This essay appeared in Under the Sun, Vol. 12, No. 1 (Summer 2007). It was selected by Robert Atwan as one of the "Notable Essays of 2007" listed in The Best American Essays 2008 ed. by Adam Gopmik (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2008).
DRESSING
Not easy for us
to equal goddesses
in lovely form
––Sappho
I once had a friend who could wear anything—bikini, business suit, jumpsuit. She was a neat-boned Vogue model who dropped into our bluejean world of the late 1960s as if from a different movie. For a brief time she became one of us, living in the margins, smoking dope, dancing the nights away. She was photogenic, that ephemeral quality that differs somehow from good looks: Photographers drooled after her like puppydogs.
She was no writer. But she created characters out of outfits, going on whim from jet-set to waif, from shopgirl to vamp. She was like that Wizard of Oz duchess who spent her days in a mirrored room trying on various heads from her large, fashionable collection.
Our Vogue model, too, collected selves. For her, crossing the boundary from one character to another was as simple as dressing for dinner. She also designed clothes, and stitched them. Quite casually, in one afternoon, she made me the most beautiful dress of my life, a short black raglan-sleeved dress with a mock-turtleneck that could be worn to the Laundromat or to any more formal occasion. She imagined for me a lovelier persona than I imagined for myself, and provided the means of transformation.
* * *
I’m terrible at dressing, but gradually I’ve come to find it entertaining. I was brought up to the care of cows and dogs and as a child I entertained myself by reading the old books that lined the walls of our crumbling farmhouse. We dressed in jeans and in Sears Roebuck rubber farm boots except for Sunday School, a stiff affair. We wore the required dresses to grade-school of course—beautiful dresses stitched by my Pennsylvania Dutch grandmother—but unfortunately in the first wash our rusty waterpipes stained them with great turd-colored blotches and our school dresses all looked irreparably soiled.
Our mother was oblivious to dress, a blindness she shared with our father. My twin sister Pamela and I considered ourselves vastly superior in matters of fashion. We had regulations and stipulations: We refused to dress alike and looked down on twins who walked around like duplicates. However, we lacked teachers. Our family lived to a large extent outside the cash economy, and shopping we knew nothing about.
Undoubtedly though, our interest in dressing was the legacy of our Grandma Henry. She sewed all her life and not only stitched Pammy and me all our school dresses but also our flowergirl gowns for our wedding duty. Our favorite school outfit was a calico print dress, daisy-on-black, smocked, with a sash and a round collar with a center-tab edged in yellow piping. I remember my grandmother’s little white sewing room and the whir of her Singer sewing machine. I remember her pins stuck in a pincushion, needles in their needle-paper, pinking shears. I remember her gray-felt dress-form draped in its measuring tape. I remember the crinkle of pattern paper and the white pattern envelope printed with color pictures of the dress or skirt or suit.
Despite this inheritance, I’m no seamstress. During my young wifehood, I sewed for my husband a man’s wine-colored India-style shirt with a slit neck and a wine-colored satin lining. He appreciated it deeply but it was too much for him and he never wore it. I also made sweaters using an instruction book that showed you how to measure a person to make a sweater to fit an actual torso, an actual arm. I knit my mother a navy blue wool cardigan and she wore it for many years. I knit my beloved grandmother a purple shawl. I asked my father if I could measure him so I could knit him a sweater, but he declined, explaining politely that he already had a sweater.
So much for my attempts to dress others. Dressing myself has been frankly more difficult because I do not have the stick figure to fit into clothes designed for anorexic models. Besides, I was never inducted into the arcane feminine guild in which elaborate rituals of dressing, I am convinced, are passed along. To this day I have no idea how to tie a scarf.
As for the characters who people my fiction, they dress, for the most part, quite well. I select their wardrobes with attention and care. True, I am burdened with a few curmudgeons who disdain the very idea of good clothes—two are sinewy farmers who have met neither each other nor my father—but I also have characters who dress with a certain impeccable elegance. Maxwell Stern makes a very good living stealing fur coats. When he steps out in his white double-breasted suit and white Panama hat, he could easily make a People Magazine Best-Dressed-Man-of-the-Year Award. At one time Edith Steiner wore conventional cap-sleeved sheaths accessorized with pearls, but then her husband dumped her and she in turn dumped her wardrobe along with the rest of her false life, and went to live in the woods. As a hermit, she wore corduroy pants and boots and rustic shirts. She got her garments by carving walking sticks and trading them for duds at the country store.
Dressing characters is a complex task requiring shopping. I have shopped exclusive shops without spending a dime and once at Neiman Marcus tried on a Russian sable overcoat that went for $100,000. In the same work in which Maxwell steals such an overcoat, Olivia Sharkey plays jazz violin in a $300 tee-shirt, a black-gauzy thing scattered with blood-colored velvet leaves, its V-neck lined with black marabou feathers. Maxine completes their triangle wearing bluejeans, a black turtleneck, and white New Balance running shoes, which, unfortunately, call attention to her size 12 feet.
Dressing characters provides entertaining moments, but there are no expensive moments. Dressing oneself is more complicated. As I approached my 40th birthday, the question of obtaining a decent wardrobe became acute. Basic attractiveness, previously taken for granted, began to seem at once essential and slightly ephemeral. At that time I put bread on the table by operating a printing press. Looking back on it, I am startled to realize that I chalked up a decade as a printer in part because I could print in what felt like my own clothes. In any case, my turn into low-middle age marked the beginning of my emancipation from bluejeans, workboots, tee-shirts, and my trusty red-and-black-plaid lumberjacket.
At the start of my campaign for a decent wardrobe, I determined to gather to the cause a coterie of assistants. My first and primary fashion consultant has always been my sister Pamela. Pamela grew up to get a Ph.D. and to become a brilliant historian of technology and culture, with grants and awards falling upon her like rain. But her education in matters of fashion is frankly no better than mine. Nevertheless, she loves to advise me and I love to advise her.
Next I turned to one of my dear friends—this was when I lived in Boston—who was extremely experienced in all matters of fashion due to her longstanding, extensive, and perfectly trouble-free avocation of shoplifting. One day Isabelle—as I shall call her—brought down her new overcoat. Now she is a pretty woman but was beginning to soften into the little round grandmotherly look common among middle-aged women from her country of origin—let’s call that France. It should be further mentioned that Isabelle raised her child in poverty as a single mother. For her bright and funny boy, she was the best, most devoted, most loving mother I have in my life witnessed. But she wanted a man. She wanted a good man. She wanted a lover and she wanted a husband and she wanted a good stepfather for her child. When she put on the cashmere coat for which she had abandoned her shoddy, stained, worn-out, woolen coat—I was shocked. The coat transformed her into a beautiful woman. Shall we look down on her? Shall we cluck our tongue? And—she got the man of her dreams and she is happy, and I am happy for her happiness. I have always loved Isabelle, she is one of the dear friends of my life, but the problem with her fashion advice is that she has no price range. Besides, I am a coward and could not possibly rip off clothes even if I wanted to.
Years have passed, and I am still learning to dress, even if slowly, and with mistakes. Here characters, and not only my own, have schooled me in a subject that some daughters learn from their mothers. I have meditated on Mrs. Dalloway’s shopping day. I have considered the manner in which Cinderella’s fashion crisis was solved with supernatural assistance. I have admired the contemporary film version of Cinderella—Pretty Woman—in which it is a man, the hotel concierge, who plays the fairy godmother. I have noted the fastidious care with which Raymond Chandler’s detective Philip Marlowe dresses for work: “I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.”
Most characters dress in order to pass from one realm to another, to cross a border, to escape into a world to which they do not belong. Consider the expression from rags to riches (not from shacks to riches, not from bad teeth to riches). Consider the expression to dress down, meaning to scold or to reprimand (to expose, to undress, to return, perhaps, to a state of naked truth).
The opposite of dressing down may be to dress up, to dress a part. And why not dress a part? Who is to say that persons cannot become their portrayals? Perhaps the person most in need of faking out is that old shoe—the self. Perhaps everyone stepping out every day is engaged in some form of passing. The big question about the extreme forms— from black to white, say, or from man to woman—is only this: What happens to the old self that has been discarded like a pair of bell-bottom jeans?
Those bell-bottoms—narrow-thighed and slung low on the hip—were to 1966 what the song “California Dreaming” was to that same era. Indeed, any garment—sock, cap, shirt, or shoe—comes loaded with connotation, with history. Outfits fit both body type and decade. Are you wearing a bra? You belong to the 20th century, for in the 19th it was the corset. A skirt? You could be a man in 12th century Scotland. Or not. It is possible to consider the march of centuries and cultures in terms of the hat, from warrior’s headdress to tophat to French beret, this last worn by men reading Becket or Proust through wire-rimmed glasses.
* * *
Clothing may cover the body, but how much more does it clothe who we are and who we wish to be. If all the world’s a stage, our garments are the costumes and the props. Which of my selves shall I wear today? Which face shall I put on, to meet the faces that I meet? What does my dark side wear? My child? How do I dress my wounds? Perhaps we each have an original self, the one we go home to. Mine is a farm girl dressed in bluejeans and work boots and a plaid flannel shirt. I once had a friend who worked as a nurse, but on her Saturday-off went around as Louisa May Alcott’s Old Fashioned Girl. She wore an ankle-length cotton-print dress with long sleeves and covered buttons. How different is depression’s outfit—dull-colored and ill-fitting and unkempt. How different again seduction—draped in a slinky red dress. It is possible to go out dressed in a self that is entirely unused to company—a Queen, say, or a vamp. Then we may have the sudden urge to escape out the back door of the party and run home. Our grandiosity has been exposed. We were posing fraudulently as royalty when the truth is we are the cleaning lady.
For an outfit also has an inner fit. It reflects, whether unconsciously or willfully, the inner mind, the inner spirit. Georgia O’Keeffe, who designed and sewed all her own clothes, wore simple dresses and long skirts, always black. She costumed a persona: serious, mysterious, an artist. And who is to say that a consciously created persona is not as valid as any other? Coco Channel began as an awkward, homely girl. But she learned to dress in elaborate costume, as if entitled, and she became, as we know, the empress of fashion. Was she really homely then? Or was she really beautiful? Or was she homely until she made herself into a beauty? She had courage, and indeed courage is required to dress, to dress up, to cross-dress, to dress down. To dress is to impose one’s own definition of one’s own self upon the social scene.
To construct a persona—a public personality in Jung’s terms—is in some sense to construct a person, a personality. This is exactly why gifts of clothing are so loaded: someone else gets to define who they think you are—or should be. That my grandmother made us school dresses that we loved proved to us that she loved us.
The persona I bring out when I read my poems to an audience is as follows. I wear clean bluejeans and some sort of black-turtleneck top. In other words I stand behind the poems in a somewhat spiffed-up version of my original self. I also wear my amulets—in one pocket a stone of coal, around my neck a Yin Yang circle carved in cowbone, on my ring-finger a blue stone set in silver-wire, not to mention my secret good luck underwear.
But that outfit didn’t fit the occasion of a reading at Seattle's Elliott Bay Books for the contributors to the Feminist Memoir Project anthology. I wanted my feminist to look feminine, understated, somewhat expensive. She wore a narrow black skirt, a black teeshirt, and over that a raw-silk coppery gold jacket with raised shoulders and patch pockets. This last had consumed what was for me at the time the staggering sum of $285. However, I consider her costume to be my best sartorial achievement so far. The reading turned out to be a well-executed occasion full of lively talk. And—a friend in the audience later told me: You looked rich.
* * *
Clothes advertise class, region, occupation, conspicuous wealth, conspicuous absence of wealth. In fact, it is difficult to imagine any material or immaterial situation that is not in some way connected with clothes. We fight in uniform, bask in bathing suits, sleep in pajamas, run in sweatpants. Even death insists upon its grave-clothes. Our clothes connect us by the very skin to the natural world. This was brought home to me when my friend Maury Klein presented me with the gift of a red-fox stole—we were rummaging in the attic of his big old Narragansett, Rhode Island, house. He had inherited the stole, which retained its fox-head, fox-tail, fox-ears, fox-paws, and small fox face, from one of his father’s inebriated ex-wives, an ex-fashionable woman of the 1940s. I declined the gift, explaining to Maury the danger of walking down a Seattle street—we are very pro-animal here—with a dead fox warming my neck.
Still, I wear shoes made of cowskin, carry a shoulderbag fashioned from a dead lamb. Until 1924, when Dupont invented the artificial silk, nylon, every fabric on every back was taken from a plant or an animal: silk spun by moths, wool sheared from sheep, mohair and cashmere clipped from goats, cotton plucked from the cotton plant, linen spun from flax.
Dressing is complicated by fabric, cut, drape, and fit, and I am a slow learner. At Yazdi, a store in Seattle’s Wallingford Center, I spend an hour deep in rayon scarves—gold-flecked purple or black or peach satin, this last an evening gown with spaghetti straps that I would not myself be caught dead in. Yazdi sells slinky dresses, bulky sweaters, ropes of glittering beads. Next door, another shop purveys jumpers woven from hemp, and cotton jackets and skirts, sturdy and lovely looking. I support ecological, plant-based clothing and once or twice a month go there to try something on, only to find in the mirror a rather dowdy-looking frump scowling back at me.
Frump or not, I have found a wardrobe mentor. Her mother, too, was a fashion dud. She has been where I have been, but she took a different path out. She is a former model, a personal shopper, a therapist whose erudition in matters of dress is acute. She is no clothes-horse, but rather a professional who thinks about how this person feels in these clothes. She studies the fit of garment to person. Barbara Blackburn is writing a book (I coach book-writers) on beauty, on the possibility of anyone owning the beauty that is hers to possess.
I have also found the perfect store. Opus 204 is an elegant but comfortable place in downtown Seattle, with scarves and shoulderbags arranged on oak tables, with crockery for sale along with somewhat expensive (they have good sales) dresses, skirts, coats, trousers, vests, and jewelry. The main saleswoman is a cheery, posh, rather heavy woman who wears my name—Priscilla—in rhinestones above her right breast. Once when I was trying on some blousy thing she emitted a scream from the other side of the store—No!—and came running over with something different to try on. I immediately fell under her spell. At Opus 204 they know the arcane secret of making rather sturdy-looking figures such as mine look slender: shoulderpads, and slightly longer, straight-cut blazers that button all the way up. The store has a workroom in the back where dressmakers design and sew most of the garments they sell.
Opus 204 was my doorway into “good clothes.” At Opus I bought my first truly worthy garment. I thought I was buying a tunic-length blazer, but after wearing it a few times I realized that it was not a blazer but a shirt. (I am fashion-blind the way some people are plant-blind, unable to tell shepherd’s purse from purslane although they look at these common weeds every day.) I tried on this shirt, made of herringbone-woven wool, shoulder-padded and buttoned up to a simple collar. It was on sale for $70, reduced from $300. There was something about the cut. In the mirror I saw understated good looks. I saw a rather attractive woman who was perhaps competent at what she did, no doubt rather well paid. I actually looked behind me. No, this was me. I bought the shirt. It was not too long afterward that I began asking for raises at my copyediting job, and began receiving them. That shirt, I am convinced, paid for itself.
* * *
I’m nowhere near death, I hope. But I like to wander into thrift shops, if only to think of all the characters who have shed their vestments, their investments, whether out of whimsy or some larger transformation. Here is a red satin slip and matching red pumps. Here is a black sequined gown. What glorious evenings, what romances have these castaway garments seen! What buttons have been unbuttoned by whose fingers, what clasps unclasped! Whatever lives and whatever loves these clothes have passed through, all was ephemeral, in the end. Whatever glad-hearted girl first wore this olive-green floor-length gown cut in the flapper-style of the 1920s has no more need of clothes.
She has gone from this world, disappeared entirely from the world of appearances. And I, in high middle age, have discovered something new about appearances that I would not have guessed even a few years ago. How it is that a person may disappear into the world, before disappearing from the world. How the world, early one morning, becomes all rain and whispering leaves and the padding and purring of cats. Without the self in it to bother with. Just the world itself, for whole moments of time.
And how, more and more, you drop the need to arrange your face to meet the faces that you meet” as T. S. Eliot wrote when he was only 25 and didn’t know any better. Especially no need to arrange your face to meet the faces of your friends. For who are your friends if not the ones who love you for who you are?
And what of that friend of long ago, the Vogue model we began with? I imagine her on some white beach, turning this way and that for the camera. Perhaps white cliffs rise up behind a turquoise sea. She changes from bikini to beach robe back to bikini. This is her job and she is good at it. Now she is done for the day. Her image, once again, will flit through a hundred glossy pages, unrecognized. I have looked for her face and it has become lost among the faces. I hope she has become very rich and I hope she is happy in love. We can imagine her stepping out of one guise or another into bluejeans and sandals, into her original self, the one we knew for a short while so long ago. She of the frenetic social life has been looking forward to this evening. She goes back to her hotel, dines in her room, pulls out of her suitcase a thick novel. She settles down for the night to read. We will leave her there, lost in the world of the imagination, that near, familiar world where the characters—so like ourselves!—all wear their hearts on their sleeve.
Copyright 2008 by Priscilla Long, All rights reserved. Please do not reproduce or quote without permission.
Work Sample: Creative Nonfiction
Contact Me:PriscillaLong@comcast.net