Women in Clothes

by Sheila Heti

  22. Wash but do not make alterations.

  23. This is not a make-work project. Make no adjustments beyond what scissors can do. If the shirt is too big, you will look young and poor. If the shirt is too small, you will look big and strong. If the shirt is much too small, leave it on the street for a smaller hunter.

  24. We are not talking about comfort here, we are not advocating fleece. We must always be a little bit uncomfortable. We are, are we not, part of this world? We have to be alert here, we can’t get too comfortable. As they say, if you are going to go anywhere, you mustn’t get too comfortable.

  COLLECTION

  AMY PINKHAM’s bobby pins

  SURVEY

  HANDMADE

  “When I was about nine, my mother hand-sewed a Little House on the Prairie–style dress for my birthday, and a matching dress for my Barbie.” —TANIA VAN SPYCK

  EDIE CULSHAW When my great-grandmother was in her thirties during the Second World War, she was in the Women’s Royal Naval Service. She was so horrified by the quality and cut of the uniforms that she had hers remade, by hand, by her tailor.

  COLLEEN ASPER I am an artist. This means appearance is an occupational concern. Many artists take this literally and seem to match their work, but with the exception of Yayoi Kusama, I usually think it’s more interesting if someone doesn’t look like what they make.

  MOLLY MURRAY I do something to alter everything that comes into my closet—cut off embellishments, change a seam or hemline, wear it back to front—though I don’t do it as much or as well as my friend Jane, an artist with great style who is the undisputed master of clothing modification. I also compulsively remove all identifying tags and labels from my clothes. In some superstitious way, I feel like this allows the clothes to become more fully themselves, to speak with their material and cut and color and shape, rather than for a shop or designer.

  BRITTANY BROWN My mom was a seamstress who worked in a warehouse sewing the garments doctors wear. She constructed the uniforms to withstand gushes of blood and ultraviolet light. She would also pick out fabric and make me a shirt or dress. One day I was with her in the warehouse, sitting at a sewing machine by myself and my shirt caught on something—a splinter of wood, a tiny knob, I don’t remember what exactly. The thread from the sleeve’s hem unraveled and I remember thinking this would never have happened if my mom had just bought my clothes at a store instead of making them with her own hands. I remember distrusting everything she ever made and therefore everything I wore, all of it concocted by the unskilled craftsmanship of my mother. From then on, I rebelled against everything she made me wear.

  MARGARITA TUPITSYN Most Russians were really poor, so they couldn’t afford to wear the high fashions of the West. My mother, grandmother, and aunt compensated by making things for my family and me to wear. Russian avant-garde artists like my aunt believed that fashion should be egalitarian, part of everyone’s life, and that all things should be beautiful and aestheticized. They were against fashion as elitist. But after Stalin’s regime, this sensibility was lost.

  RACHEL KUSHNER My mother is a southern Protestant beatnik who wove see-through tank tops on her loom and wore homemade pleather hot pants. No bra, never shaved her legs. She has waist-length bright red hair. DIY was instilled in me, I guess.

  FELIZ LUCIA MOLINA My parents are Filipino immigrants who came to L.A. in the late ’60s. They were hippies and kept a lot of their clothes. At a young age, I instinctually wore their old clothes. In college, I cut up some of my mom’s old dresses because the patterns were cool. In the ’80s, they owned and managed board and care homes (where my family lived) for the physically and mentally handicapped. One of the patients taught me how to tie shoelaces.

  ZIVA SERKIS-NAUMANN I have twenty or thirty Bedouin dresses. One is so fine I’m donating it to a museum after I die, and they are waiting for it. I like all things handmade and hand-embroidered. Years ago, I realized it would be a lost art, because it takes so long to weave the cloth. Now you can’t get them—just imitations. I got it in the market in Hebron. I’ve had the dress for forty years or more. I wear it maybe twice a year.

  IVY ARCE My cousin has made clothes for me from scratch. He made my wedding dress and my husband’s suit, vest, and pants. In his suit there was a fabric accent of my dress and vice versa. My cousin has been my best friend since childhood. I keep everything he has made me.

  HEL GURNEY People say, “I love your shirt.” I thank them and sometimes proudly add, “I made it myself.” Ten years on, it’s still the best-loved thing in my wardrobe. It’s my go-to for formal and semiformal events, costume parties, and on days when everything about my body screams wrongness. When I made it, I had no idea how important it would become. I was fifteen. Most of my textiles classmates were making prom dresses, but with startling prescience, I knew my wardrobe needed something different, something that expressed the sort of dandified masculinity to which I was increasingly drawn. The town goth shop had a few extortionately priced ruffled men’s shirts that clung awkwardly to my hips and chest, and my next pilgrimage to Camden was months away. So I made my own. Constructing the shirt was beyond exasperating, the silky fabric was slippery, and much of the detail needed hand-sewing. But the finished product was a labor of love. When I wear it, I feel proud, not only of how damn fine I look, but of that early instance of (literally) taking my gender presentation into my own hands.

  RUTH SATELMAJER In our community, all the kids belonged to the 4-H Club. Since my mother taught the 4-H Sewing Club, I belonged to it. My mother said, “At least you know how, and one day you will be glad for what you have learned.” When I got engaged, my husband-to-be bought me a sewing machine. My husband was a pastor, and we got by with my making all of our children’s clothes, as well as my own. Also, there were several young people who made their home with us, and I often sewed for them.

  MARLENA KAESLER My Oma is from Prussia and had to abandon everything when Russia invaded in 1945. She lived in Germany during her teens. She was a seamstress and made almost every piece of clothing she owns, but arthritis has prevented her from doing so the last ten years. Last year, she showed me a sweater she knitted fifty years ago, when she was twenty-two. She got her seamstress internship with it. She says that there is a “curse” in the family, and she calls it the “Jordan Curse,” and it’s because that part of her family are all obsessed with clothing or are mechanics. The people who have the curse cannot do anything but produce work. Some are successful at it and make it their living, but some are debilitated by it and it takes over their lives.

  SASHA WISEMAN I finally bought a new winter coat, after six years of wearing my old one. I found the old coat in a lost-and-found bin at a fancy restaurant where I worked as a hostess, and I spent weeks painstakingly altering it to meet the standards I had for beauty (sewing patches of floral silk onto the edges, painting a pattern with acrylics onto the back, even trimming the fur hood with mink pelts, and sewing in small jewels in geometric patterns). Over the years, I stopped feeling that these adornments had anything to do with me, and every time I put on the coat I kind of cringed, though I could barely admit to betraying my former self. But I think it’s important to view your style as fluid.

  CLARE NEEDHAM I once found this little-girl’s dress, and having fallen in love with it, I took it to an Indian seamstress who has a shop in Kensington Market filled with saris and beaded scarves. I had fabric added to it so I could fit into it. Years later, when I weighed less and lived in Buenos Aires, I took it to a costurera from Armenia whose shop, and later my dress, reeked of cigarette smoke, and had some fabric removed. It goes without saying that it’s my favorite dress.

  COMPLIMENT

  “BRA”

  Changing room of New York City gym.

  WOMAN: Can I ask you an indiscreet question?

  LISA: Sure.

  WOMAN: Where did you get your bra? It’s so beautiful. The lace. . . .

  LISA: I know! I just got it to replace a favorite one th
at wore out. It’s so great, isn’t it? And it’s navy.

  WOMAN: I have to get one.

  LISA: It’s from La Petite Coquette on University.

  WOMAN: I’m gonna go get one right now. Thank you so much.

  LISA: No problem, I would have done the same thing.

  COLLECTION

  MELINDA ANDRADE’s aviator sunglasses

  CONVERSATION

  FLOWER X

  SMELL SCIENTIST LESLIE VOSSHALL SPEAKS TO HEIDI JULAVITS

  HEIDI: Is smell a language?

  LESLIE: I think it’s absolutely a language. But the lexicon for most people is really, really narrow. Once you start paying attention to it, you learn the nuances. You know, one can identify different kinds of fire: electrical fire, rubber fire, paper fire, wood fire—they all smell different.

  HEIDI: Did you start paying attention at a young age, or is it something you concentrated on more when you started studying it?

  LESLIE: I’ve always paid attention. I’ve always smelled stuff. Even body smells. I know the smells of different farts. Whenever I pee, I pay intense attention. Um . . . I’m sorry.

  HEIDI: No! I think it’s really fascinating.

  LESLIE: Urine changes entirely based on your health and what you’ve eaten. I’ve always been an acute observer of smells that I generate and the perfumes people wear.

  HEIDI: Personal body smells can be a language, right? I remember the first time I went out on a date with this guy I ended up with for a few years, and at one point I got this whiff of spoiled meat.

  LESLIE: Was this at the beginning or the end of the relationship?

  HEIDI: This was our first date! And I had a moment of “My nose is telling me to back off!” I just wonder—if he knew I wasn’t attracted to his smell but I otherwise loved him, is that something he could change? Or is smell part of your genetic identity?

  LESLIE: Your hair smells different from your neck, from your underarms, from your pubic hair—from, obviously, your genital area—from your feet. All those things smell different because of different bacteria. So the bacteria call the shots as to what you’re gonna smell like in those areas. And then there’s your genetics. Your genetics you basically can’t change.

  HEIDI: Do you inherit the way you smell?

  LESLIE: In some sense. Then perfumes are a way to change how you smell. But it’s unpredictable, because every perfume smells different on different people, right? Because of how oily their skin is, or because of the bacteria—they’re gonna chew on the perfume in different ways.

  HEIDI: I love online customer perfume reviews for that reason. A person will say, “It starts out nice, but after fifteen minutes on me it starts to smell like glue.”

  LESLIE: Those blogs have completely disrupted the fragrance industry. It used to be that the manufacturer told you what it smells like. But the perfume bloggers have much more nuanced opinions, and everybody has a slightly different opinion of what something smells like.

  HEIDI: Because it smells different on each of them.

  LESLIE: Yeah, because they will have done some surgery on the perfume just with their body. I love a lot of perfumes, and I buy a lot of them, but I generally ignore the manufacturers’ descriptions because they’re total bullshit. They’ll always say a perfume smells like flower X, which actually has no scent—that’s very typical. Like a daisy is almost scentless. Many orchids are almost scentless. The people who sell the perfumes are in general such morons; they’ll say, “Do you like lemon, or do you like woody?” They’re untrained and they’re idiots.

  HEIDI: I read that you said that most people think they’re better smellers than they are.

  LESLIE: The context for that quote was a really big smell study. Ten out of five hundred people, their answers were completely random. They’re very expressive and very excited, like, “Oh, I really like that,” but the data proved that they’re basically blind to smells. It would be like a blind person going to a museum and saying, “I really like the colors of that one,” while standing in front of the elevator.

  HEIDI: What’s happening neurologically? Are they actually smelling something, do you think, like having a scent hallucination?

  LESLIE: I think they’re bluffing. I would say that in general people are not well trained. You need to be experienced with smell, and recognize and learn, and train yourself, and then this whole world opens up where, you know, strawberries—there isn’t just “a strawberry scent.” Depending on ripeness, there are thousands of different strawberry scents. I find that so exciting.

  HEIDI: How do smells become culturally meaningful? How do we culturally agree on what a smell means or what’s a desirable scent?

  LESLIE: I think that every single smell that someone in America can identify and put into a category—like beer, vinegar, apple, fire—is something that we’ve learned. From the earliest age your parents are teaching you smell identification and smell categorization. Babies start out with this blank slate: they haven’t learned what the associations are, but they’re interested in all the smells. So—poop. They learn to hate the smell of poop only because of the actions of their parents—you know, if they’re changing a diaper, the parents are always verbalizing, or scrunching up their faces, and saying, “Don’t touch it.” That’s an extreme example, but in every case, you’re associating a smell with an object. But if you go overseas, to Africa or Asia, where they have unfamiliar things, and you ask yourself what does something smell like, you’ll be completely tongue-tied. You can’t even say “It smells like” because it’s so unfamiliar, right? You can’t physically put a description on it.

  HEIDI: Are there fashions in perfume?

  LESLIE: Definitely. There are a few key moments when a perfumer will make something revolutionary. Perfumers are very creative, so they make something, and they find it fantastic, and they put it out there, but the public has to be ready for it. The fragrance White Linen is an example of a very musky, powdery fragrance.

  HEIDI: People didn’t like it at first and they learned to like it?

  LESLIE: It wasn’t a style in perfume before, but everything started smelling the same and people were a bit sick of it, and then this new, musky, powdery fragrance came out, it took off, and for the next ten years everybody was copying it.

  HEIDI: It seems like there was a vanilla perfume moment and then there was a fig perfume moment and then there was a vetiver perfume moment. . . .

  LESLIE: Absolutely. Whenever I go to airports, I spend a lot of time in the crappy duty-free shops smelling the crappy perfumes, they’re all powdery, floral crap, and I’m just waiting for that moment when the next big perfume hits and shifts it. It’s not that different from music. I grew up as a teenager in the seventies and early eighties, and I remember when everything was disco, and then some door opened and disco was killed. Then it was Depeche Mode and the Psychedelic Furs. I think perfume parallels that. Fashion also. People just get sick of things.

  HEIDI: But perfume feels different from fashion trends. It seems much more self-erasing to go out and buy the same perfume that you know many other people are wearing.

  LESLIE: I think it depends on the temperament of the person. Some people like being part of the herd and wearing things that are recognizable and somewhat generic. There’s some comfort in that. Whereas I’ve always been a contrarian. I have in my collection of perfumes some of those signature perfumes that everybody wears, but I would never wear them myself.

  HEIDI: Why own them then?

  LESLIE: I guess I’m just a perfume fanatic. I sometimes want to see, Why do people like this? There’s a fantastically famous perfume called L’Eau d’Issey. At a certain point one in ten people in New York were wearing it. So I wanted to own it to see what it smelled like on me. But I would never wear it outside the house.

  HEIDI: Some perfumes you wear only around your house? Like sweatpants or something?

  LESLIE: Sometimes I’ll try things out, yeah. There’s a lot of stuff I really love that my husband
hates, so I can’t wear it unless I’m traveling. Scent is important in relationships because why are you wearing it? Are you wearing it for yourself, or are you wearing it for your partner? Ideally there’s some consensus.

  HEIDI: True.

  LESLIE: It’s a beautiful art form and form of human expression. There are certain people who wear a lot of cheap perfume—I think men are much more guilty of that than women, you know, the men who are putting on Axe. Cheap aftershave has given the whole industry a bad name. In general the perfumes marketed to men are just gross. Historically men used to wear much more floral scents. In the days when men were wearing those beautiful high-heeled buckled shoes and frilly blouses and powdered wigs, they were not wearing Eau Sauvage. Most men’s perfume and aftershave and cologne today is leather, tobacco, citrus. Really idiotically simple. No nuance. Sharp to the nose, and to me really horrible. I like men who cross-dress with the perfumes, because a lot of women’s perfumes are really great on men, and vice versa.

  HEIDI: It’s interesting that there are certain specific moods that are evoked by specific smells and how that gets decided. How are emotions controlled by cultural consensus?

  LESLIE: The effect of culture is very strong. My favorite perfumes as a kid were Love’s Fresh Lemon and Love’s Baby Soft. They’re tiny, one-note perfumes, and they do evoke specific moods, and those moods are related to context, to how you’ve been trained to feel about them. So Love’s Baby Soft—