Fashion for Writers

Jenny and I have had some massive email brainstorming sessions about how to play out this 200th post, and this is what we’ve come up with for your reading pleasure: remixing clothes from our pasts that we haven’t worn in ages (and should probably be donated somewhere, if not for Sentimental Value) and having STORYTIME about said clothes. Which is all the more fitting for FFW, because my very first post was about my clothes and their happy/sad stories.

Could I look any more scowly in this photo? I think it’s because I’m dissatisfied with the pseudo-phallic crotch-knot.

No crotch-knot this time. The dress in its full glory.

In high school, I wore this dress all the frickin’ time. I’d bought it at Crossroads Recycled Clothing — which is where I also went and bought some boots during a bomb threat at school — and it appealed to this pseudo-vintage-loving self buried deep inside my outward self, which was often more invested in dressing “punk/riot grrrl/zine kid,” etc. Often my memories are interpreted through the lens of memories of photographs, and the photograph that this dress reminds me of the most is a class portrait of my Calculus BC class. I had big, curly hair (I guess that much hasn’t changed about me, but my choice of stylists has improved a lot) and had that sort of stick-thin figure that rapidly disappeared in my first year of college, and we were all standing in front of a board that depicted some sort of equation or proof — maybe about Riemann sums or the proof of a derivative/function/integral? (I’m sorry, Mrs. Rachtman!) As soon as I tried to remix this dress, I realized all over again why I NEVER wear this dress anymore. It just feels dowdy to me in a bad way, and my sad attempt at showing the underslip only resulted in failure.

Kova & T t-shirt, nostalgia skirt, UO scarf

This particular skirt is from my mother’s wardrobe when she was a young woman. May I also add that she was a young woman with a tiny waist. The tiny waist has prevented me from wearing this pleated and spotted pastel skirt in public, but I’m nostalgic about it because my mom didn’t keep many of her old clothes, and she gave this one to me a long time ago. It’s been in my possession/closet for ages, and I keep thinking I’ll wear it, but there are a lot of things that aren’t so much in its favor — it’s pastel pink (not “my color”), it’s too small, it’s an awkward length. Still. I refuse to donate it.

xo, mw

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I’m glad Meggy ended her post on a skirt that once belonged to her mother because all of my nostalgia outfits are completely entwined with memories of my mother. One of my first memories of vanity is standing outside of the bathroom and crying while my mother was applying make-up because I didn’t want her to be more beautiful than she already was. I also remember crying on an outdoor walk after my mom bent down to admire a flower, and like the brat that I was and still am today, I said, “You think the flower is pretty but not me?” I must have been four or five at the time. Anyway, after a lifetime of watching my mom getting ready and wearing beautiful clothes on her tall, swan-graceful frame, and her asking me to come into her bedroom while she tried on outfit after outfit (there was the all white silk pantsuit, the jewel toned ankle length floral skirt with lace-up boots, several 50’s polka dotted dresses with cinched waists, the red silk jumpsuit with matching neck scarf, the seafoam green silk qipao with slits so high she could only wear them to events where she didn’t have to sit down)–is it any wonder that my style has always been and is still greatly influenced by my mother? It’s my mom’s birthday tomorrow and my heart is full of love and gratitude to her as my fashion debt to her (not to mention all the other more spiritually taxing debts) keeps growing.

Scintillating blue skirt handmade by my mother, H & M black top, incredibly heavy vintage hammered belt (reminiscent of a belt my mom gave me 12 years that I lost 7 years ago)

Same shiny skirt but in silver, mom’s silver necklace, mom’s earrings

My mom used to work as a seamstress for a tiny fashion label run out of this lady Lisa’s apartment. Sometimes, she took me over there and Lisa’s mother, who we all called ‘mom,’ would make me sandwiches, which was amazing to me because my parents never bought sliced bread, had a toaster, or owned more than 2 forks until I was 15 (and actually we only had 2 forks in our home until I was 18 and a family friend donated their old IKEA silverware set to us.) I loved going to work with my mom because Lisa wore big jewelry and went to Italy in the summers for inspiration. Lisa was incredibly generous. She hired my mom even though my mom barely spoke English. In the mornings, she came down to help my mom parallel park our car because my mom was too scared to do it, gave us gifts all the time, and at one point, she hired my grandmother, who was newly arrived from China and living with us, to help with sewing and construction. The silver necklace I’m wearing in the second photo (which is having its last gasp before all the beads fall off) was a gift Lisa picked up for my mom in Italy. Up until a few years ago, she still sent us Christmas cards and sometimes little earrings in the mail. In the past few years, we’ve fallen out of touch. (Lisa, if you ever happen across this blog: my mom and I love you!)

Both of those skirts are Lisa’s designs. We used to own dozens of skirts and dresses and jackets in this fabric. I’ve never seen that fabric anywhere else–it’s so iridescent and shimmery, but not at all in a gaudy way. The silver skirt has a very wide cummerbund like waistband. My mom wore these two skirts all the time until I started begging her to let me wear them. I wore both skirts pretty much every week in high school after I got over my I’m a badass punker who only wears wide leg jeans phase. (I wasn’t as cool as Meggy to know about riot grrl yet.) I wore both skirts all year round. During the summer, with sandals, and during the winter, with clunky combat shoes and sometimes with a scarf tied around my neck (also inspired by my mom.) I wore them all the time in college too, often with a pinstriped blazer I got from H & M and Pepé Le Pew boots that I’ll show you guys another time. I can’t really wear these skirts anymore because they are ridiculously big on me (I must have worn them really low-waisted when I was younger,) and because they look so so so insanely 80s.

Here I’m wearing a green wool skirt my mom passed down to me in high school, around the time when I became obsessed with clothes again. (In elementary school, I used to come home and take out all of my mom’s dresses and wear them in front of her full-length mirror when she wasn’t home and then by 5:30, half an hour before she came home, I would put them all back. I never told my mom about it until one day I checked her closet and all of her dresses were gone. It turned out she had thrown her old clothes into a dumpster to make room in her closet, and only years later did I confess that I had been secretly coveting them for years! After that, I went through a phase when I dressed really badly and was bitter about everything.)

I used to wear this exact outfit (but with flat red mary janes or knock-off blue Converses with a cherry print) about once a week when I was a sophomore in college. I’m holding a copy of Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying because I came up with this outfit after I had a meltdown during my Faulkner seminar. We were discussing Absalom, Absalom! a book I hated at the time (I bet I’d like it now) in a class that I loathed with all of my heart and soul, and in the middle of a laborious close-reading of a single sentence in Absalom, Absalom! I realized that I hated being an English major, and I detested the English curriculum, and I detested the methodology of English literature studies, and that taking English classes was swallowing my love for reading and writing into a black vomit hole of hatred, and I got out of my seat in the middle of my professor’s lecture, ran all the way home, searched on the internet for ‘how to tie a tie,’ and started wearing ties four days out of the week. (I also switched my major to Ethnic Studies.) My favorite outfit to wear with a tie was this one. My mom’s wool skirt with pocket flaps in the front with this thrift store skinny green tie (now riddled with moth holes,) and this plain white button-down that my friend Diana bought in China but gave to me because the shoulders didn’t fit her well. I don’t wear ties anymore, mostly because I’m sick of people, friends and complete strangers alike, coming up to me and asking, “Hey are you trying to be like Avril Lavigne?” UM, NO YOU TWIT is what I want to say but never do.

Innocently clutching Absalom, Absalom! (Actually this is As I Lay Dying, which I fucking love, but I’m pretending it’s Absalom, Absalom! for the purposes of this post.)

Dear Absalom, Abasalom! I’m only smiling because I’m going to destroy you.

Now that you’ve been destroyed, I’m going after the English canon.

So now that we’ve shared our ghosts of fashion past and incorporated them into our present, do any of you have old clothes that you can’t bear to part with for nostalgic reasons?

Love, Jenny