In the early 1960's, I took a writing course at the Radcliffe Institute and handed in a story about a woman a lot like me. This babe lay in bed stewing about what she was going to wear the next day. "Surely there are more important things she could think about," scoffed Mary Nash, the teacher. Fifty-five years later that dig still rankles, but now I’m finally ready to take on Nash (is she still living?).
Secure in my sense of right and wrong, but temperamentally unsuited to weigh decisions about our laws, cancer cures, the unified field theory, the Greek economy, the meaning of life, or the angst of malaise, I insist that what I do think about – the everydayness of a life that need not be escaped is worthy of consideration. And how any person presents herself to the world and to herself matters.
Thus, a venerable establishment like the Metropolitan Museum of Art mounts exhibits that tell a lot about fashion and a lot about the nature of the museum biz. The Met’s current show, "China Through the Looking Glass," is a glossy and impressive extravaganza (think Vogue magazine in three dimensions). China is a world financial power. Museums suck up to the monied. But clothes are not just big business; they reflect the mores of their time. It is not only the burka that projects a group’s beliefs.
Today in the U.S., most wearers of mega-bucks clothing – Beyoncé was recently reported to have bought a $3,500 pair of shoes – are female. But though high- fashion designers tend to be women or gay men, straight white males usually control their businesses. Nothing new there. The bulk of the world’s money has always been in the establishment’s grasp.
"In fashion, even what seems most fragile must be built on cement," read a quote from Charles James at last year’s show of his designs. James’s clothes, especially his coats, walled in anyone who wore them; they screamed not of women’s sexiness, but of their wealth’s sexiness.
Here in the Big Apple, as elsewhere in this country, it pays to look rich. And "good taste" belongs to the top tier. But when I was in South Africa, I noticed that the poor were wearing great designs while the well-off looked as frumpy as England’s queen.
In other U.S. cities, I have found the most interesting hat and shoe stores to be in black neighborhoods. Once, casually dressed on a Sunday, I went to a Red Lobster in Manchester, Connecticut, and found myself racially outnumbered and stylistically outdone. The other female patrons, presumably eating out after church, wore fancy hats, dresses, even in some cases, gloves. I was embarrassed by my disrespect for an unknown tradition.
"Better to be underdressed than overdressed," my mother had often warned. But could I trust the fashion advice of a woman who would rather buy a too small designer dress because it was marked down than a cheaper full-priced no-name dress that fit her?
Looking back, despite the Red Lobster incident, I realize that while many in her set flashed too much jewelry and overly stylish clothes, my mother somehow managed to sail through her time projecting classic elegance. Not bad for a poor Bronx girl who was never more comfortable than when speaking Yiddish. And not bad for a role model, either. My mother had confidence in her costume choices. I often feel that same confidence in mine.
This is surprising because I have a long-time tendency to guess wrong. Many years ago, for example, invited by a fellow bridesmaid to a ladies lunch in honor of the bride-to-be, I showed up in my usual bare legs, ballet slippers, a denim skirt, and a boy’s shirt. The other guests wore silk-print dresses, stockings, and heels. Later at the rehearsal dinner, another member of the wedding party introduced me to her husband saying, "She’s the one I told you about, in the Brooks Brothers shirt." Talk about rude!
But what really got me was how did that boorish dame know where I bought my shirt? Was it the free monogram or the fabric? Other women can tell by sight if a sweater is cashmere. I have to cop a feel.
Another time at a long ago Bloomfield Republican Women’s Club tea, party members wore what amounted to uniforms proclaiming themselves to be LADIES. "You don’t belong," their garments and icy attitudes informed me. Though I cannot remember what wrong thing I was wearing that day, of course the Republicans were right; I did not belong among them.
Where then do I belong?
In the ladies’ room of Sarasota’s Marietta Museum of Art and Whimsy, a mirror’s mosaic frame, embedded with images of jewels, hats, faces, equipment, and uniforms, asks, "Who will I be today?" This is the same existential question I ask myself every morning (sometimes starting the night before).
A yoga guru once advised me to look at my mirrored self first thing each day while saying, "I like you." But when I tried this, my inner voice instantly piped up, "If you were someone else, I’d like you," the real me having seen the mirrored woman as badly in need of smartening up.
Of course some women don’t bother, and I assume they are among those select few who do indeed have better things to think about. But while I admire my contemporaries who go natural, I also find myself asking, "Don’t they know the tricks that are available to them? Don’t they care how diluted they look?"
Once I was waiting in a restaurant for someone. The minute she walked in I thought that if I were costuming a play and I needed the audience immediately to know that this character was a nut job, I would dress her exactly as this person was dressed, in a huge out-of-season hat with a fringed brim, a varicolored shawl, a gypsy garment, and drooping jewels. Clearly desperate for attention, she made sure her clothing choices and body language would get plenty of it.
Another woman I knew had kept her figure. But when in her 50’s, she wore the teeny-bopper clothes that still fit perfectly, my first thought on seeing her was that she was too old for those get-ups. So instead of looking younger, she was calling attention to her actual age and then some.
My late spouse claimed that many women dress the way they wish they looked, rather than to flatter the way they actually do look. He would mention the big hats that turned the petite into mushrooms and the front pockets that accentuated overly capacious boobs. And once, after following me up a flight of stairs, he suggested that I nix plaid slacks, a recommendation I have taken to hind as well as to heart.
Of course, as I would often point out to him, some males also dress as fantasy selves. Five by fives in double-breasted jackets look like robots. Few trim guys sport the loud suspenders that occasionally emphasize over-ample girth (anybody out there remember Jack Dollard?). Chalk stripes do nothing for any physique, yet some anglophiles still insist on sporting them. And bow ties presumably intended to appear jaunty say those desperate to jump out of the run of the mill have simply landed in a run of the mill channel.
It takes skill to come off not as a kook or a wannabe, but as someone with individual style. The documentary "Iris" is about a woman with that skill who devoted most of her life to being seen in the fashion world. But at the end of the film, closeted with her beloved hubby behind barriers of dated clothes and clunky gewgaws, she is imprisoned not by ideas, but by stuff.
So maybe Mary Nash had a point; there is more to life than what a person wears. Clothes do not actually make the man. I once went to a dinner-party where one fellow was wearing plaid trousers. I instantly pegged him as a bore. Turned out he was a smart doctor and with heart, appearing in disguise.
But what about my own presentations? My daily mirrored assessments are visual one-on-one conversations in which, like the Brit who daily dons his tuxedo in the jungle, I’m not just alerting the onlookers. I’m reminding myself of who I am and what values I hold dear. No matter my circumstances, I am a sly, comfortably situated woman who respects artisans. So before anyone pooh-poohs my ilk, s/he will do well to remember that the Titanic iceberg, showing up first on the sea’s surface, was plenty deep.
