Women in Clothes

by Sheila Heti

  SHEILA: If people choose clothes they can’t move in, can they have style?

  ALEX: Since stylus is also the name of the needle of a record player, it suggests that without ease of movement, registration is unclear. You don’t hear the music. Without ease, there is no style. That’s not to say that all style is fluid. We’ve all seen people who manage their awkwardness into a style, and that is hugely charming, but I would say there is an accuracy in the registration even there. They have found a way to turn their awkwardness into a way of navigating the world. Style is all about agency, about marking the world in a certain way. But there is also a receptive moment in style. Style is the way we let the world move through us. Think of a surfer. The surfboard is a stylus, cutting a path through the wave. The surfer finds an individual path—no two surfers will find the same path through the swell and curl. And the surfer is nothing without the wave. Without that energy, that force, the surfer can’t carve her path. The same relation exists in the sphere of clothing. Someone with style is irreducible, yet she is always in a powerful relation to her moment. Even if she adopts styles from other eras, or comes up with a style that has never been seen before, she needs the wave of the surrounding culture to do it. That’s why certain periods seem better suited to producing stylish responses than others.

  SHEILA: Why?

  ALEX: Because certain waves are better than others.

  SHEILA: How well suited is our period to producing a stylish response, do you think? Or which periods were well suited?

  ALEX: I think the optimal condition for a good style era, like the twenties or sixties, is a combination of lots of sudden change, but also a good deal of incipient codification in the new expressions. That seems to create the right kind of tension.

  SHEILA: That sounds like right now.

  ALEX: But I don’t see a lot of radical new now. Of course, fashion has always been backward-looking—Shakespeare has one of his characters talk about the “young hotbloods” hunting for new looks in old stained-glass windows and tapestries—but these days it seems more backward-looking than normal. There’s a lot of recycling from a pretty well-established menu.

  SHEILA: Yet now is a time of sudden and radical change. There’s unprecedented information access, more global communication. You’d think that would change things somehow—be a big, powerful wave.

  ALEX: Then why haven’t we seen anything as radical as flappers or hippies? Lots of waves go unsurfed.

  SHEILA: What are hipsters?

  ALEX: Hipsters are part of the retrospective culture I was talking about, archivists of past styles.

  SHEILA: Do you think style is related more to one’s character or to one’s body?

  ALEX: I think style is the state in which one feels the least separation between one’s character and one’s body. There’s no question that style is a kind of armor. We need it to get through the world. But it’s a fluid armor.

  SHEILA: When you think of style, do you think of it in terms of how one conducts conversations, and who one chooses as one’s friends, and so on?

  ALEX: Yes. Since style is the marking instrument in movement, it courses through many things.

  SHEILA: Can you think of any figures from history who had style in life and dress?

  ALEX: Jimi Hendrix is a good example. It’s surprising to hear him speak in interviews, as he is so sweet and unassuming, but then you realize that is part of the style. The guitar-playing combines flamboyance and discreetness in the same way the person does.

  SHEILA: Is it possible to have style without thinking about one’s culture?

  ALEX: No, I don’t think so. May I quote Gilles Deleuze, pretentiously?

  SHEILA: Yes!

  ALEX: Creuser dans la langue une langue étrangère et porter tout le langage vers une limite musicale—c’est ça avoir un style. “To carve out within language another foreign language and to take all of language to a musical limit—that is to have style.” That pretty well describes Jimi Hendrix playing “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

  SHEILA: Do you think people with style think about it and cultivate it, the way one can alter one’s own handwriting?

  ALEX: As young humans we learn to navigate the world—a very difficult ballet. We get so good that it becomes almost totally automatic. But then we go to a foreign country, or have some of our parameters messed with, and we have to start over, at least partly. I think people with style maintain a sense of that starting over always, a sense of knowing how to do it, but also learning how to do it at all times.

  SHEILA: I love this idea that people with style are always relearning. It can be depressing to discover oneself wearing, as a grown-up, what one liked back in high school.

  ALEX: That’s what distinguishes the stylists. They change, they’re alive. That sense of always relearning means the stylists are not just unconsciously inhabiting whatever their prevailing way is. They are conscious. But they’re not self-conscious, overthinking beings. They have sprezzatura. They are philosophers in that they are a little outside—but their philosophy is entirely practical.

  SHEILA : What is philosophy, to you?

  ALEX : It is reflection. It responds to reality and turns it around a bit. Philosophers think through what is taken for granted by most people. I called the stylists “practical philosophers” because they have that, but their activity is not in their thinking, rather their thinking is in their style, in the way they move, dress, inhabit the world.

  SHEILA: Has being newly in love changed your style, your way of moving through the world?

  ALEX: I think so. People have been remarking on how well I look. And I definitely feel a greater suppleness, a sense of being a finer, more receptive instrument.

  SHEILA: Yes, your body language is so different with her in the room.

  ALEX: She is so strong and individual, she fills the room.

  SHEILA: You have to respond to the wave that is her. She is your new wave.

  ALEX: Yes, we navigate around each other.

  PROJECT

  STYLUS | MICAH LEXIER

  I’ve always been interested in other people’s handwriting, and have made a number of artworks, often in steel or acrylic, using handwritten names. In preparation for these artworks I ask a person to write his or her name in black pen on a piece of paper many times so I’ll have some options to choose from. Instead of signatures, I like to have them handwrite their name as a way of presenting themselves. These sample sheets are the written equivalent of the changing room or one’s bedroom, where one tries on different clothes or looks.

  COLLECTION

  SADIE STEIN’s brassieres

  CONVERSATION

  I DIDN’T BUY THE BABY ANY CLOTHING

  MAD MEN WRITER SEMI CHELLAS SPEAKS TO SHEILA HETI

  SHEILA: I’m so interested in the idea of a “deep style” and how everyone has one—even if a person is not aware of what it is. I think it cuts across everything you do. Can we figure out yours?

  SEMI: I feel like I have no style. I feel like a human collage. I moved to L.A. suddenly. I had a job interview on Friday and I started on Monday. We quickly got a place online, and I put a note on Facebook that said we needed furniture, and so many people offered us furniture. The only thing we ended up buying was a TV. (A baby cries.)

  SHEILA: Were the baby clothes donated, too?

  SEMI: Yeah, I didn’t buy the baby any clothing. So now we have this hilarious house, and nothing goes together because it’s all from different people. I had this myth in my head that in Toronto my home was stylish and I was put-together, but then I realized that it wasn’t true—my furniture has always been donated.

  SHEILA: Do you think there’s any similarity between that and how you’ve handled your career?

  SEMI: I’ve always operated on the idea that all I needed was the ability to say no—to make enough money to say no to stuff I didn’t want to do—which is slightly different from saying there’s stuff you do want to do. I sometimes feel like I should be more
self-directed, but when I am, I feel like I’m in a safe zone. When I let myself be open to what other people think I should do, it’s more interesting to me.

  SHEILA: Does that correspond to how you dress?

  SEMI: Yeah. I have one friend here who gives me clothes she doesn’t want anymore. They’re never clothes I’d buy, but they’re much more interesting than the clothes I would buy, and I like wearing them. Most of my clothes have been hand-me-downs. People say, “Buy a jacket that will last you forever,” and I think of how every time I did that, I abandoned it in some city.

  SHEILA: Your romantic relationships—are they like your furniture and your clothes and your career? Have they also been “given” to you?

  SEMI: Well, I was never interested in getting married. I never pursued relationships in the abstract, or cared if I ended up in a long-term relationship. I definitely never had a desire to have a wedding. I hate to say this, but with relationships I’ve often—like with cities—walked away when I felt ready to. Even with intense emotional relationships, I’ve had a tendency to leave them behind like litter, as I’ve done with my clothes and places I’ve lived. But when I found true love with Mike, it wasn’t convenient, it was actually a lot of work, and it was one of the few relationships where I worked at it and went back to it and rode out the bad stuff.

  SHEILA: Do you understand why you stuck it through with Mike?

  SEMI: A big change came over me in the last few years, where I started to take on bigger commitments and be less afraid of them. Until I was thirty-eight, I thought, “I’m never having children!” because I thought I wouldn’t be able to make that commitment to caring for them. Then something changed where I suddenly saw that I could. I had my first child at forty and my second at forty-three. I signed a contract with Mad Men for three years, and I’d never signed on to do anything for three years in a row, ever. I feel like I used to have this secret list in the back of my mind, of men I would be with, and places I would live, and no commitments I had would ever interfere with the fact of the list. Then Mike and I broke up for a year in the middle of our relationship, and I lost track of where he was in the world. During that time, I had an opportunity to cross something off my list, and I walked away from it. And it was the complete disintegration of the list. ’Cause I was like, “If I’m walking away from this. . . .” Sea changes come over your personality—they literally do. After that, I reconciled with Mike and had a child and bought a house in Toronto, and it seemed like everything was going to settle down. I had this ratty old couch from my grandma, and I had it reupholstered. It was a huge outlay of money and commitment. Then, six months later, we had to move across the country, and we left the couch and everything behind. It made me realize that having a baby doesn’t settle you down or give you a sense of what you’re going to look like moving through your life.

  SHEILA: So your style is to abandon a cohesive style in order to experience the extremes of life more fully, or to experience surprise more fully?

  SEMI: I think so. To always try to keep things, myself, in the unknown. I think that’s true.

  SHEILA: How do you approach writing a script? Because writing for Mad Men—it’s like these characters have been handed to you or donated to you like baby clothes.

  SEMI: And my feature career has been adaptations of books. It’s similar writing for a TV show, where you’re working with found material. I can’t believe I’m saying all this out loud. I feel so insecure about this—that my own imagination needs so much exterior material. I’m envious of artists who seem to work from a more internal place.

  SHEILA: I can think of a number of people who could never live with mismatched furniture or hand-me-down clothes. What’s going on at the core of you that links and normalizes and understands all these disparate elements?

  SEMI: That’s a question I have always wrestled with. I’ve always been able to put everything I own into a package and move it. Portability is my aesthetic at some level. Do you remember the cartoon that had a portable hole, a black circle you could go through or throw stuff in? I’ve always been obsessed with that image—this flat, black circle that can contain multitudes. The only thing I think I know about myself is that I can keep moving. I can always land in a city and figure it out. But there’s a deep insecurity in me that there is no there there.

  SHEILA: So the black hole is you?

  SEMI: I think it kind of is. But it’s actually an illusion. It’s a 2-D flat circle that you can put all this stuff into and everything will disappear. Then you can tear the circle off and move it again. I guess it’s an image of myself and aesthetic.

  SHEILA: How do you work?

  SEMI: This is interesting, thinking about this makes me feel like I have more of a pattern. I always try to have a room of my own and a desk and a space, but I always end up writing in the most uncomfortable, shitty cafés, where the coffee is bad and the bagels are worse. I fit everything I need into a backpack, and when I have to write, I grab my backpack and go wherever. Yesterday I set off to meet a friend for work with my backpack and breast pump and maxi pads to stuff my bra, and we went to a café and worked for ninety minutes, then I went to pump my boobs, then I went to another café and worked, then I went somewhere else, and at eleven at night I felt: I really have to go home now. I’d been away for twelve hours, backpacking around the city, and I had the newspaper, and a book I’d bought, and the breast milk, and I got home and dumped it all. I need to take everything and go somewhere that’s not mine.

  SHEILA: I’m so different. I need to be alone in my room. I’d hate to work away from my room.

  SEMI: I’ve always spent a lot of time alone, being unaccountable. My whole aesthetic of living—a profound solitariness is part of it. For a long time, I had a really crappy apartment in New York, and sometimes if I was in a bad mood in Toronto, I would get on a train to New York without telling anyone. I loved living that way. Now I have kids and I can’t go anywhere without five diaper bags and eight changes of clothes, but sometimes when I’m with Mike and the kids, doing something random, I’ll have a profound sense of: These are my people, this is my tribe. It’s not necessarily what you would think of as love—it’s not a mushy, sentimental feeling, but a fierce “We’re in this together” feeling. But saying that, I feel all itchy, like I should run and jump on a train.

  SHEILA: But if it’s your tribe, it becomes part of what you take with you. It becomes part of your identity and part of yourself.

  SEMI: That’s right. A tribe is very portable. This is part of what I’m taking with me.

  COLLECTION

  MIRANDA PURVES’s shirts with Peter Pan collars

  SURVEY

  Young Kim

  What is the most transformative conversation you have ever had with someone on the subject of fashion or style?

  The bulk of my formative adult years—twelve years from the age of twenty-six—were spent with my boyfriend, Malcolm McLaren, until his death. We were extremely close, and at a certain point in our relationship, I believe we somehow became the same. This is why I think our relationship worked. As an artist—which Malcolm quintessentially was—he was naturally a narcissist. (Perhaps I am one, too.) But as we somehow became one (“We have to be the same,” Malcolm would often insist), it enabled our relationship to constantly strengthen. In the last few years of his life, we never disagreed on anything—people, food, fashion, art, design, politics, film, books, ideas . . . We might have different personal preferences (for example, I don’t like heavy political war films), but we would agree on our assessments of them. (Liking something is different from recognizing that it is good.) Ultimately I believe we influenced each other equally. I was influenced by him and he was influenced by me. I can’t imagine having more transformative conversations about style or fashion with anyone than I had with Malcolm. We used to talk about clothes all the time. He knew so much about fashion—from the historical to the practical, everything about the great couturiers and the fashion movements in pop cultu
re. But he could get his hands dirty, too. He knew how things should be made—all the different techniques of fabrication, cloth, cut, et cetera. Looking at a pair of trousers flat, he could tell if they would suit you. Once, in Zurich, he took the bottle opener in the hotel and wedged it into a new pair of shoes (mine) to stretch them out. He knew exactly what he was doing. We both loved clothes and were obsessed by them. We loved shopping and looking . . . at everything, not just clothes. I often joked that shopping was our favorite exercise—shopping for cheese, shopping for wine, shopping for linens, shopping for books, shopping for objects and furniture, shopping for clothes . . . We always went shopping together. The only problem was, I would get bored more easily shopping for men’s clothes than he would for women’s clothes. Men’s clothes are just not as interesting! He would insist always that I come into the dressing room with him while he tried things on, and would reproach me when I started to get bored.

  When do you feel most attractive?

  When my skin is clear, my hair manageable, and I have the right complete outfit for the occasion.

  Are there any clothing items that you have in multiple?

  I don’t buy things in multiple, but in the past fifteen years, I have had two special pairs of boots that I have replaced when they became completely worn-out. I am on the second generation of both. (I hope they will continue to be manufactured so I can keep replacing them.) One is a pair of black patent-leather Courrèges go-go boots, which I wear in the rain. They are not necessarily intended for inclement weather, but they are durable enough for a rainy walk in the city. I love them because, first of all, no one wears them. Furthermore, I think the design is chic and timeless. I like the fact that they are unchanged from the sixties and still beautifully made in France. The spacey style is always cheery on a rainy day, and the surprising lightness allows one to trot around dodging raindrops. The other is a pair of traditional sealskin boots from Norway with soles like tire treads, lined in shearling with bright red laces. They are the best footwear for snow. Malcolm originally bought them for me at the Swedish shop in Paris next to the Brasserie Lipp. (He had worn sealskin boots himself in the seventies.) When I tried to replace them recently, I discovered they were now banned in Europe, so I had to get a Norwegian friend to bring them from Norway for me. I happen to have a Balenciaga white rabbit coat banded in horizontal strips of red felt, which I often wear with the boots. Once I wore this coat during a France–England football game in Paris and realized I looked like an England supporter.