All Quiet on the Sundress Front
Oh, I’ve been wanting to use that title for a while! And it feels just as good as I thought it would!
The last couple of days before I left New York last Friday were positively chilly. Fall-like. Fall-like as fall is like in the Pacific Northwest. It was because of Hurricane Ernesto, they said. Probably it will get warm again for a while, Indian summer and all that. But it cannot be denied that the sky holds less light now when I come out of work in the evenings, and that a few dry poplar leaves crunch underfoot while I walk down the block towards Smith Street in the mornings.
I have dragged a couple extra blankets onto my bed, and I woke up on mornings last week at a loss for what to wear. Do you ever have this problem at the changing of the seasons? All of your wintry clothes are packed away, under your bed, but it’s not just that: when you get them out they are fusty, wrinkled, and hidden in their folds like flakes of skin are pieces of an old you, last year’s you. Last season’s you. The return to the old can be comforting, but there is also a sense of ill-fittingness. You’ve changed or at least you feel like you’ve changed, and crawling back into some of the old pieces is about as appealing as squeezing yourself back into a wet bathing suit that you left in a roll on the bathroom floor.
And that is why, even though you have a wardrobe of perfectly good clothes, you want new ones. Styles are changing. Everyone else is marching forward into the future. You hardly want to be left behind.
Yes, it’s fall, and I want some new fall clothes. The goddammer about fall is that the clothes are way more expensive than summer clothes, since they are more substantial. I’d like a pair of boots. Hell, I’ve wanted a pair of boots for years. I keep not doing it because they are expensive and I can’t find just the perfect pair. Maybe this will be the year! Or maybe this will be the year I learn to wear high heels, like I’ve been wanting to. Or the year I get a really handsome warm coat.
And a fall/winter-type handbag, I need one of those. Yeah, need is a funny thing. I have less money to spend on clothes than I have space to store them, which is NOT A LOT. Still, I’m sure I will make some sort of nod to fall wardrobe acquisition over the next couple months. That back-to-school feeling is a hard thing to shake. Every year, I think back to the time—I think it must have been the week before the start of seventh grade—when I bought a copy of the fall fashion issue of Seventeen magazine to read on the flight home from Seattle, where we’d been visiting my uncle Henry and his family. It was a red-eye flight but I stayed up the entire night, keeping vigil with this magazine, mixing and matching outfits for myself, and imagining how great I and the world would be, once all the issues of style were ironed out.
It’s a little embarrassing, but I’ve always done this. Every year around the end of summer I take a little time to imagine what I want to wear and whom I want to be. The embarrassing part is that these two areas of imagination become so fused in my mind. Is it possible to change oneself in a meaningful way simply by changing clothes? I used to think not just about what would look good on me, in a straightforward kind of way, but what sort of image I wanted to project. I’d work on the image while extrapolating how a person dressed in my ideal style du jour would feel inside. And what effect she would have on other people. Possible or not, embarrassing or not, I was strung along by the blurry fantasy that inner perfection of feeling and outer perfection of dress existed in a dialectical relationship, and that the world would lie at my feet if only I were able to gather together the ideal collection of garments, accessories, and grooming products. My tangly soul would lie straight, then, too. Once my outward appearance was made to bend to my will, or so the theory must have gone, my inner space would be rendered well-ordered and manageable, by magic association.
(To be continued...)
The last couple of days before I left New York last Friday were positively chilly. Fall-like. Fall-like as fall is like in the Pacific Northwest. It was because of Hurricane Ernesto, they said. Probably it will get warm again for a while, Indian summer and all that. But it cannot be denied that the sky holds less light now when I come out of work in the evenings, and that a few dry poplar leaves crunch underfoot while I walk down the block towards Smith Street in the mornings.
I have dragged a couple extra blankets onto my bed, and I woke up on mornings last week at a loss for what to wear. Do you ever have this problem at the changing of the seasons? All of your wintry clothes are packed away, under your bed, but it’s not just that: when you get them out they are fusty, wrinkled, and hidden in their folds like flakes of skin are pieces of an old you, last year’s you. Last season’s you. The return to the old can be comforting, but there is also a sense of ill-fittingness. You’ve changed or at least you feel like you’ve changed, and crawling back into some of the old pieces is about as appealing as squeezing yourself back into a wet bathing suit that you left in a roll on the bathroom floor.
And that is why, even though you have a wardrobe of perfectly good clothes, you want new ones. Styles are changing. Everyone else is marching forward into the future. You hardly want to be left behind.
Yes, it’s fall, and I want some new fall clothes. The goddammer about fall is that the clothes are way more expensive than summer clothes, since they are more substantial. I’d like a pair of boots. Hell, I’ve wanted a pair of boots for years. I keep not doing it because they are expensive and I can’t find just the perfect pair. Maybe this will be the year! Or maybe this will be the year I learn to wear high heels, like I’ve been wanting to. Or the year I get a really handsome warm coat.
And a fall/winter-type handbag, I need one of those. Yeah, need is a funny thing. I have less money to spend on clothes than I have space to store them, which is NOT A LOT. Still, I’m sure I will make some sort of nod to fall wardrobe acquisition over the next couple months. That back-to-school feeling is a hard thing to shake. Every year, I think back to the time—I think it must have been the week before the start of seventh grade—when I bought a copy of the fall fashion issue of Seventeen magazine to read on the flight home from Seattle, where we’d been visiting my uncle Henry and his family. It was a red-eye flight but I stayed up the entire night, keeping vigil with this magazine, mixing and matching outfits for myself, and imagining how great I and the world would be, once all the issues of style were ironed out.
It’s a little embarrassing, but I’ve always done this. Every year around the end of summer I take a little time to imagine what I want to wear and whom I want to be. The embarrassing part is that these two areas of imagination become so fused in my mind. Is it possible to change oneself in a meaningful way simply by changing clothes? I used to think not just about what would look good on me, in a straightforward kind of way, but what sort of image I wanted to project. I’d work on the image while extrapolating how a person dressed in my ideal style du jour would feel inside. And what effect she would have on other people. Possible or not, embarrassing or not, I was strung along by the blurry fantasy that inner perfection of feeling and outer perfection of dress existed in a dialectical relationship, and that the world would lie at my feet if only I were able to gather together the ideal collection of garments, accessories, and grooming products. My tangly soul would lie straight, then, too. Once my outward appearance was made to bend to my will, or so the theory must have gone, my inner space would be rendered well-ordered and manageable, by magic association.
(To be continued...)
posted by katherine | 10:36 PM
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