Women in Clothes

by Sheila Heti

  SUSAN ELIZABETH TROUP

  Though my mother was model-scouted once in Bermuda, I don’t think she had any idea that she was beautiful, or if she had an idea, she didn’t much care. She rarely wore makeup or fussed over her clothing. Her hair, for the entirety of my childhood, was cut in this style, known as a “Dorothy Hamill.” Hers was maintained monthly by a Rod Stewart ringer named Claude. Claude was her beloved hairdresser. I asked Claude to cut my long hair exactly like hers. For months afterward, I was mistaken for a boy. I learned, through similar missteps, that she was more effortlessly beautiful than I was and that I couldn’t follow her lead. What our faces have in common, however, is this: When happy, we both look like dogs with our heads thrust out the windows of a speeding car. HEIDI JULAVITS

  FUSAE KISHIMOTO

  I love this picture of my mother. She was twenty-three, traveling through Thailand with a friend. In this picture, she has just gone parasailing and has landed on the beaches of Pattaya. Her hair is a mess but she is happy. I have always looked up to my mother for being the adventurous and courageous woman that she is. In this picture, I imagine she feels liberated and full of life, traveling the world. A couple years after this, she will meet a foreign man and fall in love, give birth to a daughter, then be widowed. She raised me on her own and I have taken in many of her core values. I am just as happy and adventurous as she is in this picture, and it’s all because of her. STEPHANIE MIKI ARNDT

  MANIA CIUPKA

  My mother was a beautiful woman and I have tried for a long time to model my look after this photo. M. WHITEFORD

  DOLORES GRIEGO

  My mother died on February 20, 2012, at the age of seventy-nine. I miss her very much. My mother was from a beautiful family, they only had love. She married my dad when she was seventeen and had eleven kids. My mother was left-handed and ten of her children are left-handed. She worked caring for her family all her life. She only had a sixth-grade education. She hated school because they were very prejudiced and hateful to the Hispanic kids. She quit school to go to work in the fields with her dad to help her family. I think my mother was a beautiful woman. CHRISTINA GONZALES

  EIRA ROBERTS

  I love this picture of my parents because it’s taken in front of one of the most romantic buildings I know of, the Taj Mahal. They’re looking so young. They’ve swapped cultures. Dad in suit, mom in sari. They look utterly free and besotted and with their whole lives ahead of them. I imagine they felt like that then, and it’s what I see. Two beautiful people beginning their lives. TISHANI DOSHI

  VALERIE ANNE FRASER

  Here is the best picture of my mother. At the time, 1980, she was around fifteen years old and probably pregnant with my older sister. The theme of this particular Polaroid was “Valerie in front of her friends,” and it’s basically the same as an accompanying Polaroid, “Valerie in front of her parents,” where she’s sitting on the couch in the same outfit but without makeup on. I use this picture of my mom to explain my family to other people. It makes me laugh. She is the exact same person in many ways today. My mother adores this picture of herself. WEDNESDAY LUPYPCIW

  COLLECTION

  CHRISTINE MUHLKE’s identical dresses in different fabrics and patterns

  ON DRESSING

  I STOPPED BY THE STORE EVERY DAY

  IDA HATTEMER-HIGGINS

  Morrissey sings: I would go out tonight, but I haven’t got a stitch to wear. I bet Morrissey would agree that the man who is speaking probably has not too few clothes, but too many. He defeats his evening in advance by thinking too much about their effect—about their future.

  Recently, I was engaged to be married. Right away, I put a lot of thought into a dress for the wedding. I wanted something old, something very specific. I put more thought into the dress than I’ve ever put into any single other item of clothing. During my search, my future was never more vividly imagined, never more desirable, and, of course, never more manhandled.

  A few months later, the engagement was called off in a manner both stubborn and violent. Gradually it became clear that everything I had thought was my life was not my life. I had thought I would soon be living in Portugal. Suddenly I would be neither living in Portugal nor adopting any of its worldview. I had thought I would be the wife of a Russian. Suddenly I was not going to be linked to Russia in any way at all. My daily routine, the deliberate shaping of my tastes, my identity, collapsed. I was left futureless.

  Among much else, this posed a specific handicap, in that when I buy clothing, I resist the idea that I’m buying for the present. It pains me to imagine that any piece of clothing is not meant for eternity. New clothes feel like a hand one reaches forward into the folds of a later time. You touch a piece of fabric, and in doing so you touch a future occasion, a future city, a future life. New clothes are the solid tip of the future.

  Because I resist the ephemerality of clothing, I make grandiose demands of it: a garment must touch on all that I have ever been and will be. The irony is that for all my grasping at eternity, in the end, I almost never wear any item for more than a few months.

  So it was not just the wedding dress I could no longer touch. I could no longer touch the specific destiny surrounding it, and all the clothes that went with it. There was no replacement destiny. The life I thought was coming, with its particularities of mood and thus style, vanished without a trace. It was lurid to watch as its deep contingency was suddenly exposed.

  In the last days of the relationship, when it was already far too late to do anything about the implosion, I went to Athens to visit my ex-fiancé, to wander the ruins of love, and make some kind of halfhearted inventory of loss, as you see survivors of an earthquake do—moving in shocked, fascinated circles around the vacant space where a home once stood. As it happened, we found very little to say to each other.

  Every day I took a long walk near Omonia Square, among the heroin addicts, illegal Pakistani immigrants, police in riot gear, and fat old posturing pimps standing around the magazine kiosks. Not far off from this action and to some degree within it, I found a large, old, decrepit store in the colonial style, once grand, with ragged bunting now hanging flaccid over a protruding lip of iron filigree.

  The entrance to the store was draped with merchandise on racks facing the sidewalk, apparently aimed at a population of tourists at once greedy and slightly stupid: new T-shirts grimed by the street, army-navy gear, knock-off jeans, shoddy camping equipment, football jerseys without official license.

  Once inside, however, sunlight sliced by narrow, weak beams fell onto high-ceilinged rooms, and under the layers of dust was a grand old sartorial shop, a merchant’s palace filled with ancient dead-stock, tailored prêt-à-porter—mostly for gentlemen, but plenty for ladies as well. Clothing designed in London, Paris, and Milan, forty, fifty, sixty years ago. Jackets, trousers, wool-and-felt hats, broadcloth shirts, and ties still in their rotting white boxes, each labeled by size and style with a yellowed sticker on their thin edges. A few garments lay on the floor where they had fallen. It seemed like they had been lying in the same slatternly constellation for a long time, as though the former owners had abandoned the store hastily a few days ahead of an advancing army.

  The jackets—tweed, wool, gabardine, of fine cuts and colors—hung on long racks, their hues softer along the ridges of shoulders and crests of lapels, blanched by the light and the dust.

  Without any evident pattern, the eccentric owners were mixing new clothing into the racks—articles made in China, with the names of sports teams and designer brands in large plastic letters across the chest. These things looked clean, shiny, and very much like garbage, while the old things appeared dignified, honorable, dirty, and diseased.

  During my stay in Athens, I stopped by the store every day. In the beginning, I only pulled at the edges of interesting fabrics that I saw poking out from the bins at the front, where odds and ends had been thrown together and were being sold for one euro an item. Sometimes their yellowed tags were s
till attached; they had mod fonts on heavy card. Every day, it seemed the piles were slightly different. On my first visit, I saw a little boy’s shirt made of fine silk paisley, beautifully tailored, with square buttons made of bone, but the next day it was gone. I didn’t imagine for an instant, however, that it had been sold. The shop seemed almost completely unvisited. It was far more likely that the shirt was swallowed up in the turning of the piles, which fell round and round as in a washing machine, shifted constantly by the old woman.

  The old woman was not so old, really, but the lines of her face were flamboyant, almost like an alligator’s, framed by hair clearly dyed its brick color. Under eyes outlined in kohl, she wore a black leather jacket and a polyester turtleneck. She shifted the clothes with a casual hand, strong and indifferent, a cigarette burning in her other hand, ashing regularly onto the piles of clothing. With her free arm, the one without the cigarette, she made suggestions, pulling out items for me to try on with a breezy majesty—things invariably grotesque and inappropriate.

  On the first day, I found a deep green pencil skirt of delicate wool twill, made by Yves Saint Laurent circa 1965, sewn to simulate a wrap. The closure was held by dark gold buttons made of military braid, which ran all the way down its length. When I tried it on, the skirt clung to me as if it were liquid. I bought it.

  The next day, I found a linen dress with three-quarter-length puffed sleeves and two concentric Peter Pan collars, one on top of the other. At first I thought it was made in the eighties, but then I saw the hook-and-eye closure, and the straightness of the hips. It could not date later than 1939. Because it was the color of sea glass, I bought it, too.

  I bought some ladies’ button-down shirts in salmon, indigo, and turmeric silk. I bought a short dove-gray swing coat, closely fitted in the shoulders, with massive cuffs and a collar stiff enough to stand up around the ears. I bought a camel coat of a rare, almost mustard tone that was lined in scarlet paisley brocade.

  I kept buying clothes. But for perhaps the first time in my life, the purchases were without consciousness: I did not imagine wearing them. There was no plan of any kind. When it came to my future style of dress, I could not imagine anything at all. It was as if a great gourmand had suddenly lost his appetite, but kept eating nonetheless, making himself sick.

  Still, to go to this place every day—to have something to bring home for a euro, something to put into the bathtub with detergent, to run the water, looking on with vain satisfaction as the water turned black from the filth; to rub the fabric against itself, jealous of its age, its delicacy, and, when it was clean, to have something to take into the sunlight on the terrace, at the top of that tall building sitting kingly at the almost highest point of one of the highest neighborhoods in Athens, from which one could see beyond the Parthenon all the way to the port of Piraeus, and watch as the sea became paler and more reflective as the sun descended—this was not an altogether bad thing.

  I stood for long spells in this way and thought not of the future, not of my life, but rather of Pasolini, of Charles de Gaulle, of Tegel Airport when it was still young—of what it would have done to redeem a person’s humiliation to walk across the tarmac and up the stairs of a commercial airplane while wearing, say, this dress.

  The romance of clothes is one of the few aspects of life I love. Or rather, one of the few aspects of public life I love. I see the world as an execrable place, lurking with humiliations, and dressing to go out is the last link to a fantasy I once had of what going out would be like—indeed, the only shred remaining of an early promise that the world would not be bereft of the feelings I had learned to desire from it in movies and books.

  But I don’t think I dress well. And these same fantasies may be standing in the way of my putting myself together beautifully. I seem, to paraphrase Chekhov, to be asking more from fashion than it can give, because the source of my fascination is a dream.

  I was once entranced by the connection between proper, girdled undergarments that altered the figure, and a story by Nabokov, “That in Aleppo Once.” At its climax, we read:

  Some time later, as I sat on the edge of the only chair in my garret and held her by her slender young hips (she was combing her soft hair and tossing her head back with every stroke), her dim smile changed all at once into an odd quiver and she placed one hand on my shoulder, staring down at me as if I were a reflection in a pool, which she had noticed for the first time.

  When I think of my hips, the question arises of whether it is possible to be subject and object at once. I try, with my elaborate 1930s clothing, to be the woman in the Nabokov story, but as I play her, I also play the story’s narrator, and in my efforts to approximate the consciousness that invented these lines, I also play Nabokov. I’m overworked and underperceived, like an actress—like an actress in a one-woman play with no audience.

  At the northwestern corner of Omonia Square, there is a hotel called Hotel La Mirage. The name is spelled out in giant sans serif capitals on the roof, each letter as tall as a person. One day, while I was gazing up at the roof as I sat in the square, it occurred to me that I could release my grasp on the things I owned and everything they implied about the future I thought I’d lead, and just move to Paris.

  It’s amazing how quickly my extravagant consciousness returned. A new future flashed toward me. I would pack away my life in Berlin, bringing only the tall wardrobe, the oak desk, the sleigh bed, the citrofortunella tree, and my books of German philosophy. I would sell or throw away my wedding dress, and perhaps all of my other clothes, too, keeping only what I had bought from the decrepit shop in Athens. Sitting in a café on Odos Athinas that had wireless, I found an apartment on a Parisian real estate website that looked very nice. On a Listserv, I saw a job I wouldn’t mind.

  I envisioned how my things would look in that living room there, and how they would appear to a person visiting—not to a friend, but, crucially, to an acquaintance, someone who was still trying to understand me. I saw how I would seem to someone who would spot me from a passing car the moment I emerged from the entryway of that apartment in the 10th—me, a sudden movement under a cloudy sky, hues of blue and graphite, a dark green skirt of wool twill with military braid. My adequate future was clear.

  This avid consciousness that forces me to see myself and be seen by myself in a constant, grinding feedback loop, which makes the future a monstrous presence elbowing disproportionately for itself, did not slacken after the breakup. In fact, it was the only thing that remained. Destinies rise and destinies fall. Yet I still reach toward the outline of an absence, and dress to go out tonight—interesting to myself and myself alone, deep in a dream.

  SURVEY Do you consider yourself photogenic?

  I do not consider myself photogenic in any way, shape, or form. I look much better in person than in any picture.—NATASHA MOLETTA • Didn’t used to, but I do now. I’m considered to have a “winning smile.” —KAREN GARBER STEPHENS • No.—KELLY WILSON • I do believe that I am photogenic, although I feel awkward saying so.—JYTZA GUZMAN • I am photogenic, and to save myself from being labeled as conceited, I’ll explain that I love being in pictures—often sporting a goofy face.—KRISTY HELLER • Yes, yes, and no. I have three selves in photos. Two are photogenic. One is not at all. Horrible.—GILLIAN SCHWARTZ • Yes, but only if I smile my head off. As soon as I stop smiling, I look devastated.—SOFIA SAMATAR • Depending on my mood, I can feel at ease in front of the camera; other times, complete distrust. It all depends on my confidence.—CHRISTY-CLAIRE KATIEN • Not at this stage.—PAULINE SMOLIN • Yes, if you mean do I use my digital camera’s delete button religiously.—DANKA HALL • For an author shot I have to have hundreds of pictures taken to find one I like. I think people who like to have their picture taken or are photogenic settle on a face and make that when the camera points. I have never found that face.—EILEEN MYLES • Not at all. A former roommate who was a professional photographer tried to use me as a test subject and we had to stop because I’m so
unphotogenic.—BRYENNE KAY • Yes. Very. I once dated a sociopathic photographer and he would take pictures of me anytime, without notice. I can pose within milliseconds once a camera is whipped out.—MARI SASANO • No. Oh god no. And I think that if you aren’t photogenic, the worst thing you can do is to try to work on being photogenic, like developing some mannered pose or facial expression. Everyone hates that person. Just look like you’re having a good time. No one can criticize you for that because it’s endearing.—BONNIE MORRISON • No. My features are too light to register well with a camera.—CLARE NEEDHAM

  COLLECTION

  MELISSA WALSH’s scrubs

  SURVEY

  STRANGERS

  “A young gay man on the street waved his finger from my head to my toes, approving of my look. I felt damn good that day.” —MALWINA GUDOWSKA

  MAIA WRIGHT I called up a guy who was selling a bike on Craigslist. I wasn’t sure if the frame was the right size. He asked how tall I was and what my inseam was—explaining it was the distance from the floor to my crotch. I got out a tape measure and told him. He exclaimed that I had very long legs for my height, and that I must be a runner. Far from it. I’ve never considered myself long-legged—I’ve always thought of myself as short-waisted. Ever since then, though, I have thought of myself as a long-legged person, which has made such a difference in the way I dress. I really delight in wearing tailored pants in a stripe or bright color.