Women in Clothes

by Sheila Heti

  MARY: How does that go down?

  AMY: Sometimes it’s subtle, but usually it’s to the tune of “I like your lashes.” “I like your lashes.” Or we’ll talk about it. I was interviewing some teenage girls once at an IHOP, and one of them pulled out her makeup bag and she was wearing them, and we ended up just tabling the interview and getting into our eyelashes for the rest of it. Oh! And it happened on the way home today—on the subway. You just big up somebody, like, “What’s up?” (nods chin).

  MARY: And you’ve been wearing them for how many years now?

  AMY: Six years now. It’ll be funny when I reach the period of my life where I realize that I’ve been wearing them for longer than I haven’t. I know that it’s coming, somewhere in the future. I look forward to that day.

  MARY: Will you celebrate?

  AMY: God, what would I do? Get some sort of eyelash cake?

  MARY: Have an eyelash party?

  AMY: I feel like my whole life is an eyelash party.

  SURVEY I feel most attractive when. . . .

  As dependent and shallow as this sounds, I feel most attractive when my boyfriend says I look beautiful. —JANICE CHAN • When I’m getting undressed in front of a man I’m with and he’s acting all amazed and enchanted by my body. —CAILIN HILL • When I’m around someone I’m flirting with, or who I sense is attracted to me. —CAITLIN VAN DUSEN • Why am I finding this so difficult to answer? Because I don’t want to admit that I feel most attractive when someone else is finding me attractive? —SUSAN SANFORD BLADES • In my husband’s eyes. —LUISA B. • I feel most attractive when I’m happy with my appearance and my husband confirms his happiness with my appearance after seeing me. —REBECCA SALERNO

  The time I felt the most attractive (though I attracted no one at that time) was when I was pregnant. My hair was thick and full, I didn’t have to worry about having a belly! I felt fabulous. —NANCY FORDE • I’ve never felt as beautiful as I did in the days after giving birth to my daughter. In the days that followed, I felt transformed. I had also never felt more myself. So much about feeling beautiful revolves around transformation: the way we look in different clothes, a different hairstyle. When I became a mother, I didn’t become someone else. I simply encountered a version of myself that had been hidden from me until my daughter burst into the world. —ARIA SLOSS

  PROJECT

  THE OUTFIT IN THE PHOTOGRAPH | III

  Mika Mulligan and Emily Schuller with their dates, Virginia, 2000

  MIKA (SECOND FROM LEFT): This photo was of our seventh-grade formal—seventh grade was the first year we had a formal dance. We were still in a phase when boys had cooties.

  The vertical lines on the photo are creases from where I folded the boys out, so that only Emily and I would show. It seems like a mean thing to do, but we were just in a very awkward stage. It was awkward being put into a formal situation with my friends.

  My mom got my dress for me from Express. I didn’t like dresses or shopping. She would buy a few dresses, I would try them on at home and go with one of her choices, and she would return the others.

  Before the dance someone’s parents drove us out to eat. At first I remember feeling awkward in a dress-and-date situation. Someone broke the ice by referencing a popular commercial. We would roll down the window and take turns asking people at stoplights, “Pardon me, but do you have any Grey Poupon honey mustard?”

  I did like the dress I ended up wearing, though. It was a solid green underneath with a sheer overlay that had flowers on it. It seemed simple and natural. I still try to dress simply and naturally today. I saved that dress through high school. As I grew older, so did the fit of the dress. Toward the end of high school I parted with it.

  EMILY (SECOND FROM RIGHT): I remember getting this dress at the exchange on the air force base where my dad worked. I don’t remember too much about picking it out, but since our school colors were maroon and gold, I’m sure that ended up influencing my decision.

  ON DRESSING

  SUMMER DIARY

  HEIDI JULAVITS

  I went to my friends’ house for dinner last night. These friends are family to me, but the wife and I can be affectionately hostile with each other. I am told I look thin as an accusation. She’s said to me numerous times after giving me a compliment, “I hate you.” I understand that she loves me when she hates me.

  She is the mother of four children, and she runs a very tight domestic scene. Her children are never in stained clothing; their faces and hands are clean, their hair is brushed. Her floors are dustless and she is always folding laundry. I try to wash my children and myself before going to her house so that I don’t offend her, or make her feel like she has to wash her house after we leave it. Tonight I washed my hair for the first time in a week; I didn’t bother with my children’s hair, because one was planning to swim at her house (she has a pond) and the other colored his white hair with a red Sharpie and it’s never coming out, so what’s the point?

  I was running late; I didn’t have time to comb my hair. I thought the huge knots wouldn’t be obvious, but then I also forgot a hair elastic to bundle the mess into a bigger mess on top of my head. We ate dinner. After dessert, my friend—who was sitting at the opposite end of a long table—stood up and said, “I can’t stand it anymore! I can’t stand looking at that bird’s nest in your hair!” She grabbed a brush and sat next to me. She isolated the biggest knot cluster and said, “Hold this!” She worked her way around my head while the rest of us talked about whatever we were talking about. I felt ashamed, happy, infantilized, adored. How long has it been since another person—aside from a hairdresser (whom I visit roughly seven times a decade) or my daughter—had brushed my hair? Decades. This ritual felt so intimate that we couldn’t have done it without other people around to ease the intensity. And I know it’s ridiculous to read into these things, but as she brushed my hair I felt a level of acceptance—her of me—that I’ve never fully experienced before, though we’ve been friends for ten years. She wasn’t criticizing me by brushing my hair—I am forty-five years old, and might really feel insulted by her implication that I couldn’t brush my own hair—she was taking care of me.

  Yesterday I swam the length of the harbor, and along the Reach, and around a point, and to the beach where my friends are renting a cabin. I felt every different temperature ribbon of water flow past me. I felt the ocean like a garment. I started to think of different outfits I could wear that could approximate the garment feel of the ocean when, in two weeks, I’m no longer able to swim in it because we’re going back to the city. I thought about the used wool sweater I bought with the too-tight arms, and how it might feel like the cold closing in (cold can feel like oppressive warmth). I thought about the white dress Sheila and Leanne bought me at a sample sale, and how its swishy, cool sheets feel on my legs approximated the warmest patches of water, the ones you can’t believe you’ve found out here in the icy Atlantic.

  The older I get, the less interested I am in how my clothing looks, and the more interested I am in how clothing feels on my body. And by “feel” I don’t mean how I feel in clothing, as in “I feel confident”—I mean literally the feel registered by my body when I put clothing on it. Soft or warm or tickly or whatever. I’ve started to seek out sensory experiences in hopes that I might replicate them, or memorialize them, in clothing.

  When I got to the beach, I lay front-first on the hot rocks. These rocks are the size of walnuts; they mold to your body. They felt like little suns. When my body cooled them off, I’d shift a few inches to the left and soak up the heat again. I thought, Why doesn’t anyone make dresses that feel like smooth, hot rocks against your skin? This struck me as such a colossal oversight. People design clothing that makes you imagine you might be the sort of person to lie on a beach of hot rocks—a frequenter to St. Tropez—but they don’t design clothing that makes you feel like you’re lying on a beach or swimming in salt water. Why not? Why doesn’t clothing take greater advantage of th
e fact that it touches your body? When I’m in the city I don’t want to pretend, through my clothing, that I’m walking by the sea. I want to believe I’m swimming in it.

  CONVERSATION

  GENTLE, CONSERVATIVE STYLES

  TAILOR MONIKA CHHY SPEAKS TO PHOTOGRAPHER ANNA CLARE SPELMAN & TRANSLATOR JENNIFER LIEBSCHUTZ

  ANNA: I’m sorry, how old are you?

  MONIKA: Fifty-three.

  ANNA: No you’re not! (laughs)

  JENNIFER: You look so young!

  MONIKA: Ah! Thank you.

  ANNA: So what are you considering when you’re choosing the clothes you wear every day?

  MONIKA: I like to be pretty because I’m a tailor, and I want to have a nice style so when the customers come, they’ll say, “Oh, she looks nice.”

  ANNA: It’s good advertising. If you look nice, then people will buy your clothes.

  JENNIFER: And she makes all her own clothes.

  ANNA: How long have you been a tailor?

  MONIKA: I started when I was twenty-one, 1979. No European customers, only Khmer. The shop used to be on the riverside in Battambang. In 1981, I came here, to this shop. I’ve been in this shop twenty-eight years [on the bottom floor of her house in Phnom Penh].

  JENNIFER: And when did you start to have Western customers?

  MONIKA: 1993.

  ANNA: That makes sense—the UN entered Cambodia in 1992.

  MONIKA: I like cotton. And I like to wear comfortable clothes! Europe, not tight. Khmer, tight clothes.

  JENNIFER: Do you think Western people wear clothes that are more comfortable than the clothes the Khmer wear?

  MONIKA: Yes. Because Khmer want to be more pretty. More interesting. So tight you cannot move. But at home, Khmer people like to wear comfortable clothes.

  ANNA: Do you think most Cambodian women think fashion is important?

  MONIKA: They wear different clothes for different occasions: to go to a wedding, to go to the wat, to go to the market, to go to sleep. You need different clothes for each place.

  ANNA: Where do people here buy their clothes?

  MONIKA: The seller, they buy from Thailand and they sell.

  ANNA: Oh, in the markets. Or in the stores.

  MONIKA: Mm-hmm.

  JENNIFER: Is fashion more important in Cambodia now than before?

  MONIKA: Yes, because of TV. Internet.

  JENNIFER: People take many pictures of each other now. Do people care more about fashion now, because they take so many pictures?

  MONIKA: Yeah, I think so. They care.

  ANNA: Is there anything else you want to say about clothes or fashion?

  MONIKA: The older people can’t change styles. They still wear gentle, conservative styles like before.

  ANNA: Can we ask you a little bit about your business? Who works for you?

  MONIKA: Now business is good. I want more workers, but there are no more. They do not know how to make clothes.

  JENNIFER: So you’d have to teach them.

  MONIKA: Now many people work in large factory because so easy, easy, easy, easy.

  JENNIFER: They don’t have the skills to tailor.

  MONIKA: Yes. And you have to think a lot to do this job. Many styles.

  ANNA: I see, so it’s difficult to find people to work here. Because it’s a difficult job.

  MONIKA: Yes.

  JENNIFER: And because they go to Thailand or Korea to work, or they work in the factories.

  MONIKA: The last one, she married—left.

  COMPLIMENT

  “SKIRT”

  Children’s section of a bookstore. Woman crouches down, reshelving books. She wears a tight cotton skirt with a print that from a distance looks like a drawing made with a pen but is actually sewn-on pieces of silk-screened fabric.

  STARLEE: I like your skirt.

  WOMAN: Oh, thanks.

  STARLEE: Did you design it?

  WOMAN: Oh, no. I wish I could design stuff like this.

  STARLEE: It looks like your tattoo.

  WOMAN: Oh? (looks confused, since the tattoo is of a rose and the design on her skirt is of birds)

  STARLEE: I don’t know. What are they—birds?

  WOMAN: Yeah, a bird here and then a bird right here.

  STARLEE: It’s nice.

  WOMAN: Thanks.

  SURVEY

  CLOSETS

  “Trying to describe my closet stresses me out.” —AVA V.

  MELISSA SMITH My closet is like a museum. Everything is in its place. I arrange my tops by sleeve length (spaghetti straps, tanks, short sleeves, quarter-length, long sleeves). The dresses follow and are arranged in a similar order. Skirts follow dresses, short to long. Once this system is in place, I organize each top by color of the rainbow. It helps me keep track of my clothes. I know when a friend has a piece of mine or something is in the dirty pile. It also helps me when I’m half awake in the morning, trying to get ready for work in under ten minutes.

  JOWITA BYDLOWSKA Every few months I go through my closet and get rid of items I haven’t worn in more than a year. The exceptions are clothes that are too pretty or carry a sentimental value or are what I call “clothes I’d like my future daughter to have.” (I don’t have a daughter.)

  RACHEL PERRY WELTY My friend’s grandmother used to say, “It owes me nothing,” when she was ready to divest herself of an item in her closet.

  FARAH BASHIR I have multiple jeans because they never go out of style, and jeans are a “safe option” when one lives in South Asia. I also have multiple sleeveless tops, as I love my shoulders, but for the last year I have hardly had the “societal permission” to wear those. I have to depend on occasions when I go out with my husband to enjoy wearing those tops. Last week, I gave so many clothes away to my maid for her daughters as I couldn’t afford to just look at them sitting unused in my closet, making me feel miserable and helpless and without any control over the basic right and freedom to wear what I want, when I want.

  ROXANE GAY I’ll stand before my closet and look at all the clothes I’m too shy to wear, and pretend for about three minutes I might do something different, and then reach for one of the ten or so outfits I wear regularly.

  CATHERINE MAROTTA I’m a compulsive Goodwill donor. If something has hung in my closet unworn for a month, it’s out the door. I have been caught donating my friends’ items that they have left at my house.

  BETH FOLLETT I have a vintage clothes rack, which I found one garbage night in the Annex in Toronto. Beloved clothes in my wardrobe were found in other people’s garbage also.

  CAITLIN ANN HARRINGTON I have a clothes rack. Everything that isn’t on a hanger is lying in messy piles below the hanging clothes. I hate doing laundry, so I just constantly buy more underwear and rewear my clothes until they smell, are stained, or stretch out. I think not washing clothes might be good for them, though. Not sure.

  NAN KEVIN GELHARD My daughter-in-law said, “Why are you keeping clothes you don’t like and don’t wear? It is okay to admit mistakes.” And we cleared out the closets.

  KIRSTIN CORCORAN The way I dress, along with my occupation, is a direct representation of me. I never wanted to have a separate wardrobe for work, so there is no differential between what I wear to work and what I would wear after six p.m. or on the weekend.

  NINA MOOG I am thinking of the chair in your room that acquires the function of the wardrobe, where you pile dresses, shirts, sweaters, and pants as you rummage through your closet to find an item. I noted the chairdrobe in almost every bedroom I entered thoughout university.

  AMANDA MILLER My closet is so large it could be a bathroom. My bathroom is so large it could be a bedroom. My apartment has no bedroom, though, so the closet is host to many things besides clothes and shoes and jackets and boots. I’m a Virgo, therefore there is a place for everything and everything is in its place. I could tie a blindfold across my face, switch off the lights, and remove a specific garment from my closet without ruffling the adjacent blouses.


  SASHA GORA I grew up with older cousins, which meant I was rich in hand-me-downs. I remember being in elementary school and counting how many bottoms I had in my closet. This was the nineties, so leggings counted as pants. I counted more than sixty bottoms and was shocked and impressed. I brought it up the next day in the schoolyard. My intention wasn’t to brag (at least not to brag too much), but my claim was met with grave suspicion. My friends thought I was lying, something I didn’t realize at first. But then a few days later, when I was wearing the same pair of pants for I guess too many days in a row, a friend cruelly asked why I was wearing them again when I had sixty-plus options.

  KELLEY HOFFMAN While I was in New York, I thought the designer clothes I’d bought were beautiful. But then I’d see these pieces that seemed so nice trampled on the floor at the Barneys Warehouse Sale, or I’d find them being sold on eBay for $30 a few years later, or they would sit in my closet until I started to notice that maybe they weren’t that well made despite the label. You get tricked by the magic of it.

  CARRIE MURPHY My grandmother had this big, custom-made octagonal closet, painted bright fuchsia pink, stacked with hat boxes and glove boxes and clothes from the 1960s. It smelled like her, it was pretty like her, and it was my favorite spot in the house. When I knew her, my grandmother wore silk blouses, lots of gold jewelry, and comfortable poly-blend pants, but her closets were full of the more dramatic clothes she used to wear: paisley caftans, a suede coat with fur cuffs that she had promised to my older cousin (damn!), pillbox hats, everything you can think of. I idolized her, so you can imagine what it was like for a young girl to have free rein in the magical closets of a woman she loved and admired.