Women in Clothes

by Sheila Heti

  What are some dressing rules you think all women should follow?

  I am not a big believer in rules, unless they are useful. Fashion is a terrible place that promises you can look like a peacock if you like, but the second you do, people will make fun of you.

  Would you rather be perceived as having great taste or great style?

  I think today, for someone to say that you have good taste means that you’re rich enough to adorn yourself with all these brand names. But if you are someone who has style, you are turning yourself into a very particular brand. Your own name is your brand name when you have style.

  Are there dressing tricks that make you feel like you’re getting away with something?

  I wear a whole chassis of things underneath a dress. I have fake hips, a fake bum, I corset up my belly, and I have a bra that holds silicone breast forms. These are the only things that give me any curves at all.

  Who are some people from culture whose style you admire?

  I remember when Björk appeared on some awards show to sing a song and she was in this dress that resembled a giant dead swan. Its neck curled up and around her own neck and its head rested on her right boob. I remember being blown away by that dress. It, more than anything, made fashion more artful to me.

  Are there times when you dressed to calm yourself?

  I’m scared a lot, so I more often wear clothes to protect me. I like having a lot of layers between me and the world. I get self-conscious when people look at me. I like attention, but handle it better when it comes obliquely, through admiration of the things I make.

  Is there an item of clothing you no longer own, but which you still think about?

  When I was six or seven I had this Batman outfit and I would wear these black high-heeled boots that my mom didn’t wear anymore. I adored them. I was conscious of the fact that boys weren’t supposed to wear them, but I enjoyed them immensely. Then one day I couldn’t find them and my mom told me that she’d thrown them out, and it broke my heart. Now I have an entire collection of sexy high-heeled black boots.

  PROJECT

  THIRTY-SIX WOMEN | MIRANDA JULY

  Six strangers wear one another’s favorite outfits.

  Featuring Ziva Serkis-Naumann, Rosemary Hochschild, Nyjia Jones, Tabatha Rajendra, Molly Ringwald, and Kimber Hall. Photographs by Michael Schmelling

  PROJECT

  A MAP OF MY FLOOR | HEIDI JULAVITS

  OCCASION Funeral for a close family friend, rural New Hampshire, February. The bedroom floor displays the following tried and discarded items:

  1 Liz Claiborne silk jumpsuit. The woman who died was sexy into her seventies. I want to look sexy in her honor, but also because I’ll be seeing her favorite nephew at the service. I’ve had a crush on him since 1983, i.e., since the year this jumpsuit was produced. I believe she would have been happy if I’d married him, so I might dress as though this is still a possibility (even though he and I are happily married to other people). 2 Sixties double-knit wool jersey dress (Karlana) with white leather trim and belt. Last time I wore it was to a wedding and the couple is now divorced. 3 Commes des Garçons black tulle skirt. Too bleak-girl-at-the-prom. Too like I’m trying to perform, before an audience, my sadness. 4 A Détacher kimono-sleeved jacket. I bought this a few years ago at a sample sale thinking, “I’ll wear this a lot when I’m older.” I guess I am not yet old enough. 5 Vintage B. Altman ankle-length knit wool dress. Also sixties. I wore this with Miu Miu nautical sandals to a literary awards ceremony. I did not win, but Uma Thurman checked me out approvingly and I took that as the greater honor. 6 Sixties French sailor pants. Fear I might look like an extra in Guy Maddin’s “Sissy-Boy Slap-Party.” Also, the funeral is in the mountains and nowhere near the sea. There will be enough cognitive dissonance with this woman now gone. 7 Another sixties knit wool dress (Cordon of Philadelphia). Black and brown stripes. I feel bouncy like Snoopy whenever I put it on. This is either the best or the worst thing to wear when one plans to cry a lot.

  WORN Agnés B. dress, black cardigan, long wool socks, white pleather ankle boots.

  CONVERSATION

  IF NOTHING ELSE, I HAVE AN ETHICAL GARTER

  HUMAN RIGHTS JOURNALIST MAC McCLELLAND SPEAKS TO SHEILA HETI

  MAC: When I was a teenager, I saw this documentary about abuses at overseas Gap factories, and it simultaneously opened my eyes and ruined my life—being an embarrassingly avid Gap shopper at that time. (laughs)

  SHEILA: Do you remember what you thought about where your clothes came from before seeing that film?

  MAC: I’d never thought about it. You wear clothes starting when you’re a baby, right? Unless you’re educated in some way about where clothes come from, there’s no reason you’d look at your OshKosh overalls and think, I wonder if a child slave made these.

  SHEILA: Can you tell me what you mean when you say “child slave”?

  MAC: Underage workers, not in school, making some obscenely low wage. A million workers squeezed into tiny dorm spaces crammed with beds, not allowed to leave, no windows or heating or air-conditioning, not being able to take breaks, people getting hurt, people working crazy long shifts . . . The thing everyone in a sweatshop has in common is that they are poor, they desperately need a job, and it’s the best or the only job they can get.

  SHEILA: Right.

  MAC: So I stopped shopping at the Gap—huge sacrifice for a teenager in the nineties (laughs)—and I found a way to self-righteously insert the topic into conversations. Then, of course, one day I was soapboxing to this woman who had worked in Cambodia for years and years—this is a white lady I’m talking about, an aid worker—and she was like, “When people boycott those factories or get them shut down, all those workers lose their jobs.” She’d worked with women who’d lost factory jobs and thus had to become prostitutes. She was like, “Buy anything you want from the Gap. Fuck it.”

  SHEILA: Do you have any idea what percentage of the clothes people buy in the West is produced overseas in these kinds of conditions?

  MAC: Almost nothing is made in the United States. Which is not to say that all overseas factories are hellholes, but there’s very little oversight and regulation, so it’s impossible to know what kind of conditions your Made in non-USA clothes are produced in. Not to say that if we moved a portion of the textile industry back to the States, the workers wouldn’t also be treated like shit here, of course.

  SHEILA: Right.

  MAC: We do all sorts of terrible things to our own warehouse and factory workers. Because in general, people want to have jobs, and they’d rather have shitty jobs than no jobs. At one point in college, I was hell-bent on buying overpriced American Apparel clothes because they’re made in the States, but where does the fabric come from? Also, it turns out Dov Charney is allegedly a sexual terrorist. What’s a girl to do?

  SHEILA: So what do you do personally in terms of your own shopping choices?

  MAC: Well, I hardly ever shop because I hate having things. (laughs) But when I do have to buy clothes—so like, I’m not in a position where I have to go to Old Navy for a five-dollar T-shirt, but even if I’m going to go to Saks . . . Okay, obviously I don’t have that much money. But if I was to go to a J.Crew, who says those clothes don’t come out of those same factories? They still do. It’s not like across the street they have a different row of Saks factories that are really fancy and have air-conditioning and flavored water that the workers can sip all day, and they can take a lot of breaks. The clothes at Saks are probably made with better materials, and that’s where your money is going—plus design, branding, things like that. But some of them could be made in the same conditions. So it doesn’t necessarily make any difference whether I’m going to buy a five-dollar shirt or a five-hundred-dollar shirt.

  SHEILA: What if you buy from a boutique where the owner makes the clothes herself?

  MAC: Sure, right. When I lived in San Francisco, there were definitely stores on Valencia that upwardly mobile hipsters would go to, where
people designed and made their own stuff, and I actually do own a dress made by this girl in Pittsburgh. I paid a hundred dollars for it and I thought that was great. But that choice is not open to all consumers, not just for price purposes, but because if you don’t live in a boutiquey hipster area—

  SHEILA: But then there’s Etsy—

  MAC: Right, I wasn’t thinking about that. So for example, my garter—this is really embarrassing, but when I got married, my husband really wanted me to have the garter, and I was like, “Where am I going to get a garter?” ’Cause Victoria’s Secret—I mean, they specifically have had very serious child-labor and slave-labor accusations in the past. But maybe I’m just turning all the ex–Victoria’s Secret workers into prostitutes because I’m not supporting Victoria’s Secret factories! Anyway, I went on Etsy and some gal—I don’t know where—made a garter and sent it to my house and I was like, This is great.

  SHEILA: Your ethical garter.

  MAC: That’s right. If nothing else, I have an ethical garter.

  SHEILA: Okay, so there’s sweatshops, and then there’s the distribution of clothing items within America. Tell me a bit about Amazon and how most people get their clothes shipped to them.

  MAC: Well, this whole process—there’s not a clean step in it, right? Because yes, you could buy your clothes online. But then you’re probably buying it from some mega-place. Do people buy a lot of clothes on Amazon?

  SHEILA: I imagine people must, and even if you don’t buy clothes there, you buy cosmetics—

  MAC: Accessories, sure. And even if you’re not buying it specifically from Amazon, chances are very high that any distributor of clothing will use some sort of mega-warehouse to get those orders fulfilled. And in those giant warehouses, a lot of times the workers are not paid very well, or they’re temporary workers, which is this big new trend. Because if you have “temporary workers,” even if you keep them for three years, they’re basically on contract, which means you don’t have to give them vacation or health insurance or raises or other things that people might be interested in having, and they can work under extremely demanding and physically damaging conditions. They could be doing a lot of repetitive actions or things that could cause permanent injuries in some cases. But then if you think about retail, there have been a lot of complaints in recent years against retail companies for worker abuses. They’re forcing people not to work full-time hours, so that they don’t have to give them benefits, and that makes it not a living wage. So you can’t win. How can you win? It’s so hard.

  SHEILA: You were saying you don’t like to have much stuff. Is that related at all to what we’re talking about?

  MAC: It is a bit related, yes. Also, I used to work for a moving company, so I spent a lot of time in people’s houses, packing up their things, and just being overwhelmed by the amount of shit people had that they didn’t need. So I think it probably started a little bit there. (laughs) Then I have some weird disaster issues, like I lived in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. To me, things that you have are just things you will lose or could lose, so don’t get attached to them. But yeah, if I’m going to go shopping, I do think about all these things. It’s kind of hard to turn your brain off. And if you’re keeping these things in mind while you’re shopping, is shopping, like, fun? Not really. Okay, I just looked up the Abercrombie scandal. They were keeping employees down to one shift per week, and the employees would have to call in every day to see if they were working or not.

  SHEILA : So they can’t have any other job.

  MAC: Right. You’re on call for your fifty-five-dollar shift. You couldn’t have another job, and you wouldn’t be able to plan your finances if you had no idea how many days per week you were going to work.

  SHEILA: What’s the motivation for having people call in every day to find out their shift?

  MAC: I’m not entirely sure about retail, but that’s a thing they do in big warehouses. There, people call in because they don’t want to pay one cent to a worker they don’t absolutely need. There’s real-time updating—they have software that tells them: This is how many orders we have. Then they can calculate the exact number of humans they’ll need to fill them, and then they will order those people by the day.

  SHEILA: When you saw this documentary as a teenager, was that the dawning of your consciousness about global politics and labor unions?

  MAC: It had a lot to do with it. Because it was astounding to me that here I am, spending my whole life shopping in the Gap, and my parents are coming with me, and they’re shopping at the Gap, and my parents are considered to be intelligent people. And when I’m in the Gap, there’s a hundred other people in the Gap. So how are we all just walking around the Gap having no idea? It’s such a big deal. You’re buying these clothes. You’re supporting these companies in this industry.

  SHEILA: So when you, in your head, map the world, and you see America and India and China and all these places, in terms of clothing and in terms of these issues, what’s the structure you see? What do you visualize?

  MAC: I visualize cheap labor—and originally, when people set up these factories in China, they were pulling people out of the fucking hillsides, you know? But now that the game’s been going on for a while, the workers in China are getting more organized and they’re demanding higher wages and they see the news and they know that they’re being underpaid, so their wages are way up. I was talking to an economist and he was telling me that there was this mad rush to get into Vietnam because China was so expensive—though compared with the United States, it’s nothing. But for sure, any place that has a desperate and very poor population in the East, there are a lot of factories. I picture older, heavier white men walking around, possibly with hard hats on, you know? Touring factories and setting up connections and hustling. Then all that stuff gets shipped on these huge containers into our ports. Then there’s us in the United States, where we care about this stuff, but at the same time our own wages have been stagnant for decades. So you have a huge population of people who, even if they’re not so enthusiastic about foreign workers being exploited for their benefit so they can have cheaper clothes, don’t have the money to buy anything that’s more expensive because their own wages are low and their cost of living is very high. It’s just reinforcing demand for cheap, cheap, super-cheap clothes. But even when you’re buying more expensive stuff, it doesn’t mean it was produced in better conditions. And H&M, oh my god, I can’t even be in an H&M. I feel like I’m having a heart attack in there. It smells like . . . do you know what I’m talking about?

  SHEILA: It smells like what?

  MAC: It smells! To me it smells like diesel or something—gas fumes and textile chemicals. It smells like a terrible factory. The smell, and the amount of clothes, and how cheap they are, and how totally disposable they are—everything sort of comes together for me in there and it makes me feel overwhelmed and sad. Urban Outfitters—I have the same thing. Every time I walk in there I’m just like, oh my god, it smells like plastic and chemicals and bad news and bad politics and I just (laughs) I don’t want to be there. I sound like a crazy person, by the way. But it’s frustrating because there’s no good answer, you know?

  SHEILA: But it’s still better for people to know about these things, right?

  MAC: (long pause) Sure, yeah. It’s the first step. Admitting you have a problem.

  SHEILA: Can you see a future when there isn’t a place in the world where there’s incredibly cheap, exploited labor?

  MAC: If you think about how many poor countries there are in the world, and how many poor people there are, that would take a very long time. Of course, once you bring all those factories into countries, it does build up their economies, and the more you do that, the more you have to end up paying people, but then you’re like, “Oh no, we ruined this for ourselves! These people have a standard of living now! We have to leave!” Then the companies go somewhere else. And wages are only part of it. There’s no oversight, or very little oversig
ht, so people end up dying in factory fires. And trying to figure out what the conditions are that produced, say, your Apple products—there’s so much corruption and so many levels of outsourcing that it’s almost impossible to nail down what’s really happening and fix it. Will we move toward that eventually? I don’t know. We haven’t yet—and the Industrial Revolution was a really long time ago. (laughs)

  SHEILA: Okay, let me ask this, because I’m stuck on the idea that you don’t like owning much. What do you own? How does your house look different from the houses you packed up?

  MAC: Until two years ago, I had in my apartment in San Francisco—I’d lived in it for years and years, and I was a professional adult woman, so I had the means to buy furniture—but I had a mattress that I bought for thirty dollars, ’cause it was junk, and I had a tiny table that someone was throwing out of a garage. I only had garbage furniture in my house, and I only had three pieces.

  SHEILA: Right.

  MAC: But then I got married, and my husband is French, and I was like, “I can’t have a European with all his aesthetic sensibilities move into my garbage apartment.” (laughs) I wanted to make it look more like a home. So now I have a few pieces of furniture. But in terms of clothes, I have maybe ten sweaters. The latest I bought in probably 2007. Fuck, which is seven years ago. And the two sweaters I wear most often, they’re J.Crew, and I got them for Christmas in 2003. See, I really hate shopping.

  SHEILA: Do you take very good care of your clothes to make them last?

  MAC: One of those J.Crew sweaters is in pretty bad shape. It has a very visible mustard stain that it’s had for five of the last ten years. And the other one is getting super-threadbare in the elbows.