On getting a marketing email from Ten Thousand Villages: I thought: I’ve bought some things I really loved from Ten Thousand Villages, and the little dopamine-hungry part of my brain then wanted to repeat that experience: it was good once, surely it will be good a second time and a third time! Herein lies the trap. I love things, I love aesthetics, I love style: but I don’t want to be sold to anymore. I don’t want to just consume. I want to actually use things.
What does it even mean to use a thing? I started wearing the clothes I like best, in my house. I work from home: I wear them sitting in my mess of an office; I wear them lying on my yoga mat doing stretches and trying to recover from work nonsense. I wear those clothes I like while cooking dinner and getting cooking smells in them. I learn so much about a piece of clothing by doing this. Mostly I am paying attention to how the garment feels and only minimally to how it looks. I mean, I probably bought it based on how it looked. Wearing it at home, by myself, over and over, tells me whether my appreciation is more than skin deep.
This is also a good way to decide to get rid of something. Sometimes when you see it on the hanger in your closet, you like it; but once it’s on your body you understand why it gives you a vaguely bad feeling.
I unsubscribed from Ten Thousand Villages.
I got a haircut this past week and it was just… a disaster. I rely on my haircut looking good most of the time and it does. not. look. good. I feel unsettled. I have an appointment to get it colored and I think I’m going to hit pause on that. Sometimes I examine that urge for aesthetic newness and think: Am I redirecting my creative energy into creating myself, rather than creating some piece of poetry or prose or just random art? And I think this is something women certainly like to do and are also encouraged to do. Sublimation of creativity into forms that serve the outer rather than forms that serve the inner. And I’m saying: you need both; but often they get very unbalanced.
I produced a couple of new drafts of poems this week and somehow, didn’t give myself any credit for this at all. Why not? Was it easier to feel aesthetic success in a haircut than in a piece of imperfect writing?
I was thinking about how the style-adjacent YouTube creators I most and least enjoy are the ones with Big Main Character Energy. I subscribe, I watch them, I get fed up, I unsubscribe. Now, I like a strongly held opinion. I respect some opinions even when I don’t agree because it tells me a story about that person. But there’s a fine line between navel-gazing that’s – strangely – helpful and relatable vs navel-gazing for navel-gazing’s sake. This type of creator gets big enough and suddenly, their comments sections are just filled to the brim with a level of parasocial worship that sets my hair on fire. Is this their fault? It really isn’t. But I can get lost in other people easily and I prefer to be my own main character.
See also: The abysmal way Chappell Roan is being treated. I can’t cope with participating in that discourse and now I just read it and won’t engage with it. Social media gives you this portrait-formatted video of a person and your dumb brain starts to tell you “this is my pal.” And that’s not your pal; that is a person you don’t know and it’s weird to feel like you know them. I’m starting to think that – for me at least – it’s weird to even have such a strong opinion about them. I dream of excising all the para- from my social.
I don’t know what differentiates between a Main Character Energy and The Rest of Us; I have thought for years that it has to do with ego, and my own inability to develop the kind of ego I need to have to be a successful artist.
I’ve been thinking a lot about Trends I Do Not Like. Herewith:
Just WHY. Wearing a sweater as a scarf (or as a belt); putting a sweater over your shoulders or around your waist with no actual need or intention to ever actually wear the sweater on that day. We have a piece of clothing that does this… it is The Scarf.
In honor of the apparently out-of-style scarf, I sorted through my scarves this week. I really considered the colors and patterns I keep collecting and realized I still enjoy most of them. I put four in the donate pile and moved the rest to a folded situation rather than a hanging situation. I’m not saying this will get me to wear them! But I will get to enjoy seeing the colors and patterns. And I would not be any more likely to sling a random sweater around my neck.
I wish Quiet Luxury would shut up. I think “quiet luxury” has taken over every style discourse to some degree and it always just reads as preppy to me and thus I have no patience for it. I think it’s great if your style actually is on the preppier side and those clothes make you feel like yourself, but I also just have a hard time believing every single person only wants to wear plain white t-shirts from Cos or Uniqlo or whatever the current zeitgeisty shop is. It could be that I watch too much of a certain kind of fashion video and read a certain kind of Substack style dispatch and so I have accidentally surrounded myself with these things.
Despite hating a style uniform that mimics everyone’s obsession with The Row/Toteme/Khaite (lions and tigers and bears, oh my!), I have lately gravitated back to: jeans, and a black top. Dark blue denim and a black shirt have just never let me down. I don’t feel it’s the most out-there, weird, or creative outfit, but I always feel good in it. Is this my version of a “style uniform”? Oh god. I’m just as bad as everyone else.
A thing that happens when you try to take care of an un-take-care-able person is: you lose yourself. I say “you” – second-person – because there is only one first person in this equation. The only subject is the person in need. The needs are bottomless. Will never be fulfilled.
The object, acted-upon and perpetually in action, the do-er, is secondary.
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You, in this instance, is someone who shops as a defensive undertaking. Almost desperate, this activity. Shopping is a restatement of
opinion,
aesthetic,
point of view,
taste
that arises from the choices second-person can make in the space inside a TJ Maxx. Here, no one is asking second-person for anything, no one is berating her, no one needs to be cajoled. Second-person sorts, second-person chooses, and in this way second-person constructs a self. It doesn’t matter if it’s just a thin layer of self, the distance from floral blouse to skin. It’s still a self. Unique, distinct.
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It’s not a coincidence, maybe, that the only thing about me which gets my mother’s attention, in these years, is a thing I’m wearing.
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I come to reckon with the closet, whose doors stand perpetually open so I am constantly confronted by its contents. The closet is what it holds, just as I am. There is a row of matching hangers; a sea of muted blues, greens, berries, dusty pinks; and the shelf above so packed with folded clothes I can’t tell what’s up there. Those stacks always start out tidy, they just break down over time. This is the risk of having simply too much to manage. The life that got totally unmanageable, over years, and all at once.
The closet is in progress of being dismantled. Next to it, a growing pile of donations.
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Being plus-sized in the nineties and early aughts was a different experience to now. At risk of sounding like an Old: Online shopping did not exist in those days. There were two stores in the mall that sold “extended” sizes, and one of them was for teenagers and deeply unwearable for an adult with a corporate job. So a person developed certain tactics when clothes-shopping:
if the thing fits, buy it
especially if the pants are the right length, buy them immediately, do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars
if there is more than one of it, buy two
if the thing is not perfect, still buy it. You will not see it again and what do you see next will be much worse.
Nowadays, one can look at this state of mind and call it “a conviction of scarcity.” But the thing is: the scarcity was real. I was right to have that conviction.
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(One time a well-meaning straight sized friend opined that I needed a pair of green pants. I had to keep from hysterically laughing. One did not simply buy a pair of green pants. One gathered one’s mental and emotional strength to look for pants – the hardest garment to fit – and if one was so lucky to find a pair, one pounced on them, regardless of what color they were. If one was really lucky, they were black.)
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I imagine a lot of people who struggle with over-shopping have lived some version of this conviction of scarcity. And now that we can finally push back on that lack, we are going to: all bets off; enter retail therapy, baby!
But the behaviors that served me then do not serve me now. In the intervening years, more stores have started carrying women’s plus sizes (at least up to a point; they still tend not to serve beyond a 3x, which omits a massive number of people). After years of cultivating the shopping habits of a determined and starving hunter-gatherer – shop constantly, try everything, make a thing work even if it’s not your first choice, go way outside your comfort zone just to stay dressed – we have – I’m not going to call it an abundance of plus-size clothing, but at least a bit more of a selection.
I was in a Boscovs a couple of years ago, and the amount of clothes in the women’s (aka, not misses) section was so great the clothes were actually falling off the racks. I was in shock. I also made a lot of bad decisions that day because while there was volume, the quality was dismal. This was before I got serious about fabric content.
But my point is: it did get better; it is better. There are more choices now. And so, my two decades of being a professional-grade shopper is now hazardous to my mental health, and to a degree my bank account.
[However: Vogue reports that many brands are now scaling back their plus-size lines, so I suppose I’d better not get too sanguine.]
But here I am now: I have a closet full of things I actually love, but they are fighting for their lives against a bunch of other things:
things I do not love
things I used to love and can no longer truly see for what they are
things another version of me loved
things a me that will never exist would have loved
things I needed, but don’t love: ie, corporate clothes, work clothes, event clothes (weddings, funerals)
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We ask a lot of clothing. It is supposed to a) cover us, b) signal our acceptability to others, c) signal our uniqueness and specialness to others, d) make our unacceptable bodies acceptable. Especially if you are fat, your message about clothing always involved the word “flattering”; flattering just means “as thin as possible.” So a lot of fat women my age ended up with a mostly black wardrobe, because it’s true that black swallows light and recedes, especially in photographs, whereas white expands and reflects light. (Light colors take up space. Interesting.) It took me a lot of years to consider whether I even like black as a color, as opposed to just finding black useful. (I maybe don’t like it? But I’m not there yet.)
And this idea that clothing is self-expression is lovely, but I promise you, self-expression is secondary. If you are finding self-expression through clothing, you have already negotiated with a, b, and d above. You may have negotiated it without even thinking about it, but it was a labor nonetheless. But because humans are essentially creative little wild-cards, we want clothing to be self-expression. We keep trying.
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Well but. I wanted to talk about the clothes. The things themselves. (Impossible to talk about the clothes without the ungovernable body intervening, but okay.)
My overfilled closet is evidence of my coping mechanism – all that compulsive searching, all that desperation. The habits that, as I said, served me well until they didn’t. I have enough clothes I like now that I don’t need to “just buy it, you might be able to make it work.” It’s been the work of these past few years to re-frame my behavior to match reality: I don’t need to buy things I don’t actually love. I don’t need to buy things that are poor quality. And I maybe don’t even need to buy a thing I love, because I just have too much at home that I already love, and too much is a cause of actual suffering.
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My mother never liked my clothes, in a general way. She did not like my hair long. She used to confidently state that short hair is “more becoming,” and signalled that my clothes did not align to her preferences. She is very preppy in a born-that-way way. I am the inverse of preppy. When I was small, my career aspiration was “sorceress.” Izod polo shirts became popular in the eighties, and I just instinctively hated them. Teenage me loved thrift stores and the men’s section of department stores; my favorite item was a summerweight wool tuxedo – secondhand – that I wore the pieces of constantly for years. Once I wasn’t straight-sized anymore, all that creativity and freedom just disappeared and I struggled to find anything I really felt at home in.
At one point in my thirties or early forties I wore a slightly more corporate-esque printed black-and-white blouse, and my mother exclaimed “that’s what I want you to wear to my funeral!” I was like… well, it’s going to have worn out before then; am I supposed to keep it pristine and hope it still fits many years from now? I cannot even remember the shirt, because as I say, it was not quite my style; I donated it years ago. Don’t ask me what I’ll wear to her funeral. Will I try to slake her taste in my clothes one last time?
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What are the things in that get-rid-of pile? The things that pilled, the things that pulled, the things that were the wrong color and I only bought them because they fit. The things with too many embellishments added to an otherwise okay garment (this is a particular risk of plus size clothing, as if the designer was like “how do we distract from the body? I know, SPARKLES!!”).
What are the things that get to stay in the closet? The colors that appeal to my eye, the cuts that appeal to my sense of volume. And I find out: when I buy only what I love, somehow it all goes together pretty seamlessly.
The mistake most of us make in curating a wardrobe is to pick up and look at each item of clothing separately. When we do that, we see: possibilities, of this thing, right here. The way to look at a wardrobe is as one evolving creation, and how it’s serving you. Not just how is it clothing you, but how does it all make you feel. If you feel overwhelmed, or excluded, then that’s a real stressor you are enduring every day. And so I am realizing that if I have 30 shirts – even if they are all good shirts – that overwhelms me and I’ve finally grown tired of being overwhelmed. Maybe I’m just weaker now and can’t tolerate overwhelm the way I used to.
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After a couple decades of not liking my clothes, she softened a bit. As I said, she does comment on the the things I’m wearing now; recently she said she liked a lilac-colored shirt with a ruffled sleeve. It’s almost as if I won her over with decades of just being my actual self.
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There is still some self-preservation in me. If I ever considered dressing to please my mother, it was more of a passing concession. I still hate preppy clothes, except for highly specific Talbots sweaters with giant hearts on them. In this way is the sartorial function of “preppy” undermined by the existential function of “ridiculous.” And in fact a lot of my favorite clothes are very funny to me.
Many days, I am so stressed and overwhelmed that I don’t perceive my existence as a contiguous thing; the few minutes when I get dressed is the only time when I feel like myself. When I am working, trying to answer the competing needs of many people; when I am trying to keep all the parts of another person’s life from falling apart; when I am driving from one doctor’s appointment to another – my outfit is the one thing that asserts I exist. The clothes I choose, the pieces of carefully collected jewelry – are the last part of me to go down in the sea of other people’s needs. Other than that, I vanish. I was trained to be this way, and it is maybe in my nature to be this way. This disappearance is my bête noire; it is also my secret superpower in my career, this ability to sense-what-you-need, to bend into any shape.
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Who do we serve when we abdicate ourselves? The other person may after all be delighted in your abdication. And abdication of a style sense is something you do for a viewer: as you wear the clothes they would have you wear, you reflect them back on themselves, you reinforce their sartorial opinions, you reassure them everyone wants to dress this way: to look smaller, to look more professional, to mimic in the elision of your body some norm they have done no work to unravel. But this abdication does not end well. The things in my closet that are not “me” are the things in danger of going to the donation pile (and let’s be real, very likely to a landfill, although I can hope they spend time on a person’s body first – someone who likes them!). My point is not to assert to you “long hair is good” or “polo shirts are bad” or even “your clothes should amuse you” – my point is that we ought to arrange ourselves less for the hyper-critical eye of the other and more for us and what we want to feel, the stories we want to tell ourselves.
The self cannot in fact be abdicated. She can only be put aside, or hidden under a thin dense layer of the wrong thing.
