by Sheila Heti
CONVERSATION
BILLIONAIRE CLIENTS
IDA LIU, MANAGING DIRECTOR AND HEAD OF NORTH AMERICA ASIAN CLIENTS GROUP FOR CITI PRIVATE BANK, SPEAKS TO HEIDI JULAVITS
HEIDI: What do you wear to work? Is there a dress code at your office?
IDA: Formal business attire. I wear suits and dresses to work.
HEIDI: Are these guidelines written down anywhere? How do you learn them?
IDA: There are no explicit rules to formal business attire, but there are certainly guidelines to help you make the right choices, such as taking cues from colleagues and other industry professionals. I always followed the rule “Dress for the job you want to have.”
HEIDI: How do you define “power suit”? Do you wear powers suits?
IDA: A power suit is a suit that gives you extra confidence and makes you feel great. If you don’t feel great, you won’t be performing to your max. Tailoring and fit are key! You can’t go wrong with a black power suit—it also allows the audience to focus on you and your message.
HEIDI: Can you express personal flair when wearing a power suit? Or is the suit flair enough?
IDA: For me it’s more about an interesting detail on the suit—an asymmetrical cut, appliqués, interesting buttons—and less about loud prints or loud colors. I’m not suggesting that you suppress your personal style. But you don’t want your audience to be focused on your outfit rather than what you have to say. First impressions are formed within a few seconds, and nonverbal visual cues are extremely important.
HEIDI: Can you think of a time when what a person was wearing diluted the message?
IDA: I had a meeting with a woman who was wearing a super-heavy sparkly necklace, and I kept focusing on the necklace and wondering: It must be so heavy, it’s such an interesting color, wow, that is so big! And while it was a gorgeous piece and would have been great to wear on the weekends or for a party, it was incredibly distracting to encounter it in the workplace.
HEIDI: How many suits do you own?
IDA: That’s a hard question! I’ve been an investment banker since I graduated from college. I have a lot of suits. I have very specific taste and I am a very quick and decisive shopper.
HEIDI: How has the idea of business attire evolved in the past few decades?
IDA: Women are dressing more feminine. There’s nothing wrong with skirt suits and there’s nothing wrong with dresses. We can get away with a bare leg in the summer as long as we’re wearing closed-toe shoes. When I worked in Asia, there was such heat and humidity, we wore a lot of short-sleeved dresses and suits.
HEIDI: What’s an example of something you’d never wear to work?
IDA: I’d never wear something loud or outspoken. When you’re having important investment discussions with billionaire clients, you don’t want them to spend time focused on what you’re wearing. You don’t want them thinking, Why is she wearing that loud print?
PROJECT
STAINS | LEANNE SHAPTON
Various women’s stains
COLLECTION
BAY GARNETT’s leopard-print tops
SURVEY
PROTECTION
“I find life rather terrifying, so I tend to dress to feel invisible and, in turn, safe. This makes me sound a little crazy, but I am not.” —ROXANE GAY
ANNIE REBEKAH GARDNER I dress protectively. Outside, people have told me I walk like a “dude,” and that they daren’t approach me because I look like I’m going to kill somebody.
CLARE NEEDHAM When I lived on the Mount of Olives in East Jerusalem, I would deliberately plan outfits that made me look as unattractive and asexual as possible. I would wear my boyfriend’s shirts, which were baggy and loose. Once I even tried to wear his jeans. It was better to pull my hair back, to keep my nails unpainted, and to try to draw as little attention to myself as possible. None of these disguises really worked—I was still harassed. But choosing to dress myself in a modest way gave me the illusion of control.
NINA MOOG I usually wear eye shadow when I’m stressed. When I wrote my master’s dissertation, I wore mascara every day. I am unsure what this means, exactly.
BRYENNE KAY In grade eight, my mother said I looked like a prostitute. I’d just grown boobs and hadn’t realized that men noticed. I was wearing the same clothes I’d always worn, I just looked more womanly. What did she say, exactly? That I was trying to be a predator, when really I was the prey, and that the clothes I wore could affect my safety. Thanks, Mom!
LORI HANDELMAN I was severely abused in my childhood and lived on the street for three years in high school to get away from my terrible home. It took me a few decades to learn that I did not have to hide myself, that I could dress in an attractive way and still be safe, even be seen by others, by men, without too much danger. Dressing is really only now becoming fun and a pleasure. I am fifty-four years old.
CARLA DU PREE When I’m not quite up to feelin’ folks, the big sunglasses come out and stay on, and with a tilt of an upward chin, folks don’t say much. I don’t allow them in.
AURELIA BELFIELD Fashion is a weapon. Fashion is 100 percent a weapon in my life.
WEDNESDAY LUPYPCIW When I was in grades eight to ten, I used to make “wearable-art sculptures” out of anything I found lying around, and wear them to school. There was a yellow fringe face-veil mounted onto wire antlers, a molded skirt made out of Sweet Valley High books, and a silk shirt with a rusted-wrench pattern, worn with the actual rusty wrench. Stuff like that. I was really shy. The sculptures were a way to make sure no one talked to me.
JENNY DAVIDSON I took up endurance sports in a big way six or seven years ago, and as much as things like bike shorts are unflattering, there is so much clarity about what’s the best style and color. I will wear bright colors for safety without a qualm. I wish I could wear a navy blue boiler suit and have a shaved head, but if I did those things, they would attract attention rather than repel it.
THERESA PAGEOT I own one really expensive item. It’s a really sexy blazer with these huge power-pockets. If I’m going somewhere I’m scared of, or where I feel like I don’t really belong, I’ll wear that blazer for a hit of courage.
JOHANNA ADORJÁN Once I was called by a friend who told me that the man I loved had just walked into a party in the company of another woman. He had minutes ago left my apartment, claiming he was tired and needed to go home to sleep. I immediately got dressed to confront him. I chose my highest-heeled shoes, and it felt a bit like dressing in war gear, like wearing armor. Also, they made me taller, which was exactly how I needed to feel. Unfortunately, when I arrived at the party, he had already left.
MONIQUE AUBÉ I wear a necklace every day. It’s a volcanic stone from Mount Hekla in Iceland, which was thought to be the very gates of hell during the middle ages.
JESSICA JOHNSON Once I worked for a difficult woman who was a TV star. She always had hair and makeup done before going on a plane or doing anything in public. Although the superficiality of our world isn’t lost on me, I realized that some security comes from knowing a professional has done your look, which leaves you much more confident in being your true self and getting the job done. So my favorite thing is to get a beautiful blowout, and then go and be a big weirdo.
KATE SHEPHERD I distrust anything that looks different from things I already own.
LAURA SNELGROVE My favorite dress at age three was a floral dress with tiny puffed sleeves. The smocking on the bodice allowed me to pull the neckline all the way over my head when in a seated tucked position, which felt like a secret hiding spot. It’s my first memory of recognizing the potential for protection in clothing.
ELEANOR JOHNSTON When I lived in Kitchener, it had the highest rape stats per capita in Canada. I put heel and toe cleats on my oxblood oxfords thinking I’d sound bigger and more forceful when I was walking home late from the library. Seemed to work.
SADIE STEIN There have been moments when I have felt insecure with women—with an ex’s new flame, or someone I find intimidati
ng—and I have found myself offering them something in my closet that I suddenly feel they must have. “It’s never really been me,” I might say, or, “I’ve been waiting for the right person to give it to.” Sometimes these clothes are expensive, even beloved. They are always disarmed, and exclaim at my generosity. Then I feel slightly ashamed, because I am conscious of a rush of euphoria and relief: the balance of power has shifted.
NATASHA HUNT If you want to play into the shittiest and most irritating of racial stereotypes, I’m the token black girl. I’ve usually been one of a few brown kids in whatever circles I run in, so I tend to stand out. I think I wanted some semblance of control over my own feelings of belonging, of being the only one and occasionally gawped at. If you dress yourself as the “misfit,” it becomes safer to interact in a world that has arbitrarily placed you as an outsider.
CLAIRE COTTRELL I used to be terrified of flying and I’d try to intuitively feel what I should wear. If I wore the right thing, the flight would be okay, and I’d get to wherever I was going. If I didn’t, disaster would strike. I don’t do that anymore. It’s a very dangerous place to be.
ON DRESSING
THE PINK PURSE
EMILY GOULD
In the early spring of 2004, I was twenty-two and had just received my first tax refund. I didn’t have any money, but I was close to money all the time. At the slick corporate publishing offices on the Upper West Side where I worked, the profit-and-loss statements were for hundreds of thousands of dollars, which it was my job to calculate, and I fetched coffee for established authors and agents—daily interactions that reassured me that my modest circumstances were only temporary. The hazy future would deliver me a big payday, so there was no need to save. I spent every penny I earned, which was easy to do: rent took most of it, food pretty much covered the rest.
When I unexpectedly got a check in the mail from the federal government for $342, I went out to buy a large, rectangular, pale pink Marc by Marc Jacobs handbag.
Why a purse? Why pale pink? Why Marc by Marc Jacobs? In 2004, Marc anything was the ultimate status symbol for a specific kind of New York City woman, the kind I aspired to be: someone with natural charisma, a cool job, effortless and understated sexiness, and plenty of cash. These garments seemed to represent a reaction against the blingy, logo-obsessed late ninties–early aughts. They were a credible imitation of clothes you’d find in a thrift store, but perfected and updated with better quality and cooler details: cashmere instead of polyester, and clever prints that invited a second glance or started a conversation (“Are those foxes?”).
By the time I received the check, I had been lusting after those clothes for years. I felt a purse that I would carry every day would cast the glamour of Marc over my entire existence and transform my thrifted clothes into their classier renditions.
So I dressed in what I considered to be a subtle-yet-glamorous outfit, something the kind of person who frequented West Village designer boutiques would wear for a day of casual shopping: slouchy flat black boots, tight black jeans (then fashionably low-waisted), vintage black velvet blazer over a shrunken black perfectly worn-out and semitransparent T-shirt.
No one greeted me when I walked in the door of Marc Jacobs. I tried to make subtle, casual, “I’m not a shoplifter” eye contact with the pretty, dark-haired salesgirl, who was wearing an outfit like mine except with a halo around it, that intangible aura of expensiveness that designer clothes have. She didn’t smile back.
“Let me know if I can help you find anything,” she said without a question mark.
She closely monitored me as I picked up purses and modeled them one by one in the mirror.
I did my best to ignore her as I faux-casually compared price tags. The larger, heavier bags that I really wanted were $500 or $700, but after only a few minutes in the store that was starting to seem normal. The pink purse had soft leather and pretty clasp details, an inner pocket for my wallet and phone, and two outer pockets that could hold the many lip balm–type products I was equipped with at all times. I chose it quickly. I carried it to the register and paid with cash. I did not at that innocent time possess a credit card.
The purse made its debut at work the next day. As the editor in chief’s assistant, I had a cubicle just outside his office. Everyone waiting to see him had to linger in my cube region, chatting with me. The women—all the important editors were women—treated me with a mix of admiration and exasperation. The most glamorous, P, was the first to notice my purse—casually hanging from a handle on the file cabinet behind me.
“Oh my god. Is that Marc by Marc Jacobs?”
“It is. I bought it with my tax refund.”
She looked at me with a mixture of condescension and compassion. “Wow. Well, you’re lucky. I wish I could go out and buy myself a Marc Jacobs purse.”
I felt genuinely confused. “What’s stopping you?”
She sighed. “When you’re married, when you have a child, you’ll understand.”
I’m still not married and I do not have children, but I do understand. I had spied on every document that crossed my boss’s desk, so I knew her approximate salary—it was a number that seemed enormous to me then, and still seems healthy now, except I know people with that salary who struggle to pay their mortgage in studio apartments in this beautiful, appalling city. Back then I had felt betrayed by P. If she couldn’t buy a Marc by Marc Jacobs purse, what was I working toward? She owed it to me, to all us assistants, to give us something to aspire to. She owed it to us to dress for the job and the life we wanted.
Six years later—not half as secure, materially or otherwise, as my twenty-two-year-old self assumed I’d be—I set out a bunch of my belongings on my friend’s Fort Greene stoop, including the once pink purse. Despite repeated professional cleanings, the color hadn’t held up to the heavy wear I inflict on all my possessions. Also, pale pink is an impractical color for something you’re going to set down on the grimy subway floor. The purse had lost its rectangular shape and sat slumped in a leathery pile. I sold it for $10 and, along with some other things, netted $40 that day—cash I needed and felt lucky to have.
CONVERSATION
CLOTHES ON THE GROUND
JULIA WALLACE & translator Kuch Naren
There are more than 400,000 garment workers in Cambodia, concentrated in a vast and growing sweep of factories in the dusty outskirts of Phnom Penh. The majority of these workers are female and rural, having been enticed by the prospect of a regular monthly wage to leave their farming families and move to the big city, or what passes for it. Migrant garment workers usually live in makeshift wooden barracks that spring up like mushrooms in factory districts, each room large enough to admit only a hard raised platform that serves as a bed, and a few personal belongings. Toilets and cooking facilities are usually shared. Factories transport the women to and from work in rickety flatbed trucks, cattle-car style. Dozens of workers are crammed into each truck, standing room only, for miles along the country’s pitted and potholed highways. The trucks crash and overturn frequently. The cost of this rudimentary transport is deducted from their monthly salaries.
In Cambodia, below a smattering of brand-name chain stores such as Mango and Giordano, there are malls, which sell nondescript but fashionable clothes in unbranded stalls. Below the malls, there are the local phsar, the markets. And below the phsar, there is krom chhat: literally, under the umbrella. These are either secondhand garments or the cheapest possible factory-made goods, often imported from China. They are the only clothes garment workers can afford—sold out in the street, strewn on tarps spread out beneath umbrellas. The most brightly and gaudily dyed fabrics are the least expensive ones.
As a journalist in Cambodia, I have been interviewing garment workers about their lives for more than three years, but I never thought to interview them about what they wear, although I have often been struck by their de facto uniform: blue jeans, trucker hats, and screamingly bright T-shirts and hoodies in vivid shades of mag
enta or neon yellow, often accented with leopard print and rhinestones. It’s a far cry from the drab attire conjured by the phrase “garment worker.” I had always, perhaps naively, taken these colors as a way of asserting individuality in the face of the numbing repetitions of factory labor. But this turned out to be only a minor concern in the complicated calculus of dressing oneself on a salary of around $80 a month.
