by Sheila Heti
CINDY: It’s more like an essence. With some of the society portraits, as I’m shooting them, as the character is evolving, I will start to feel I know the character, or maybe I’ll realize the shots that work the best are the ones where she looks very haughty and bitchy and distant and cold, and that will help inform the character even if I didn’t plan on making her that way. Some of them look more haunted and sad and are trying to put up a good front. But it’s always a surprise to me when I see the results in the tests. Then I realize, “That’s the one that works.”
MOLLY: I think I’ve told you this before—but when we were working together on the movie Office Killer, I remember thinking about my character’s clothing, and I had this idea that she was going to be very New York and wearing all black, you know, because she was written kind of bitchy. And when you came in you were like, “No no no.” You were very forthright: “Wrong, wrong, this is not right, she’s colorful, she has to have really bright colors.” I hadn’t thought of it that way, but as soon as you said that, and we started to build the character around these colors, it really changed the way I saw the character, and she ended up being a lot more funny and interesting. She was still really bitchy, but the color really informed my interpretation of her. It’s something I’ve thought about a lot since then.
CINDY: I like to make characters who are not supposed to be frumpy—to dress them up frumpy and take it in an opposite direction.
MOLLY: Do you ever find yourself wanting to photograph people you see on the street, like, Oh I have to remember that outfit?
CINDY: Sure, yeah. And I’ve tried to do it surreptitiously. Usually the person’s approaching me and I’m trying to find my phone really quickly and then I pretend I’m just looking at my phone, and usually the picture is way out of focus or I catch the person from the side or the back. Recently I was in Venice and a bunch of us were having lunch and there was this waitress who was incredible—I have never seen anybody with so much mascara on. It was as if she used a whole thing of mascara in one sitting. It was caked on in the most outrageous way! I wish I were one of those people who don’t mind going up to a stranger and saying, “Wow, can I take your picture, you look great!” That would make sense if they’re really attractive, but if they’re very strange-looking . . . maybe they don’t know that they’re strange-looking. It might be a little insulting or something. So I make mental notes.
MOLLY: I feel that every time one goes out it’s a transformation—I certainly don’t look the same when I go out as I look in the morning. We all transform and we all have this idea of what we want to look like when we go out. Do you ever wear the same clothes as your characters? Or are those things totally separate?
CINDY: There are some things I could see wearing. Sometimes what’s more scary is that I will be getting dressed to go somewhere and then I’ll look in the mirror and I’ll realize I’ve actually become one of my characters. Then it’s like (laughs), “Okay, it’s time to change something.”
MOLLY: (laughs) Yeah, scale it back a little.
CINDY: I do feel about getting dressed to go out that it’s a totally different thing from my normal daytime self. I enjoy putting a lot of makeup on to go to some function, and wearing something I wouldn’t normally wear during the day.
MOLLY: Do you feel women in general take enough risks with what they wear?
CINDY: Well, I don’t think celebrities take enough risks—especially celebrities who have a creative side and probably know exactly what they feel good in. But that’s because they get torn apart in the press so much they’re afraid of taking chances. So everybody just looks very tasteful and kind of all the same.
MOLLY: Yeah, bland.
CINDY: Yeah. So for somebody who likes to watch celebrity events, it’s sad to see everybody look the same. But the general public? I think most people see themselves one way, and that’s how they always see themselves, even as they get older, like wearing the same hairstyle forever. They hit a certain look when they’re twenty-five and continue to look that way until they’re old. Men and women.
MOLLY: Most fashion people actually counsel you to do that—to keep one hairstyle, like Anna Wintour or Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. They really picked a look and didn’t deviate very much.
CINDY: That’s true.
MOLLY: I don’t feel I can do that. That’s one of the reasons why I won’t get a tattoo, because I feel I’d want to change it up too much.
CINDY: I love tattoos. I’ve always fantasized about having one big tattoo all over my back or something—I love it, it’s like clothes.
MOLLY: I would hate to have to wear the same outfit every day. It would feel like a uniform.
CINDY: But I could see becoming one of those people who just keep adding more and more tattoos.
MOLLY: I do think tattoos are beautiful, but I don’t think they’re for me. I guess that’s what it is—it’s art that continues to grow and transform and it just happens to be on your body. I’ve always felt I can do that with clothes. It doesn’t have to be ink actually on my body. Which women make you the happiest to look at?
CINDY: I think women who look like they’re going against style but look super-confident in what they’re doing, like they don’t care what the fashion magazines say, they’re just out there and happy about it. I’m aspiring to that as I get older—to just not care and go with it.
MOLLY: It’s hard, though, when you’re in the public eye. I feel I took way more risks as a young person. I’ll look at old photographs of myself—or even old movies, because that had a lot to do with my clothes—and I’ll think, “Wow, I was really bold, I was really going for it there.” I never really thought in terms of what other people were going to think. Now I’m not a neutral dresser, though I certainly don’t take the risks I used to take. Do you find you’ve gotten riskier as you’ve gotten older?
CINDY: I think so, because when I was younger, especially when I was starting to get more successful, I felt so guilty about it that I didn’t want to stand out. I’d go to an opening and just try to blend in. Now it is what it is. And I can afford to experiment more with shopping and purchases, so I definitely feel more playful.
MOLLY: I feel like you’re a lot sexier.
CINDY: Ha! That’s nice.
MOLLY: I always thought you were great-looking, but you were more . . . I don’t know. . . .
CINDY: I was tomboyish, I think.
MOLLY: And cute! I wonder if that had anything to do with . . . Well, you were at the tail end of not such a happy marriage. Do you feel your clothing is influenced by the person in your life?
CINDY: Yes. Although I think what also happened is I became single again and I was starting to get older, and I wanted to recapture some femininity I felt I lost through the unhappiness of the marriage or my youth going away. I also was so much more insecure about my body then, and I felt so much better about myself after the divorce that I didn’t mind letting more of my femininity come out.
MOLLY: It was really interesting to see that transformation. It’s also great for me to know somebody who looks better as she gets older (laughs) rather than the other way around. Because I think aging is really, really rough.
CINDY: It’s scary, yeah.
MOLLY: It is! It’s fucking scary! There’s part of me that wants to say, “I’m deeper than that, this shouldn’t matter, think about the roots of the tree rather than the flower.” And I do. There’s a part of me that really believes that. Then there’s the other part of me that’s just like, “Fuck, it’s only going to get worse.”
CINDY: I know, it’s really scary.
MOLLY: But in a lot of ways, I’m better-looking now than I was in my thirties. I’m more confident, my body is better because I think about it and work on it.
CINDY: I totally agree.
MOLLY: How do you feel about the way culture sees and presents women to women?
CINDY: I think it’s scary what the fashion world presents as women. But I also know that when I’ve
had my picture taken and they’ve done a tiny bit of retouching, I actually am thankful. They show me the before and it’s like, “Oh god.” But it’s these models, I think. It’s not so much the retouching, it’s the choice of models. They could still find really beautiful people who weren’t necessarily so skinny, or they could find really interesting faces that weren’t classically beautiful.
MOLLY: They don’t look quite human to me. I feel like I’m conditioned like everybody else to think, “Oh, that’s pretty, that’s beautiful, they’re so elongated,” but when I really think about it, they’re just not like anybody else.
CINDY: Yeah, they’re freaks of nature compared with the rest of us.
MOLLY: And freaks of nature that go in one direction rather than another. Fashion’s always been around, but there’s a lot more pressure on girls to look a certain way. I love your centerfold pictures, because most centerfolds are so fake and the women don’t look real.
CINDY: I made them for a magazine as a response to the idea of a centerfold. But I wanted it to feel like you were intruding on somebody’s intimacy, rather than feeling like you wanted to gawk. I wanted it to make you feel like, “Oops, I better turn the page.”
SURVEY
SISTERS
“When I was seven, I stole the side-part hairstyle from my sister for a school picture. Household drama ensued.” —DAPHNE JAVITCH
ALISSA NUTTING There was an oatmeal-colored oversized T-shirt nightgown patterned with bow-tie-laden teddy bears. It belonged to my older sister, whom I adored, and I received it as a child when she discarded it. Wearing it I felt this nearly cannibalistic pleasure. It was this combination of feeling that I’d become her, that she was with me, that we were the same person, and that I looked great because she looked great. I still wore it in college. It was soft and very short on me by that point, and I felt sexy in it. But I got rid of it a few years later when I was attempting to have a ubiquitous level of sophistication in my life. I wanted to look put-together even at bedtime, partially to impress the guy I was with. It didn’t take long for me to realize this was a really stupid notion, but by that point it was too late. I’d already gotten rid of it. I remember how comfortable I felt when I put it on. It was like transdermal Valium.
MAEGAN FIDELINO The first outfit I remember clearly is the polka-dot dress I wore to the hospital when my sister was born.
SARA K. I can’t stand borrowing clothes from people and nearly have panic attacks when I find out that a new girlfriend is one of those oh-I-had-sisters types who starts rummaging through my closet and pulling shit out. To me, clothes are really personal, so I’m offended that someone would think that she and I are interchangeable.
CAITLIN VAN DUSEN I talk to my sister often about clothes. We once distinguished between people who are “ball” (they look consistent from day to day, neither extraordinarily good nor bad) and people who are “bat” (sometimes they look drop-dead gorgeous and other times frumpy; their appearance varies a lot from day to day). I don’t know where those terms came from, but they stuck.
LENAE DAY I am constantly giving my younger sister clothing items and then, much to her chagrin, taking them back. I figure if it wasn’t a birthday or Christmas gift, it was really only ever borrowed from me.
ZENDA SHIMSHAK My sister gave me a ring for Christmas one year that I wore every day until I got engaged, at which point I switched it for my engagement ring. It was very hard to take it off. It meant so much to me.
MELISSA HENDERSON I love giving gifts. I recently gave my sister a necklace of music notes. She likes to sing. She wears it all the time and cherishes it more than her other jewelry. She still has the special box. It’s not from a popular designer, but I picked it out especially for her and I didn’t care how much it cost because it screamed her name.
JOSS LAKE I don’t generally give gifts of clothing or jewelry anymore. I gave my sister a beautiful coat a few years ago and she never even wore it as a courtesy gesture, so I’m done.
LILI OWEN ROWLANDS On school photo day, my sister and I were dressed in identical stripey tops. We were supposed to be taken in for our individual and class photos in the morning, then siblings were paired up in the afternoon for family photos. During lunch, I had put on my fleece because I was cold. When the order forms and sample photos marked PROOF arrived, my mistake was obvious to all. In our individual portraits, my sister and I looked sisterly. But in our joint photo we looked chaotic and a little sad, and you could see cat hairs speckling my fleece. I think this was probably PROOF of something.
JOHANNA FATEMAN I remember desperately wanting all kinds of outfits and shoes, especially things my older sister wore. I have a clear memory of standing at the top of the stairs in the white patent-leather Mary Janes that she’d outgrown. It was an ecstatic moment, feeling like a sophisticated, older girl in my sister’s party shoes. They were like the key to a fairy-tale realm.
KIMBERLY JEAN SMITH While still a child, my sister underwent radical brain surgery. As a result, she had lots of cognitive and physical disorders and died at age forty-two. But even at that age she looked like a small child. My mother often dressed her as one, choosing clothing that drew no attention to her, because my sister was bald due to her treatments, and thin, and sat in a wheelchair. For most people, she was already a strange sight. But I liked to buy her bright things, things to accentuate the color of her rosy cheeks or draw attention to her big brown eyes and long dark eyelashes––like red caps, and rose-printed jackets in fashionable cuts from trendy designers. It gave me great pleasure to see her wearing these things. I think she enjoyed them too, as much as she could, I suppose, as she seemed mostly to live beyond such trivial things.
SAGAN MacISAAC When I was fourteen, my sister moved out to go to university. During the time she was away, I got into vintage/Value Village dressing and liked to match all sorts of colors and patterns. I looked really hippie-ish. When my sister came home after being away for a few months she said, “What are you wearing?” My mum was in the room and leaned over and whispered (but I heard), “That’s how she dresses.”
AMY LAM My friend Zeesy told me a story about how a girl I don’t know lied about where she got a piece of clothing. This girl told one of our friends, Yuula, that she got the piece of clothing from Value Village, then later on, in a different scenario, told Yuula’s sister Xenia that she got it from a dumpster. Zeesy said the girl told Xenia she got it from a dumpster because Xenia is slightly cooler than Yuula.
RAISEL BRUNO Once while we were swimming, one of my sisters said to me, “You’re ugly.” She said I had beady eyes. Another time while we were swimming, another sister said, “Raisel’s pretty.” I took both things to heart.
GAYLE DAVIES I was wearing a pink dress and was about four years old. My mother had taken me and four of my sisters to the Lutheran church in a small country town. I crawled into the pew next to my sister, aged nine, who in no short order informed me that I was NOT to sit next to her because my pink dress would clash with the red one she was wearing.
SHAYLA CROWEL I love getting hand-me-downs from my older sister. We have similar tastes in clothing, so I was really happy when, after she had her first baby and was not able to fit into some of her clothes, I was able to take some things of hers I’ve always liked.
NAOMI ALISA CALNITSKY The borrowing of clothing remains a contentious issue in my family with the dangerous potential to deeply damage my relationship with my little sister, whose sense of style and intuitive fashion sense remain far superior to mine.
MAIREAD CASE My sister and I don’t live in the same city anymore. Once I needed a new coat and we went out together and she helped me find a good one. It was the most expensive item I ever bought, $130, on the sale rack at Macy’s. I wore this wool coat every winter day for years and, maybe this is lame, I cried when it got moth holes.
REBECCA SALERNO There was this knit linen sweater that my sister and I fought over for several months, and her best friend was also fond of it, so all three of
us were wearing it and stealing it from one another.
RACHEL PERRY WELTY My sisters and I use a form of shorthand in our own language to describe clothing-related things. CPW stands for “Cost per Wear,” which is a term I believe I read in a funny little book from the ’80s on how to dress. We use it to justify purchases. If a sweater is $500 but you think you’ll wear it three times a week all winter, then the CPW is low and the sweater is a good buy. Another term is PL, which means “Permanent Loan,” and is used when you want to give something to your sister or friend, but you want the right to ask for it back. As far as I know, in the history of the PL no one has ever asked for anything back. I think it just helps us part with things, knowing it’s not forever.
HOLLY MERRITT My little sister has been instrumental in helping me with makeup. She shuddered when she saw I owned only two eye shadows.
TALATA BOWSER My mother used to dress me and my sister, who is two years younger, the same. I remember an outfit from when we were six and four. It was shorts and a sweatshirt with a bright hearts pattern. I asked my mother why we had to wear the same outfit, as if we were twins. From then on, I tried to be different from my sister, even though we were still dressed the same way for many more years.
JENNIFER WINEKE One of my fondest early memories is from when I was seven, and my sister, who was nine, either found a jellyfish in her shoe or was irrationally terrified of finding a jellyfish in her shoe. My mom sat us down and had us write and illustrate little books about finding jellyfish in our shoes to work through our anxieties about jellyfish.
GLYNDA ALVES When I was going through a difficult phase with my body, my eldest sister said, “Your body is changing from a girl to a woman. You need to dress for it.” I was twenty-two at the time. It put things into perspective.
NICHOLE BAIEL I passed on a ring to my sister that meant a lot to me, but I wanted her to have it because she was going through some pretty hard times, and it was my way to always be there with her.
