At the age of seven, I first felt it all coming together for me, style-wise, in the dressing room of Milwaukee’s now sadly deceased Gimbels department store. I’d just pounced on a purple fake-fur-trimmed maxi coat in the kids’ department—a cartoonishly shrunken version of something my man Jimi Hendrix might have worn. And as I spun before the mirror giddily petting the collar (“Real German shepherd fur!”), my mom knew that protest would be pointless—this shaggy piece, sparker of so many future rock ’n’ roll fantasies, was coming home on my back. More proud moments in my personal fashion flip book: The day, at 14, I had the lightning-bolt epiphany to filch my mom’s tap-class fishnets and wear them under an old plaid kilt I’d scored at a thrift store, a preppy-punk signal-scramble that garnered a long, low, knee-buckling “niiiiiiice” from my high school’s hottest art god (previously oblivious to me) as we passed in the library. And, of course, the cosmic shopping trip on which I glumly entered Agnès b. late on a Saturday afternoon—then a young, single NYC woman losing hope of finding anything fetching for a fancy party that night—only to discover a dress uncannily like the dirndl-ish frock I’d literally dreamed of the night before. Oh, the joy I had in that, my magic dress. Sweetly sexy, glancingly schmaltzy in its Heidi-ness, yet also somehow dead elegant, it always made me feel beautiful, smart, self-confident—and ready to yodel.
For many years, it was my credo that clothes should say something about me and my thoughts (dirty, clean; silly, serious) to whoever was looking, and also underscore, for my own edification, the emotions and aspirations bobbing around my head on a given day. I carefully considered everything I put on, filling my closet with pieces that pleased me deeply: vintage specimens I loved for ironic or nostalgic reasons, well-cut work clothes that made me feel like a force, cocktail dresses in which I felt unspeakably pretty. I spent countless happy hours plotting my next day’s (and night’s) outfits. And if I missed my sartorial mark (as in the absurdly wide-legged overalls I bought at Fleet Farm and wore obsessively for a time in the mid-’90s, thinking they gave me an air of sassy authority, à la Katharine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story), I wasn’t fussed. All the more curiously amusing landscape dressing for you and me to consider, I figured.
But after 13 years in Manhattan—where the local custom of putting on poetically beribboned ballet flats to take the garbage out made perfect sense to me—I moved back to my home state of Wisconsin at 35. And, once settled in Madison—a fervently outdoorsy, studiously low-key university town, where clothes signaling support of athletes and one’s own permanent readiness to participate in athletics (yoga pants, high-performance zip-tops) are, along with jeans worn down not by machines but the sheer battery of years (and years), the prominent fashion strains—I began to question why I cared so much about clothes, why anyone should regard clothes as a vital means of self-expression.
This falling-out from my former faith was partly due to being newly married with my man nabbed, the call to have just the right party dress was much weaker) and having a new baby. But, much harder for me to admit, the rejection of my former style was rooted in sorrow—I was missing New York fiercely—mingled with defeated bitterness. Why bother pimping out in a pink Italian trench and a smart black patent snap-brim porkpie to go to the movies on a rainy Saturday afternoon—a look practically shouting “damned if I’m the kind of fly girl who lets gray weather get her down”—when four other people in my row are going to show up in ratty old Green Bay Packer parkas, just because they don’t want to get their new ones wet?
Putting myself out—opening a window onto my inner world by dressing in clothes that spoke volumes—I felt overexposed, silly, in a genuinely embarrassing way for the first time. Instead of sweating details of dress (“These stockings with the allover chevron pattern? No, those, with the ladder of perforated peekaboo holes running up the back!”), I thought I should sink my energies into more “useful” activities, like cleaning the basement or teaching English as a second language. Besides, I’d fit in better in clothes that implied through their pronounced lack of adornment that I am a modest, hardworking person of substance—undistracted by spangley things that don’t matter a whit.
Before long, I was marching in lockstep with the rest of my academically inclined neighbors in jeans and T-shirts, preferably brown or gray. And like balloons leeching air fast, the thought bubbles above my daily outfits shrunk accordingly. What message did my hopelessly plain clothes project? Don’t look at me! I’m just keeping it humble, bearing the earth (and mud and stone) in mind as I attempt to blend in with the scenery.
Luckily, spring has its wonderful way of following winter. And as I learned, it’s tough, if not impossible, for eyes like mine—instinctively wired to delight in small, intriguing differences in the color or cut of mood- and thought-provoking clothes—to go blind for long. After getting past my despair over the preponderance of athletic gear around me (hey, sports fans are people too), I began noticing once again—with that little, hot, half purely admiring, half jealously covetous feeling that true clotheshorses (apparently) never lose—women besting me all over the place with their excellent, fully realized personal styles: designer/VJ Alexa Chung, fixture of so many celebrity scenester websites, playing rich-girl-gone-rogue in her clever couture-cum-vintage mash-ups; Yoko Ono, at 78, on TV recently rocking tiny Ben Franklin shades and a black motorcycle jacket with some sort of foxy push-’em-up bustier underneath; and, right under my nose (!), a psychologist neighbor with three kids under six who always looks fabulous in fancifully embroidered skirts, delicate flats, and well-cut jackets. I couldn’t avoid the lovely truth: These women move me, with their evident efforts to dress sharp (or playful or just plain pretty) for themselves and anyone else looking on. I knew in my bones I wanted to permanently cross back over to that optimistic, London-in-the-Blitz place where I, too, dress to make myself feel fine and brighten for others an often-bleak world stage.
To shake the funk of dressing to deemphasize, I started purging the deadwood from my closet. I pitched the nuttiest of my thrift store acquisitions—realizing that (thank gawd) I’m past the stage of dressing like the human equivalent of a funny car just to be goofy. I carefully bagged up for Goodwill all the well-meaning yet entirely predictable chain-store-assembled ensembles I bought on autopilot during the past couple years whenever an occasion required that I wear something other than jeans. (Here’s hoping that whoever takes them home can figure out better than I how to shuffle around the component parts.) And now, after seeing, stroking, and wearing, once again, the world-beating dresses, pants, and blouses in my possession—imagination-fueling threads that have always made me feel not like somebody else so much as me at my best—I am keeping these landmark pieces in mind as I start shopping for new clothes that speak to and of me in my life right now.
Being perennially drawn to attire with a dimension of theatricality evinced by some detail of pattern or texture or nipped waist or full-skirtedness (perhaps the result of growing up seeing so many Mittel-European girls dancing ecstatically in embroidered corseted pinafores and bell-sleeved blouses at Milwaukee folk fairs), I’m looking for items with a dash of drama that are also eminently wearable—more grown-up, in other words, than what I might have gravitated toward five years ago. And—hooray!—there’s a bumper crop of looks in this spring’s collections (and a few holdovers from the fall) that squarely hit my sweet spot. Most all of Marc By Marc Jacobs dresses, particularly the navy and white wide-striped A-line sundress (in insanely fluttery satin that suddenly flares open to reveal bands of brilliant yellow in its ingenious inverted central pleat), are walking jolts of joy. Same goes for Diane von Furstenberg’s particularly frolicsome new batch of wrapdresses. Tory Burch’s black silk blouse with a few sequins scattered into the lace panel crossing the collarbone, as well as her white tank fronted with tight rows of bronze and silver paillettes, are perfect for bringing a smidge of glamour to a jean-anchored party outfit. And because I do still sometimes fancy myself a bit of a sly PI—but can’t really cotton to my old pink trench (Pink? Actually a bit saccharine for me)—I am seriously considering pulling the trigger on Max Mara’s gorgeous modern spin on the platonic tan spy raincoat, in all its double-breasted, funnel-necked, sneakily thin-belted glory.
Of course, you or I could always point out that it’s a waste of money to drop coin
on swanky, well-made clothes that will inevitably lose a bit of their luster in ordinary wear. Hours spent playing around in one’s closet, pondering various ways to combine new pieces with old faithfuls, could possibly be better spent cleaning the basement. But what I’ve come to think—after tuning in anew to whatNew York Times fashion critic Cathy Horyn refers to as “the human-pleasure-giving dimension of clothes”—is that the effort itself is beautiful. When I take time to dress like I give a rip—putting on my vintage Norma Kamali romper before meeting a friend who’s feeling down for a drink, pulling out my gorgeously stitched new folklore-fantasy boots when it’s time to tutor math at my son’s kindergarten class—people (even kids) notice and appreciate it. Some women locate their creative, human-connecting edge in cooking or painting or vinyl-record collecting. But for me, wearing clothes that speak a message of humor, strength, respect, or glamour is the act of love—of self and others—I never want to abandon again.
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