal . . . Dress 2. Albeit on a taller and more stunning frame. I was dumbfounded and hurt. I retired Dress 2 and got another job. In due course, the dress also disappeared. In a move perhaps? Who knows. I combed my apartment for weeks hoping it might turn up, but its work, too, was done.
Dress 3 came into my life at a low point. I’d been nursing a badly broken heart, and was scrawny and ill-groomed. For my birthday, the owner of the clothing shop where I worked gave me a dress I had been coveting for months. Broke, I had been unable to do more than gaze at it longingly. When I opened the box and saw Dress 3 staring up at me, tears came to my eyes. It was the beginning of a new era. Dress 3 is the most utilitarian of the three. It’s a denim shirtwaist dress with a faint primary-colored check and a sash. It’s a sleeper: you don’t notice it, just the woman beneath. When I first got it, I wore it everywhere, at least three days a week. And when I finally started dating, I wore it for dates. I was wearing it when I ran into my ex and his new girlfriend. I was wearing it when I had my first kiss with the guy to whom I would later become engaged, and also when I first met his family. It never failed me.
That dress never disappeared. I know exactly where it is in my closet. It has hung there for more than two years, unworn. This past summer, I pulled it out. I was going on a date—the first I’d been on in seven years—and for a moment, I wondered if the ghostly old magic would assuage my nerves. It was slightly worn around the edges, but it still looked okay when I put it on—a flattering, nice dress. For a few moments I considered wearing it, then unbuttoned it and hung it back in the closet. I needed something new. But what? You can’t force magic.
SURVEY
MANDATES OF PLACE
“I dress to withstand the elements. I dress to be as interesting as the Tate. I dress to insert myself into social strata, to be accepted, to pass.” —CAITLYNN CUMMINGS
ALEXI CHISLER I try to limit buying clothes for myself when I’m at home. This is because when I travel, I often feel like I’m a different person, or I’m willing to try out being a new person. So the clothes I buy don’t usually suit me for very long after I return.
DORETTA LAU My family is Chinese. Once, in Hong Kong, I was wearing a button-down plaid shirt when it was 18°C. Everyone else was wearing woolen turtlenecks and heavy scarves, and a family friend called my mother to tell her I showed up at tea looking like a slut.
ELIZABETH KAISER Everywhere I’ve lived has nudged me into a uniform—clogs look good in Washington but dowdy in New Orleans; fluorescents look amazing in the South but tacky in the Northwest. That’s one of the reasons I hate flying. Whatever you’re wearing when you get on the plane looks terrible once you’ve arrived at your destination. Vacation packing is a chore for this reason. I never pack the right outfits.
MADELEINE STACK I went to art school and was suddenly surrounded by devastatingly cool people. I had to learn to dress one way for up to forty-eight hours as life became much more spontaneous. I had to be dressed for any eventuality.
POPPY TOLAND My friend Emily and I were traveling in southern China. We went to a village, Shidong. The girls showed us these beautiful embroidered belts and waistcoats they’d spent days and days making and were incredibly proud of, and their silver jewelry and headdresses. Before, I’d always thought being overly interested in fashion and spending a lot of time, money, and effort on looking good was frivolous and to be avoided. After that visit, Emily and I decided that dressing up was an essential, human, female behavior and that it turned life into a celebration.
GISELA WILLIAMS Berlin winters are indescribably oppressive and endless. From late November to March, the city is a place of pure darkness. One day, on a fall trip to the States, I saw a pair of UGGs covered in bright blue sequins in a shop on Broadway in Manhattan. I have always hated UGGs, I swore I would never buy a pair, but I immediately bought them. No matter how dark it is outside in Berlin, my UGGs sparkle like enormous sapphire disco balls on my feet.
TASHA COTTER I once spent a summer in Paris. Slowly little cultural details began to sink in. French women focus on skin care. They present a more natural version of themselves to the world. I adopted these things into my life. It may sound silly, but I even stopped drinking soda. I drank more water. I was hungry for a way to live, and in Paris I had found something like a code to go by.
ANAHIT ORDYAN Most Armenian women like to be dressed up. An American once told me her impression was that the women in Armenia are going to a theater performance early in the mornings, not to work.
LEIGH MCMULLAN ABRAMSON Until I was fifteen, I did not care about “street clothes” because I only thought about what I looked like in the ballet studio. I did have some amazing leotards back then. We all competitively ordered them from a seamstress in New Jersey. They would have velvet on top around the boobs and cotton on the bottom, or be shiny with keyhole backs. I deeply regret not having saved them, but I threw them all out the day I quit, in a moment of catharsis. Anyway, after I quit and went to high school, I realized that I needed actual clothes. My first day at the new school I wore brown corduroy overalls and Doc Martens because my mother told me it was cool. I had no idea. I got to school and all the girls were in Clueless outfits. I was mortified.
SUSAN SWAN I think my sense of style took a great leap when I was at McGill University in Montreal. I was in a cosmopolitan city for the first time in my life and far away from my traditional family. I could suddenly be myself, and I loved the feeling of freedom. I was six-tw
o and I had this extremely short boyfriend and he had two extremely tall friends. We used to go everywhere together and people expected me to be with one of the tall men. The four of us would do an umbrella dance at parties. I’d swing around on the arms of the big men (all of us dancing with opened umbrellas) and then would end up kissing the little guy. People were shocked. It was a lot of fun playing with their assumptions. I had been a shy, awkward teenager. After the umbrella dance, I never looked back. A sense of personal style and learning to use my height for theatrical effect came together at that time.
INGRID SATELMAJER When I was eight, my family moved from the New York City area to the Finger Lakes region. We left behind shopping malls for cornfields and cow pastures. I showed up at a one-room schoolhouse—a place where the boys would spit onto a wood-burning stove in the winter—wearing a dapper three-piece outfit, tan skirt, tan vest, patterned blouse, and a tan beret. I can’t remember ever wearing that outfit again. When my best friend from Pearl River showed up to visit the next year, my mom made us matching calico dresses with bonnets. We wore them to church.
ANA OTTMAN After my divorce, I moved from stuffy Washington, D.C., to Austin, Texas. I started to experiment with showing more skin and wearing more color. Now when I look at pictures of myself from D.C., I feel like I’m looking at a stranger in these dark, professional clothes.
JUSTIN VIVIAN BOND When I moved to San Francisco, in my twenties, I finally let my hair grow and began expressing my gender in a much more honest way. I started wearing skirts and dressing a lot like Elizabeth Montgomery on Bewitched. Then I moved to New York and started playing in rock clubs and wearing harder, more rock looks that were appropriate for the clubs and punk bars in the East Village during the ’90s. Now I only like to wear clothes that are “aggressively neutral”—serious tailoring but mostly consisting of colors that resonate with sand and the sea.
SOPHIE ZEITZ I spent a year in boarding school in Maine. The school was very small and remote, and so different from the public high school in West Germany (backcombed hair! hot-pink lipstick! blue eye shadow!). I did not know anything about the fashion structures and codes in a small American prep school, where the cool people were into the Grateful Dead. When my mother picked me up at the Frankfurt airport a year later, her heart must have sunk. I was wearing tie-dye, baggy clothes, Indian jewelry, and no makeup. She did not comment on my new look, but a couple of weeks later she got me a set of black underwear. To me, this seemed an awkwardly frivolous object. White cotton had been the thing to wear in Maine.
SAADA AHMED The major turning point in my own personal style was when I lived with my college roommate Barbara from Spain. She showed me how just because things look bad on a hanger doesn’t mean they will look bad on you. Then I went to Madrid with her for four months, and seeing how people dressed there, and how free they seemed, really made an impression on me.
KRISTI GOLDADE When I was fresh out of undergrad (wearing baggy dresses and combat boots), I went to live and teach in Ukraine. The women there bought a few expensive outfits and took good care of them. You’d wear your nice outfit to work and the minute you got home, you’d hang it up and put on sweatpants. About a month in, the supervising teacher took me aside and asked that I wear more feminine clothes. I was so ashamed that the next weekend, I traveled solo to the capital and bought a new wardrobe: high-heeled boots, shiny black pants, sheer tops. After that, people trusted me more and let me into their homes and got to know me as a person. Some of my fellow Peace Corps volunteers gave me such grief for wearing these clothes and makeup. One girl proposed they nickname me “Rita Hayworth.” They continued to wear their Tevas and bulky backpacks and to think they were better, as if their staunch individualism made them more American and therefore better women.
COMPLIMENT
“DRESS”
Bookstore, bestseller table. A woman helps her friend choose a gift.
STARLEE: Your dress is amazing.
FIRST WOMAN: Thank you!
SECOND WOMAN: It’s homemade in Slovenia. She’s from Slovenia. She has a wonderful friend. She makes all of her dresses. . . .
STARLEE: Looks perfect.
FIRST WOMAN: I’ll tell her! She’ll be happy.
SECOND WOMAN: It’s totally for her body. The way they do it over there, the women have all their clothing made. It’s like, this isn’t off the rack.
STARLEE: Is that common?
SECOND WOMAN: Yes, it’s what the women do.
FIRST WOMAN: It’s not so common anymore.
STARLEE: How did you guys meet?
SECOND WOMAN: We met at a course here in New York.
FIRST WOMAN: I work in pharmaceuticals.
SECOND WOMAN: I’m a therapist. Can I give you my card? This is great! Things are supposed to happen, in this moment in time.
COLLECTION
LISA NAFTOLIN’s swimsuits
CONVERSATION
MAYBE A LOT OF PEOPLE DON’T DO THIS
LY KY TRAN as told to Heidi Julavits
I’m originally from South Vietnam. My father had been a lieutenant, then in 1975 he was captured, when he was eighteen or nineteen. He remained a prisoner of war for ten years. Then he met my mother after he was released, and they had my three older brothers and me. We had the opportunity to come to the United States in 1993 through the Humanitarian Operation program. I was three. Our apartment was on the border of Ridgewood and Bushwick in Brooklyn, and we still have that apartment. When we first got here, nobody knew the language, so it was really tough for us. The way my father referred to objects was by their brand name. He would say, “Oh, look at this Whirlpool that we have,” in reference to the refrigerator. Our sewing machine was “the Mitsubishi.”
I think it was his way of becoming more Americanized. If he would write letters back home, he’d say, “We just got a Whirlpool.” Back home there was definitely no refrigerator. Something about the brand name made it so legitimate: We’re in America, we have this brand-name thing. Even though we found it on the street—nobody had to know!
My father, he took night courses to learn how to speak English, and he eventually got a degree in computer literacy. But then he couldn’t find a job at all. My mother sold every single bit of jewelry she had, but we were emaciated, we were starving, and there was no Vietnamese community here in New York City. It was very difficult to find a Vietnamese person to speak to. We arrived in the winter and I remember my brother, his fingertips turned blue. There’s this disease called Secondary Raynaud’s Disease, it’s sort of like frostbite, your blood vessels constrict to the point where there’s just no blood flowing to the tips of your fingers. We had to go to the hospital. It was really frightening.
We found work about six or seven months after we arrived, and it was through the one Vietnamese friend my father knew. The friend said, “There’s this great opportunity, you can make so much money from it.” So this person came to our home and spoke to us. He was very clean-shaven, and had on a suit, and he sells us this idea, this American dream: You can become rich doing this! And my father said, “Yes, sign us up! Where do we go, when do we begin?” And he said, “No no no, that’s the great perk of this program, you don’t actually go anywhere, we bring everything to you.” Which, of course, that makes it even better! But it was just to cover up their operation, because the government wouldn’t be able to find out a single location where this was taking place.
So the next weekend we get this huge shipment—about six boxes, huge cardboard boxes—and inside were these different types of fabrics. My father called this guy and said, “I don’t really know how to do this,” and they said, “Right right right, we’re going to get you this brand-new Mitsubishi sewing machine, and an iron—we’re going to get you all these things.” Little did we know that we actually had to pay them back for these things with our first month’s work.
So we had to read the instructions, which were in English, on how to make a cummerbund or how to make a tie. My brothers were enrolled in s
chool, so they were starting to learn the language, and my father was very smart. He immediately figured out the quickest way to make these things. You separate the materials, you put all the materials together in the shape of a cummerbund, and I will sew, and you will take these cummerbunds coming down the bottom of the sewing machine and separate them, and cut them up using a blade. We would cycle. When one of us got tired of doing one thing, we’d be like, “Okay, your turn!” I don’t remember exactly the figures, but that first night my parents and three brothers and I made about three hundred cummerbunds.
My father called the guy and he’s like, “I have such good news for you, in one night we made so much! Can you please tell me how much that would earn us?” And the man says, “Oh yeah, that’s amazing! I think you get about . . . twenty dollars.” And my father said, “I’m sorry . . . what? Wait, I don’t understand.” And the man’s like, “Yeah, yeah, twenty dollars, it’s really good money.” So my father, he’s completely devastated, he says, “You lied to us, why? This is not a lot of money. My entire family worked. We didn’t even sleep!” The guy says, “I’m sorry, welcome to America, this is the way it is.” So my parents had no choice. They didn’t know how to speak the language. This was their only connection to American society or whatever.
When my brothers and I found out how much money we made through the telephone call, we were like, “Oh my god! How many bags of chips would that get us? Ice cream, we can have ice cream!” We were so excited. But we saw the looks on our parents’ faces, and we were like, “Wait . . . you’re upset? But we’re so happy! What’s going on here?”
