Fashion for Writers

I went to the Feria in Arles on Sunday (the ancient Roman city of Arles, which knows only glory and splendor!) and my heart was muttering and stuttering all day. No more about that. I’ve decided to not reject romance when it comes to France, partially because I feel sheepish that nearly every time I’ve written about it on this blog, I’ve always ended up portraying France in a negative light, and even my occasional attempts at writing less bitterly about my life here still conclude with a rotten little coda, when in fact, I’m happy here and I’m happy with the little life I’ve made for myself here.

Sunday, in Arles, on our way to see the Rhône river as the sun was setting, my friend Rémy (hi Rémy!) asked me about my blog and whether or not I consider fashion to be one of my passions and I immediately was like hell to the no, fashion embarrasses me and it gives me nothing but anxiety and self-pity. By now, you’ve probably read Meggy’s sad news about her decision to no longer blog for Fashion for Writers (although I will most definitely implore her to guest post as often as she can!) and leave this site in my pitiful, ever-shaking hands.

Meggy started Fashion for Writers more than three years ago, asked me to join her a year and a half ago, and now, I can only hope that I will do her and FFW proud as I navigate these waters alone. Maybe FFW’s salad days are behind us now that Meggy is no longer blogging here and instead devoting her time to her writing, her other tremendous blog, The Novelist’s Hubris, her job at Modcloth, and well, being one of the most loving and generous people I have ever known (which is some muthafuckin work!) (I promise all of these unconnected sentences/thoughts will be strung together at some point like party lights and when they are, they will shine over this entire post like the flashlight in the pitch dark, and then you can say, Ahh Jenny you do so well to mix up all of your metaphors/platitudes and to take things so far that you strangle all pleasure out of the experience of reading your words!)

There was a moment when Meggy and I were discussing the future of FFW, when we thought maybe it would be a good idea to shut it down altogether. Neither Meggy nor I knew what our relationship to fashion had become and if and how we could continue to contribute to this blog. I know I’ve alluded to this before by way of half formed protests against whatever stake I have left in fashion, but I’ve yet to fully explore my resistance, why I have it, why it keeps coming back, why it gives me such grief, in any sort of composed, half-intelligent way. Anyway, Julia over at L’Allure Garçonniere has already basically put all of my struggles with blogging and in particular, trying to blog about fashion, into a perfectly articulated blog post:  ‘thoughts: the feminist blogosphere.’

Like Julia, I too have maybe over 40 drafts of blog posts saved up somewhere that I can’t bring myself to finish because when I post something, I want it to be everything in the world that I’ve ever wanted to express and I want to express it as perfectly or more brilliantly than I’ve ever expressed something, and of course, that never happens, and then I feel defeated and then ages go by, and then it no longer feels relevant to write about the thing I tried to write about weeks, or sometimes months ago, and then I feel defeated when I think about what most fashion blogs look like, and how I can’t relate to them, not just their budget or their concerns, but their entire reason for having a blog. But reading Julia’s blog post about the feminist blogosphere truly does remind me that she’s right to say:

lately i’ve been thinking that the simple act of valuing and viewing critical fashion blogging as “work” in and of itself is a feminist act.

And furthermore:

as long as women will be judged, by their peers, by their families, and even by a court of law, by how they dress, fashion will be a feminist issue. as long as women are told they are what they wear, what brands they wear, how much money they spend on their clothing, etc….fashion will be a feminist issue. as long as fashion advertisers objectify women in order to sell their clothing and products, fashion will be a feminist issue. and basically every time someone asks me “is x a feminist fashion issue?” the answer tends to be yes.

And that’s something I can’t turn my back on just yet. Even though I don’t have the most insightful things to say about fashion and feminism, even if I may not always have the stamina to engage as deeply as I’d like, even though this blog often comes after the people in my life and the novel I’m struggling to finish and the poetry and the letters and the art I’m trying to read and see, and even though I don’t possess the kind of leave-you-breathless-with-my-smarts quality that blogs like A La Garçonniere and Threadbared most certainly have, I think I am going to try and continue to post here, on this humble space that Meggy started and has so generously and trustingly passed to my guardianship.

I admit another big challenge in continuing to write for this blog is that I live abroad. I’m living out of two not very big suitcases. If I want to take a picture, I have to put my camera on some lady or some man’s poubelle in a little Impasse. Not only do I have a tiny selection of things to wear, but I also feel less free than I have ever felt to wear what I want. I guess this is because I’m living in a country that seemingly has more ways of calling a woman a whore than I can count with my hands and feet (thanks Kyle for educating me on the impossibility of insulting a woman in French without being sexually disparaging.) I can’t wear what I feel like unless I don’t mind the harassment, unless I don’t mind feeling scared on occasion.

And to add to all that, it disturbs me when I feel myself craving to buy new things. I don’t want to feel like my interest in fashion is just an interest (an addiction) to consumption, to material things, to wanting to present a perfect exterior to all who see me. I need to believe (and to practice this belief) that a person is not composed of the things they buy, or how beautifully they can ice a cake, or how wonderfully decorated their interior space is, unless we are talking about the interior space of a person rather than their home, and I need to run run run as far away as I can from staged ‘peeks’ into things that are unutterably beautiful because of their inherent complexity and messiness and difficulty, things like: love, partnership, commitment, friendship, the making of a home and a family, all of which when blogged about often leaves the realm of the real, the meaningful, the sublime, and becomes nothing more than uninspiring, unoriginal, curated prettiness.

I think it was for all of these reasons that I told my friend Rémy I’m embarrased by my interest in fashion and blogging.

And jeez, on top of all this disquietude, I am one slow mofo when it comes to writing. It took me a few days to finally write this post. Lately, my mind has been on so many other things, and my body has physically been in so many places. In the past month, I’ve gone to Paris four times, I’ve taken a thirty hour long trip to San Francisco for V’s and A’s beautifully moving wedding weekend, and then a thirty hour long trip back. I’ve applied for maybe sixty jobs in two weeks, trying to find a job here in France for the summer. I finished my contract with the Education Nationale, and no longer get up at 6 in the morning to carpool my tired ass with my colleague who brings me croissants or pain au chocolat, and I no longer hear my students say Madame, Madame, Madame, Madame at the beginning and end of each class hour, and I no longer have to correct my students who charmingly say things like, ‘I make the party and then I fall down drink’ when I ask them what they did this past weekend.

Last week, my mother came and visited me. I met her in Paris and we stayed at a friend’s apartment that reminded her of Shanghai in the 60s. We came back to Avignon and I showed her Le Pont d’Avignon, and the place where the artist Miquel Barceló installed an elephant balanced on her trunk, and we went to Nice and promenaded and ate seafood until we were feeble.  My mom went back to the States last Wednesday, and I came back to a half-empty apartment and was so tired and worn out that I didn’t even know how to be sad that I went from this:

to being the only toothbrush putzing around in my underwear in my Avignon apartment.

Tomorrow, I am moving to Paris for two months.

I long to be with the people who know me. But I told myself that I would seek out adventure, and write, and read, and let myself savor the pleasure of being alone, the pleasure of being in love, the pleasure of intimacy without the privilege of physical intimacy, the pleasure of sheer terror that subsides if I listen to the American Anthology of Folk Music at 6 in the morning while watching the sky go from dark blue to a blue that is like the blue in the Picasso painting of a woman with her arms folded.

Oh, it is hard to pack up and say goodbye! I’ve done it many times now, and I feel melancholy and indeterminately excited. There was a day in Avignon when I felt lost, but then Martin and I saw a rainbow and ate chocolate on the terrace and let the day be the day.

Now I have to finish packing and maybe also finish the booze in my apartment that can’t possibly go to waste!

Love,
Jenny