Women in Clothes

by Sheila Heti

  Something I especially encounter with older people is fear of losing the memory. They’re afraid if they give away the physical item, they’ll lose the memory that’s attached to it.

  Sometimes people hold on to clothes that have been given to them by people they don’t like—ex-husbands! Somebody said to me the other day, “I can’t give away that coat. I wore it to my brother’s funeral.” I said to her, “Do you want to be reminded of your brother’s funeral every time you open the door?”

  People are often very uneasy if there’s space on a shelf or in a wardrobe—they feel they have to fill it up.

  I work with people who are Jewish, Muslim, all sorts of religions, and it’s interesting to see how cultural identity plays out in their wardrobes. I was with somebody last week—a professional woman in her thirties from a Hindu family—who had two wardrobes in her bedroom. She said to me, “This is my Indian wardrobe, and these are my regular clothes”—that’s how she described it. Everything from formal wear to party clothes to underwear—two completely different sets of lingerie!

  That was really stark, but we all have different sets of wardrobes, and I think what many women find difficult is to negotiate those different identities. I’m struck over and over again by the number of women who tell me that they don’t actually enjoy wearing their clothes. They wear what they need to wear, but they don’t particularly like it. I’ve noticed that when someone culls a wardrobe and reduces it to things that are comfortable and that fit and are flattering, it’s a different experience altogether to look in the closet. We lose track of who we are sometimes, and that’s reflected in the wardrobe, because we keep clothes for all sorts of reasons, not just because we wear them.

  SURVEY

  WORN

  “I am trying to get used to the idea that you wear things and they wear out and you find new things. It’s okay.” —MIMI CABELL

  CATHERINE MAROTTA My grandmother gave me cashmere sweaters from Costco. In college I would wear them every Friday, when I was most tired, because there were so comfortable, yet they would still make me feel put-together and sophisticated. I met my best friend for coffee every Friday, and we would call them my Friday sweaters. I wore them until they had holes in the sleeves.

  NATALIA ELTSOVA In the USSR, you had a thing, you wore it, you spoiled it, you fixed it—until it would be used for mopping floors or something like that. We had a great respect for things, and the opposite side of it was the fear of spoiling things. Once I had a fight with a girl in school and she took my jacket from the hook and threw it on the floor. It was more offensive than if she had tried to beat me up. Another time I had this pair of velvet pants I really liked. And guess what? I sat on a heater in the school corridor and there was gum stuck to it. Because of the material my pants were made of, I never got rid of that damn gum, and that was some stress.

  MASHA TUPITSYN I used to paint or clean my apartment in my best dresses. As a result, I ruined a lot of clothes with paint and bleach stains.

  DALE MEGAN HEALEY On New Year’s Eve, I went to a party in a treehouselike mansion. I got stoned and walked in the mud and ruined my Nina Z clogs. I kept telling myself it was worth it—I can’t stop myself from having experiences for the sake of preserving my clothes. Still, those clogs were sort of a big purchase. Saving up and finally buying those shoes felt like kissing a crush.

  ANNEMIEKE BEEMSTER LEVERENZ I try to not dress in something that would be more important to me than having a good time. I wouldn’t want to stop doing something for fear that my outfit would get ruined or weird-looking in the act of having fun.

  KARI LARSEN I’m wearing a holey T-shirt and my eyeliner is pulled down my cheeks because I rubbed my eyes and forgot I was wearing any.

  SARAH MANGUSO A friend gave me a dark blue shirtdress six years ago that I wear all the time. She got it at Walmart. I wear it with good leather boots. I wore it to demonstrate against Bush II in Rome. I wore it to give a reading in Gainesville, and I wore it yesterday. And the day before. A friend’s sick dog peed all over it once. It has pockets.

  ISHA KAZEMI I remember my mom getting very excited to buy Eid outfits for me when I was very little. She bought a white dress for me when I was around five or six. It was made of satin with thread patterns in the fabric. It was so beautiful and I was so excited to wear it because I was rarely allowed to wear white. I did inevitably stain it, because I was an active child, prone to rolling around in the grass. But I remember feeling very beautiful in that Eid.

  EMILY SPIVACK At the Chelsea Flea Market about eight years ago, I splurged on an antique black lucite mourning ring with an embedded photograph of a stranger—a woman. I loved that ring. I liked that I could shower with it, which is important as I can’t be bothered to take off my jewelry when I shower or sleep. I wore it a bunch, then it broke. I got it fixed and it broke again in a way that was unrepairable. I made a conscious decision that I would no longer care about that ring. I put it in a box and I’m not sure where it is now.

  ALLISON D. I once had a light blue T-shirt that I got from a street vendor in Edinburgh. It was majorly pitted-out and fraying at the seams, but I loved it. I also had a navy blue zip hoodie that had been my mom’s. It had bleach stains. Then there was this peachy sweatshirt I adored for the same reason: it was comfortable and worn. It was a gift from my mom’s friend Terry. She was so cool, and that coolness extended to this sweatshirt. I want these worn things back. I miss having clothing that I feel connected to.

  AGNES BARLEY I wore a pale pink ribbon around my waist under my clothing for many years. It occasionally migrated to the outside to serve as a belt, but I did not take it off. I slept in it. I bathed in it. It was mostly invisible, but I enjoyed the pink line encircling me like a little secret, making me feel pretty. I’m not sure quite how this came about. I may have unconsciously been inspired by an extended family from Bangladesh who lived above me on the Lower East Side in New York. The children would climb down the fire escape and into my apartment and I became good friends with them and one of their aunts. She was a young woman particularly interested in my clothing because she wore only saris. She wore pages of the Koran in a small pocket on a leather string tied around her waist. I was struck by the idea that one should wear one’s beliefs in this way, and I wondered what I would wear in that sense. Years later, the pink ribbon was a sort of abstract prayer and a reminder of myself. Friends were aware of the ribbon as time went by and often tried to give me ribbons as gifts, but I only ever wore my one ribbon. My boyfriend loved it, too. The funniest thing is that my mom liked to wear a red patent-leather belt under her clothes in kindergarten. She apparently refused to take it off and cinched it as tight as she could. So it may be hereditary.

  MADELEINE STACK White dresses are irresistible to me, clean and minimal, with sneakers or flat sandals. The best thing is floating angelic through a wrecking-ball party in rustling white skirts, sitting in the grass, dancing too hard with muddy barefoot smears, and having red wine thrown all over you. To wake up to a Pollock the morning after.

  SASHA WISEMAN I had a yellow sundress in my late teens that I wore every warm New England day for probably three years. I remember going on a very long bike ride to a friend’s wedding in a park and collapsing on the ground when I finally arrived. I landed under a tree that shed staining berries, and later spent hours sewing heart-shaped patches of silk onto every smudge since I didn’t know how to do laundry effectively. I was in a band then, and in every picture I have of our summer tour, I’m wearing that dress.

  MONA KOWALSKA Sometimes people will buy something pristine and think, It’ll be nice as soon as I fuck it up. People say it all the time, because they’re uncomfortable with the purity or integrity or whatever it is. I guess I travel too much and see poor people too much to appreciate that sentiment. In Peru you can see that people have hand-washed their clothes and ironed them and taken care of them and it means something to them. So when I hear people be like, “I just want to fuck this expensive thing up,�
� I’m a bit like, “No!”

  SOFIA SAMATAR I got a Strawberry Shortcake nightgown when I was maybe ten years old. It was Christmas and we had a fire in the fireplace, and my younger brother and I were hanging out in front of it, and probably messing with it, and a spark leaped out onto my nightgown and burned a hole in it. I just held the fabric stretched out and shrieked: “IT’S BURNING A HOLE IN MY NIGHTIE!” It went through the fabric so fast! My brother and I were dying with laughter. We still think it’s a funny story, but what it’s about to me now is the sensation of wearing something totally synthetic and surprising. You couldn’t guess what it would do.

  EMILY K. There was this light blue cotton T-shirt I stole from my best friend that had a picture of a sailboat in dark blue and then the phrase: no friggin’ in the riggin’. It got armpit stains, then I cut the sleeves off and wore that thing to shreds.

  TISHANI DOSHI I had a lovely green batik silk dress with puffy sleeves and a black trim that I paid a bit for. I was once at a party where there was a lot of dancing and I was being thrown around the dance floor, and one of the sleeves ripped off. I tried to make it a strapless number by removing both sleeves, but the dress was never quite the same. I still have it in my cupboard. I keep it as a reminder that the dress had a good life, and to buy more clothes like that and less of the kinds that hang like ghosts in the wardrobe.

  PROJECT

  THE OUTFIT IN THE PHOTOGRAPH | I

  Nonie, Nene, Inday, and Judy Pacificador, sisters in the Philippines, 1952

  NONIE (FAR LEFT): I’m wearing my mother’s duster, we called it a duster, a house dress, it’s just something that we used for cleaning around. Like an apron dress that you wear. It was green and white. It was very, very comfortable, very loose, like a muumuu, but short.

  NENE: These were just our regular play clothes, nothing special, and this had a blue top part with a printed white texture on white. It wasn’t a hand-me-down, it was probably sewn by my aunt.

  INDAY: I don’t remember this dress, I was about seven. It was white, I don’t really recall anything about it.

  JUDY: I loved this dress because it had big pockets. And we didn’t have a lot of toys, so we’d go around in the streets and we’d pick up stuff. We’d pick up seeds or sticks, tamarind seeds, and we’d use that for currency or whatever. So I loved pockets because I could fill them up with as much stuff as I could carry.

  INDAY: It was so hot we didn’t wear shoes. We might have had some flip-flops.

  NONIE: We had a washerwoman, she came every week.

  INDAY: She washed at the waterfall and did the ironing. She wrapped it up and tied it and carried it back on her head and dried it under the sun. This lady lived in a house with another lady and there was only one husband. The other lady sold meat. One walked around the town with her meat, and the other one did the washing and ironing. It was so funny, they only had the one husband.

  NENE: The washerwoman had the kid.

  CONVERSATION

  I ALWAYS LIKED THE PEARL SNAP

  NIKKI HAUSLER as told to Mary Mann

  I work in the police department as an animal control officer. I wear a uniform that’s issued by my employers—tactical pants, tactical boots, and, depending on the season, a short-sleeved or long-sleeved button-up two-pocket shirt. I’m not trying to look like a hottie. I do have my ears double-pierced, so I wear studs from time to time. My wedding ring I don’t wear to work. I had that drilled into my head because we had a family friend who wore his wedding ring at a grain elevator where he worked. He had gotten up on a truck, and when he jumped down, his wedding ring got stuck on something and it ripped his finger off.

  Tactical pants are what the guys wear when they’re going on SWAT team assignments. They’ve got two big pockets below the regular pockets to carry gear in. I have to carry a notebook in one of those pockets, and in the other I have a hand Taser. I’ve never had to use it. Knock on wood I never will have to. I’ve got a Velcro underbelt that holds on to a big leather belt that holds all the other equipment I have for my job. I carry Mace and what animal control officers call bite sticks—things that I can swing out and protect myself with. And a cell phone, key ring . . . there’s a lot of equipment. The main thing is it’s a huge pain to go to the restroom with it on. (laughs)

  I’ve always, always been a tomboy. I grew up on a ranch, and from the time I could start dressing myself, it was always jeans, a button-up shirt, and boots. That’s what I’m comfortable in. A while back, my husband was looking in my closet and he was like, “Nikki, you don’t even own a dress!” (laughs) He made me go buy a dress. I quite frankly hate to shop and I don’t like the styles back in the stores, so I just went out and got a little black dress. I figured I was safe with a little black dress.

  I have always been terrible about buying clothes. The women in my family, we’re not built like most women. I’m not gonna say that word “fat,” but we’re bigger-boned. I go to the men’s department, because the way they make women’s clothes, they don’t fit right for me. I have huge biceps because of my farming and ranching background, and I can’t tell you how frustrated I am with the jeans industry right now, because I cannot go to the women’s side and find a pair of jeans that are just a pair of jeans. They’re all thin, low-cut, low-rise, and I’m sorry, but there are people in this world who are not into that. I don’t need blingetty-bling on my ass. They’re trying to make that the focal point of all of the women in the world, and I think that’s wrong. I know I have a nice butt, but I don’t need to be showing it off. And god forbid I ever find a pair, I have to pay eighty bucks or ninety bucks for ’em. Whereas if I just go over to the men’s side, I can find a pair that make me happy for just twenty-five or thirty bucks.

  I’m only forty-two, but I started getting gray hair early—I think after my first husband died. I had a lot of stress in my life then. I try to dye it every six months or so. Actually, I have a box sitting on my kitchen table. I was thinking about dyeing it tonight when I get done with chores and stuff. But there’s a part of me that’s always thinking, “How healthy is it to put those chemicals on my head?”

  Anyway, when I was on the ranch it was so easy. We had to wear jeans because we did all of our work on horseback, and you’re not going to wear shorts or sweats on a horse. My dad has always been my hero. Even as a little girl, I always wanted to be my dad. That’s why it wasn’t a problem for me to dress that way, because he was my hero and I wanted to be just like him. My dad’s favorite saying is, “In this world there are takers and there are caretakers.” He raised me and Travis both to be caretakers.

  My dad would have never, ever allowed my brother or me to go outside to work in anything but jeans and a button-up shirt. Obviously boots come in handy during the summer months because of snakes and cactus. Also a button-up shirt with pockets because I like to carry a pen. A lot of times you have to write down a calf number or how many cattle you have in one pen or another. And I’m a smoker, so it’s nice to have my cigarettes right there. I always liked the pearl snap button shirts. When you’re stretching fence, you don’t want a short-sleeved shirt on because you’ve got barbed wire and god forbid it breaks and comes flinging back at you.

  You also want a good pair of leather gloves. Fencing is pretty tough, with the barbs, so we wear leather gloves to protect our hands, and a belt to hang the pliers on.

  My dad is probably one of the last remaining true cowboys in the area. He now works part-time for a farmer. I didn’t go with the cowboy hat, but I’d always have on a ball cap to protect my face from the sun. The wind is blowing forty miles an hour today, and I’m sure wherever my dad is, he’s wearing his cowboy hat. I can never figure out how he keeps it on his head. Mine always blew right off.

  PROJECT

  WEAR AREAS | ANA BUNČIĆ

  1 Man 1 said that I should wear a ponytail all the time. Man 2 thought I looked better with my hair loose. (He thinks I’m beautiful both ways.)

  2 My eyes are ordinary, dark brown, almo
st black. Men 1 to 10 never made a comment on my eyes. (He did.)

  3 Man 2 wished I wore a deep neckline so he could show my breasts off. Man 1 and Man 3 liked my breasts because they were “big.” (He doesn’t need me to exhibit them; he told me that they are pretty.)

  4 Man 1 kept saying that I should take better care of my nails. Men 2 to 10 didn’t pay any attention to them. (He finds my hands and fingers elegant.)

  5 Man 1 criticized me for not wearing skirts. Man 4 favored my legs. (He says he likes the way I walk, as if I’m not touching the ground.)

  COLLECTION

  SHEILA O’SHEA’s hand-me-downs from her mother

  SURVEY

  Sherwin Tjia

  Please describe your figure.

  Full disclosure: I’m a male cross-dresser. I’m a skinny man who’s thickened around the belly because of beer and an inactive lifestyle.

  What’s the situation with your hair?

  Right now it’s long on the top and buzzed on both sides. There was a moment when I realized that I had Rihanna’s haircut and I was delighted to fit in.

  When do you feel at your most attractive?

  I feel I look my best when I’m cross-dressed. I wear this strapless satiny black dress that’s ruched around the hips. It’s terrifically comfortable. I wish I’d bought a few of them. When I dress as a man, I tend to wear the same outfit. It’s almost like a uniform. When I find a shirt I like, I will buy multiples of it. I have twenty-two of one shirt, eleven of another. In terms of dresses, I tend to buy the same kind of dress—a little black dress.