Women in Clothes

by Sheila Heti

  PAIGE V. LYNN When I moved from L.A. to D.C., I had to buy clothes that accommodated actual weather. I also started working in politics, and I received a lot of conflicting advice on how a professional female lawyer should dress, including a debate about the necessity of stockings at all times. I heard that ponytails, braids, and hair worn down were “too sexy” for the workplace, and I was told by career counselors that at certain conservative firms, ladies should never wear a pantsuit, lest you remind some elderly hiring partner of Hillary Clinton. I have officially stopped caring, and the only rule I adhere to is closed-toed shoes in court and a blazer at all times in the office.

  ALICIA BERNLOHR My roommate gave me a black Dolce & Gabbana skirt suit that was a gift from her old boss at Merrill Lynch. Her boss was a really successful but kind of evil female stockbroker. She was brilliant but ruthless! At one point, she gave my roommate a few things she didn’t need anymore, including this gorgeous D&G suit. Apparently she said, “I’m giving this to you, but you can’t ever sell it. I’ll know if you do!” The suit was too big for my roommate and she eventually quit the job. But she was afraid (karmically) of selling the suit, so she gave it to me. It fits me perfectly. When I put it on, a weird sort of heightened ambition comes over me. I’ve never owned something so expensive and beautifully cut. It makes me feel like I’m channeling this bad bitch from Merrill Lynch. I’ve worn the suit to two job interviews, and I’ve gotten job offers each time! So the magic really works.

  PROJECT

  YES? | VARIOUS WOMEN

  ON DRESSING

  I DO CARE ABOUT YOUR PARTY

  UMM ADAM

  What I think of as my style is very different from how many other people view me and my style. If you saw me outside my home, you would see a lady draped in loose clothing of dull colors (I wear mostly a jilbab, or loose pants and a long, very loose shirt with a big hijab covering my head and chest, covering almost to my navel). Some see this style as extremist, some see this as oppression, some see it as out of style, not knowing what style is. They think it’s old-fashioned. Some see me as being very pious and religious. But I don’t see myself or my style in any of these ways.

  I feel life is very precious and there is a lot to be done. I don’t have time to spend or waste worrying about how I look and what people think about me based on my clothing. I believe the purpose of clothing, as defined by God in the Quran, is to cover your body and for beautification. As long as my body is covered properly, I am fine. As for beautification, I believe it is very different from the way women understand it today. It does not mean making your body attractive (especially to the other gender). Clothes beautify you by covering your body, giving you human dignity. Animals don’t wear clothes. The earliest humans covered themselves with leaves and animal hide. As the human race became more and more civilized, the quantity and quality of clothes increased and improved. It was a sign of civilization and dignity to wear more clothes and cover yourself more. Religion had a role in this, as God ordained humans to live in dignity, and all religions that originated from the revelation from God asked for modest clothing.

  All through history, aristocratic women would wear long, loose clothing and even cover their heads with a hat or scarf. Lower-class women—workers, servants, slaves—would wear less clothing. Clothing was seen as a symbol of civilization and dignity, which I believe it is, and is the right of every woman, not just the upper class or more religious ones.

  The Industrial Revolution and the feminist movement made women feel that to be equal to men, they had to be like men. One way women found to do this was by shedding their clothes. This coincided with the decline of religion. Men took advantage of this, and to please their own instinctive desires had the women undress more and more in the name of modernization. Yes, I believe men took advantage of women and made them slaves of their desires. This was no freedom—it was slavery. Why is it that when there is a party, a dance, women wear spaghetti-string dresses and try to show more of their body, and make their bodies attractive with make-up and all, while men cover up in a suit and tie, even closing the top button? I call this a loss of feminine dignity and the slavery of women to men’s desires, while men get to keep the dignity that civilization gave humankind. It’s not fair.

  I believe my clothing is meant to cover. When I cover myself, I am passing on a message to others, saying:

  I respect myself, my body is precious and beautiful, I know that, but it is none of your business. It is my private business and I respect my privacy and will allow only those whom I please to allow into that private space. I do not think you have any right to get any pleasure off of my body. I am a free woman and refuse to be a slave of your desires. You cannot control what I wear to please your desires. My interaction with you is not physical. I have a brain and a soul and am an intelligent individual, and that’s what you need to interact with. I have my personal dignity and space and you need to stay out of it.

  Now, I am not the only woman who makes such a statement. Every woman—when she goes for a job interview or business meeting, or when she stands for election in public office, dresses in business attire—wears modest clothing according to cultural standards. She wants to come across as confident and wants people to have confidence in her abilities. Hillary Clinton never went campaigning in a spaghetti-strap dress. I am always on official business, and I want people to judge me by my brains; if I am in the comfort of my home and relaxing with family, or in my bedroom in an intimate situation, I dress accordingly. I believe my body is too precious to be displayed in public. We don’t display our precious belongings in public, do we? We keep them protected, in safe conditions. There is a place and time for everything, and the public arena is not the place to display the beautiful body.

  I also have the confidence that God has created me—and every woman and man—beautiful. We are all beautiful, internally and externally, in our own special way. We don’t need to do anything to our body to make it look beautiful. It already is. As you may have guessed, I do not wear makeup. I have nothing to make up for. You make up for mistakes, for something that is deficient. God made no mistakes when He made me. He made me perfect. Sorry if I sound arrogant or overconfident, but I am confident about my appearance. Why wouldn’t I be? I was created by the most perfect—my Lord—in perfection, and I don’t need any man, clothing designer, or makeup artist to tell me what is perfect. I don’t fall for the false standards set by society, by cultures that have dominated the world, or by others who are human just like me.

  I don’t wear foundation to look whiter or heels to look taller or colored contacts, or pluck my eyebrows into some odd shape or color my nails into colors that are not human, or have plastic surgery to look different from how I am. If society thinks white skin, blond hair, blue eyes, tallness, and a skinny waist are beautiful, then that’s their problem. They can go ahead and create their Barbie dolls in that image, but I’m not their Barbie doll and they are not going to impose any image on me.

  I take care of the body God gave me and respect it by keeping it clean and watching my diet—not to maintain a figure that pleases the eyes of others, but to protect it from disease. I give my body the quantity and quality of food it was created to consume.

  So that’s my style. I feel bad for women who spend hours dressing every day, and days or months planning what they will wear for a party and how they can look more attractive, then look so uncomfortable in those tight clothes and high heels and can barely walk or bend down to pick up an item. When I see what the women on billboards, commercials, and game shows are wearing, it really aches my heart.

  I mean no offense to anyone, but it hurts me to see the bodies of these innocent women being used to sell products. And they are made to believe that this is freedom. This is slavery. I feel a sense of freedom that I do not have that burden on me, of making myself attractive to others all the time. When I go to a party after spending an extra ten minutes planning what to wear, trying to match my hijab to my jilbab and fi
nding a scarf in my closet that is not my regular cotton, and maybe adding an embroidered shawl for color and accent, I feel like I am telling my host, I do care about your party.

  COLLECTION

  TIFT MERRITT’s handmade guitar straps

  SURVEY

  COLOR

  “I bought a hot-pink dress a month before I was due. I loved how I felt, like a car won by the top seller at Mary Kay.” —ANN IRELAND

  AMY ROSE SPIEGEL I think it’s important to have one red detail: a purse, a hair bow, shoes. I think of it like a red door on an otherwise plain house, and how elegant that always seems.

  ADRIENNE BUTIKOFER I was scouted to move to Toronto to model after high school. I went to castings but never got a job, and at the same time I was told that my personality was shitty. I went to a rave at one point and did E. It did not turn out well. It was like, “Holy fuck, I do suck. I am a huge loser.” So I moved to Thunder Bay, where my parents were living in a cabin in the woods, and I cried a lot. But I had a revelation—that people created identities for themselves, and part of my personal pain was that I had never done that. I needed to finally commit to an identity. So I thrifted and revamped my wardrobe and wore nothing but brown for two years. Brown seemed like the most uncool choice, the weakest color. I felt weak and helpless at the time. Then I had a therapist in university who spelled it out for me. He said that people normally associate depression with black, but that the truly depressed wear brown. Hearing that made it something to strive against. The transition was pretty slow, but around two or three years later, I had a lighthearted, colorful wardrobe, and I remember feeling awesome about it. I stayed away from all brown for a long time, but then a few years later I started wearing wooden charms on a necklace on a daily basis. Having that bit of brown around my neck made me feel grounded.

  GILLIAN KING When I was in art school, and I realized that painting was my medium of choice, I began dressing in a palette similar to my paintings. I was obsessed with dyeing my hair different colors, and for about a year or two my head was the rotating colors of the rainbow.

  MEGAN HUSTAD For a brief spell in the eighties, my mother took the lessons in Carole Jackson’s Color Me Beautiful very seriously. The premise is that every person is a Winter, Summer, Spring, or Autumn, depending on skin tone, hair color, and eye color, and if one stuck to the approved colors in her seasonal palette, she would look prettier. Wear the wrong shade of green—you risked looking sallow, like a wallflower. But the right shade of green brought sparks to your eyes, a blush to your cheeks. A woman armed with this knowledge about what she looked best in wouldn’t be tempted by trends, and would be less likely to buy something she liked in the store, only to never feel good about wearing it for reasons she couldn’t quite articulate. I guess the idea was that it would save you money.

  MEGAN B. As a child, I was told over and over how beautiful my auburn hair was, so I refused to color or treat it in any way my entire life. Well, until my mid-thirties. Then it started to turn brown. I would say to people, “Well, as a redhead, I have to be careful in the sun,” and they’d tilt their heads in confusion. “Redhead?” My identity as a redhead is actually very important to me, it turns out.

  NICOLE LAVELLE One winter my friend Elizabeth said, “I am going to wear only gray this year.” She did it, and it worked, and she didn’t have to think about clothes. I tried it too, but it made me feel upset.

  VICTORIA HAF I have found a lot of great things in Barcelona’s streets, but one night I was walking with my husband, talking about how it had been a long time since we had found something good on the street, and he said, “The reason we don’t find things anymore is that we’ve stopped wishing for them.” I had this list of things I wanted (a bike, an accordion, a hammock), and I had found all of them on the street, and I thought: “He’s right, I wish I could find something today,” and on the way home I found a cardboard box full of red things, red toys, a red feather boa—it seemed like props from a play or something, and there was this beautiful red Valentino dress missing a button and with some holes, but it was so easy to fix and it fits me perfectly.

  SARA HABEIN I was the one kid with black ballet shoes, and I made my mother look for an all-black backpack and a black toothbrush. It probably all started as a way to be contrary, because I still insist on being contrary about certain things.

  LAUREN BRIDE A few years ago, I was having some intense psychological pain. I have always loved clouds as a symbol, and that summer, alone and upset, I began looking often at photos of clouds. Then I moved on to looking at pictures of whipped cream, heaps of feathers, cotton wool, froth on waves, marshmallows . . . I wondered what they shared. I realized they were all fluffed with air, so what I was seeing was a frame for the air. I thought about how this was true for everything, though not with air as a common denominator, but empty space. I believed if I could focus on the parts of myself that were made of empty space, it might cure me of my mental pain. So I saved the images I found online of those fluffy, pale things, and I created zoomed-in shots, and printed them on white long-sleeved cotton shirts. I wore the shirts with white skirts and white shoes all summer. I wanted to be like the white space left after a person is cut out of a photograph. Wearing white all the time and walking into the world in those clothes caused the world to treat me with a bit more gentleness, so that was soothing for me. When I saw people I knew, they would ask me about the shirts and I told them what the pictures were of, and about the idea of empty space, without going into how miserable and wild I was feeling. People were very kind to me, and it generated dreamy, warm conversations that were comforting to have.

  SASHA GREY I’ve often had recurring dreams about rescuing someone or something in the ocean while wearing an all-white tuxedo that gets weighed down by the water, making it nearly impossible for me to save this person or thing.

  COLLEEN ASPER For about five years, I have worn only black, white, and gray. This began as an unpremeditated inclination and morphed into a decision when I found myself routinely traveling for work, and realized that it ensured all my clothes matched and I always looked somewhat dressed up. Now I travel less regularly but have come to feel squeamish about wearing color, as it presents all these options that represent potential commitments that I am not ready for.

  KARI LARSEN I don’t like when people comment on my wearing a piece that departs from black. I would rather they not comment at all.

  BRIAN McCLOSKEY I would obsessively check The Ricki Lake Show’s guest request page. When I saw an invitation casting people in “unconventional marriages,” I wrote: “I am a transvestite; I got married in a dress.” The producers contacted me immediately! For the important day, I chose a red Calvin Klein pleated A-line dress—fun, flattering, and filling me with confidence. On the day of the show, the wardrobe lady burst into the dressing room in a panic and announced, “You can’t wear red! Ricki’s wearing red today!” I had to change into my backup outfit—a conservative gray Calvin Klein dress. We walked onto the stage, took our places on Ricki’s couch, and answered a few questions. Ricki asked if what I was wearing held any special significance. I told her no—I had planned to wear something red but was told to change since someone else on the show was already wearing red. The audience cracked up. Ricki responded with mock horror. Clutching her red blouse, she exclaimed, “I would have taken this off!” Ricki Lake offered to take her top off for me. It was the greatest moment of my life.

  COLLECTION

  PAVIA ROSATI’s cashmere V-neck sweaters and cardigans

  CONVERSATION

  YOU’RE NEVER GOING TO GET THAT MONEY BACK

  JULIET LANDAU-POPE as told to Sheila Heti

  I am a declutter coach. When people take me into their bedroom and open up a wardrobe, they often say, “Ah! I would never let my mother see this!” or “My closest friends would never see this!” It’s a really big thing to display your most personal belongings to someone.

  A lot of women feel very bad about having too many clothes,
or not enough clothes, or too many certain kinds of clothes. The most common issues I encounter are around weight and body size. The vast majority of women have clothes that don’t fit them, and the majority have a fantasy that at some mythical point they’ll go back to being a size they were. So they keep that favorite pairs of jeans, or their pre-maternity clothes, or clothes that have never been worn but that they bought because they wanted to slim down into them. They have a fantasy that they will be a certain size one day. It can be very painful, confronting that reality.

  Sometimes people hold on to things because they’re very expensive and they feel like, “Well, I’ve invested a great deal of money in this, therefore I have to hold on to it.” In that case, I say, “Whatever you spent on it, you’re never going to get that money back. And in fact, what’s happening now is it’s reminding you of the guilt that you paid so much.”

  I work very closely with clients to help them find a meaningful way of parting with stuff. If they’ve lost a relative to cancer, maybe there’s a charity that’s raising money for medical research. I never talk about throwing anything out.

  People find it very difficult to just show me things without telling me stories—every item has a story. If I’m talking to an older woman or a mum, she’ll start telling me a story, and I’ll say, “I’m sure your daughters would love to hear that, or your sisters. There must be someone in the family who would love to hear that story.” By holding on to the thing, they are keeping the story to themselves rather than sharing it, so one of the things I encourage people to do is write the stories down or record them or find some way of documenting them so the story is not lost, while the thing can be given to someone who’s actually going to make use of it.