Broken things become pattern in reflection.
~Ali Smith, Artful
I recently had an anxiety dream, the kind in which I’m not prepared to do what I need to do. But instead of dreaming that I missed an exam or couldn’t find my classroom on the first day of school, I dreamt that I was traveling and failed to bring the earrings and silk scarf that I usually wear with a particular outfit. I felt stark naked. When I awoke, I thought, Really? You’re dreaming about accessories?
Clothing and I go way back. As my mother had sensed from the time I was a toddler, wearing a favorite hat or outfit was grounding for me, even salvific, in our chaotic family. And when I returned from my junior year in Paris needing to reconnect with my disappearing body, my mom’s focus on my clothes fueled my passion. Lately though—decades after these periods of crisis—I've been trying to understand what keeps me and clothing so attached.
***
To dress:
to make straight; to put into proper alignment; to arrange; to prepare for use or service; to tend or cultivate; to apply protective or therapeutic covering, as for a wound; to put through a finishing process by smoothing the surface. From Anglo-French drescer, dresser: to direct, put right.
***
“You’re wearing it on a Thursday!” exclaimed the owner of my favorite vintage store when she saw me wearing a grey cloche hat and beaded 1920s dress. I love wearing whatever feels right to me, regardless of whether it matches others’ sense of style or level of formality. I might end up at Home Depot wearing a pillbox hat and 1940s suit, as I did one Christmas when my sartorial plans didn’t match my family’s agenda, but I dress so that I’m in tune with my own feelings and needs. Occasionally, if I’m not feeling my usual harmony of body-skin-second skin, I bring a back-up outfit in my backpack. Though I almost never use it, the extra outfit is my emotional insurance, my security blanket, my ready-to-hand toolkit for getting back on my axis.
***
Fascinated by the connection between avian and human adornment, particularly of the head, Charles Darwin claimed that birds and humans have “nearly the same taste for the beautiful,” as shown by “our women, both civilised and savage, decking their heads with borrowed plumes, and using gems which are hardly more brilliantly coloured than the naked skin and wattles of certain birds.”
Darwin failed to note men’s equally long history of adorning their heads yet couldn’t stop thinking about the peacock, a male bird known for its adornment. Finding it implausible that peacocks’ cumbersome tails could help them to escape predators or navigate their environment, Darwin ultimately hypothesized that their tails became more dramatic over time because potential mates preferred colorful males; peacocks acquired elaborate adornments to capture the attention of elusive females.
***
My hat habit began with the floppy, paisley beach hat I was wearing at age four when my mother forgot me at the grocery store. My collection also included a brown wool ski cap; a long, knitted stocking cap with white, orange, and brown stripes; a red and white captain’s hat from the Gateway Clipper Fleet; and a Russian fur hat with ear flaps that fold up at its crown. These hats were part of my everyday wardrobe until I turned seven. Big girls, I was told, don’t wear hats.
***
A group of peacocks is called an ostentation. Derived from the Latin word for “display,” ostentation also means “vain and unnecessary show, especially for the purpose of attracting attention, admiration, or envy.”
***
My sisters, most comfortable in t-shirts and jeans, long ago dubbed me “the bag lady” thanks to my love of vintage dresses. The truth is, if I had the necessary wardrobe, if I lived in a warmer climate, and if it weren’t a professional liability, I’d wear a vintage gown every day.
***
Darwin’s hypothesis about peacocks was correct. Though Hindus consider Indian peacocks sacred due to the “eyes of the gods” on their resplendent tail feathers, the ocelli are more about being seen than seeing. When choosing potential mates, female peahens consider the quality of male peacocks’ feather trains, including their length, number of ocelli, and symmetry of patterning. In the average lek, peahens choose to mate with only about five percent of the males; 95% of peacocks remain without a partner. This stiff competition explains why peacocks pull out all the stops in unfurling their six-foot wide fans, relying on both sight and sound to impress peahens. Crystal-like structures in peacocks’ feathers reflect different wavelengths of light depending on how they are spaced, creating an array of shimmering colors. And peacocks shake different parts of their feathers as they strut, emitting various low-frequency sounds designed to entice peahens at a range of distances.
Unlike their iridescent partners, Indian peahens have mottled brown, grey, and green plumage. Their understated garb enables them to see without being seen, to blend in with the bushes and remain safe from predators while incubating eggs.
***
On one hand, I share peahens’ inclination to remain safe, to watch, to blend in with the bushes.
On the other hand, I envy their flamboyant partners’ metallic blue crests, which perch on their heads like the fascinators British women wear to royal weddings.
She smiled at my delight when she converted my favorite plaid pants into knickers. She guffawed when I exited the airport wearing a tongue-in-cheek psychedelic pantsuit. She clenched her jaw when I didn’t enthuse over her gifts of clothing during my early twenties. She sucked her teeth or shouted “Hooray!” when assessing my outfits for cousins’ weddings. She said nothing at all when she sent her long-loved suede suit shortly before she died.
***
During a recent trip to Japan, I saw thousands of statues adorned with cloth bibs, usually red but sometimes brocade, calico, or buffalo check. Tiny or grand, foxes or bodhisattvas, these statues—known as jizos—appear in shrines, cemeteries, and schoolyards, sometimes sporting hand-knit berets, aprons, capes, sunglasses, even makeup. Dressing a jizo—women’s work—is a means to care for aborted fetuses, dead children, childbearing women, parents in their afterlives, and the “unconnected” or forgotten dead. Though new to me, this centuries-old practice felt familiar: clothing as caregiving and protection, an oblique form of communication, tangible longing for proximity and connection amid distance, absence, and loss.
***
To redress:
to remedy or set right; to relieve from distress; to make fair and equal; to compensate for wrong or loss. From Anglo-French redresser: to set upright, restore, set straight.
***
It seemed like hunger. After endless days, months, and years of wearing drab, shapeless uniforms, women in my prison book clubs seemed hungry for color, soft textures, and beauty in any form they could find it. “Ooooh, can I touch that fabric?” they’d say, and, “I can’t wait to see your colors.” I initially planned to wear nondescript clothing so that I’d blend in with the prison environment, but I was soon wearing clothes made of velvet, brocade, and the deepest hues in my closet, hoping that a tiny bit of aesthetic pleasure might—if only for a few hours—feed women’s senses, challenge their dehumanization, make their days a little less endless.
***
What if all my ways to say—opaque or iridescent, patterned or plain, angled or straight, gathered or loose, diaphanous or coarse—were reduced to words? What word says purple Converse sneakers or sunflower-saturated sweater? What metaphor could replace my dove grey vintage blouse with a lace inset and buttons down the back? Could a song stand in for my deceased friend’s earring-cum-necklace, a tiny figure with hinged arms and legs that dance when I move? How would I say the click of my boot heel? The angle of my hat? A loud rustle, silent billowing, or barely audible swish?
***
A peacock’s gorgeous garb is all he’s got, so he makes the most of one set of feathers. During the summer, when I’m not teaching, I often wear just a few outfits that come to represent that period of time. Wearing the same clothes provides the comfort of familiarity, like baking the same pie every Thanksgiving. During the school year, though, I love the creative challenge of continually coming up with different outfits that feel like me and suit the day’s needs. When I need a boost of inspiration or confidence, I might wear my Chinese jacket inherited from a friend, made of silver taffeta embroidered with velvety, burgundy chrysanthemums. When I feel footloose and playful, I’ll go with my purple cocktail hat, purple cigarette pants, and a vintage wool jacket embroidered with purple, slate, and grey paisleys and vines. For a difficult administrative challenge? A vintage leather jacket with a chunky, diagonal zipper. For maximum coziness, a hand knit sweater dress that could double as a sleeping bag.
Sometimes, I explore how a designer’s obsession—with brocades, peplums, visible stitching—unites a collection, transforming whimsy into a body of work. Sometimes, I search online for a specific category of clothing: kimonos, perhaps, or high-waist pants, embroidered dresses, pencil skirts, Art Nouveau capes. My browsing ritual both settles my mind and sparks my imagination, preparing me to greet my own otherness. As emotions, relationships, and experiences float in and out of my consciousness, I think about what’s catching my eye, what it might feel like to wear a particular color or texture, whether wearing the sleeves this way might look more Edwardian, how this garment might reinforce my edges or introduce me to new versions of myself.
***
Clothing is a form that allows for infinite expression but provides borders and limits. It gives me something to push against, reminding me that I live in this body, with these emotions, on this day, with this temperature and quality of light.
***
“What are the limits to what you’d wear?” a friend asks. A church hat but not a baseball cap. A Downton Abbey gown but not a Gothic ensemble. An avant-garde German dress but not a Japanese shirt with three sleeves. An interesting top from a thrift store but not a nondescript top from Wal-Mart. A menswear-inspired suit or tie but not a football jersey. I’m drawn to clothes that strike me as unusual, artistic, and elegant. Clothes that are handmade or made under just labor and environmental conditions (a poncho woven from scraps of silver fabric gathered from the floor of a sewing factory). Clothes with dramatic shapes that don’t try too hard (a skirt that I’ve unwittingly worn upside down because its folds create an unexpected form). Clothes that stem from other cultures but don’t veer into cultural appropriation (a knee-length 1920s kimono that I wear with skirts and jeans). Clothes that evoke other time periods (an ensemble that—friends tell me—conjures a 19th-century woman on the moor).
Peacocks’ plumage inspired Darwin’s theory of sexual selection, which posits that beautiful yet ostensibly useless adornment can evolve when it provides an advantage in the competition for mates. As a hat-obsessed child, I wasn’t trying to attract a mate, but I, too, was motivated to capture the attention of an important female. Does my early plumage suggest that my ongoing love of hats and clothing stems from a vestigial need to be seen? If clothing-lovers are peacocks, is it possible to be unassuming yet have a peacock’s panache? Can I wear whatever strikes my fancy without being ostentatious?
***
Clothing is our interface with the world, fashion theorists emphasize, a boundary between self and other, a surface where separate entities meet and interact. For me, though, the act of dressing evokes interfacing as a sewing term: the invisible layer in a garment that supports and shapes a collar, cuff, or lapel. Whether my choice of what to wear feels crystal clear or murky, whether deciding feels invigorating or exhausting, whether I’m falling into or deviating from habit, whether I’m choosing between paisley and brocade or between houndstooth and organza, dressing is part of my daily process of defining and redefining my edges. Others see my final outfit, but what matters most is the invisible layer: the reinforcement I feel from selecting and inhabiting my clothes.
***
What seems tricky is when my everyday clothing choices seem noteworthy to others in ways I don’t anticipate. When I attended a week-long “sewing camp” a few years ago, my clothes caused a stir every morning at breakfast. I was just wearing my daily summer fare—vintage, homemade, and store-bought dresses, all interesting in subtle ways—but several people told me they “couldn’t wait” to see what I was wearing each day, and throughout the week, participants in painting, dyeing, and ceramics workshops approached me to ask about my outfits. Recently, a stranger stopped me in the grocery store to tell me that she was auditing a course that met near my classroom and would wait for me to arrive every day so she could see my outfits. For ten minutes, this stranger and I stood in the produce section as I answered her questions about my clothes. This kind of attention sometimes makes me hesitate to wear a 1930s hat for a day of teaching or a beaded vintage dress for a trip to the dentist. A few times, it has made me uncomfortable in my own skin, like the time I wore a beaded cocktail hat and ornate black and red dress made in 1918 to my department’s holiday party. Feeling trapped in the spotlight and alienated from myself, I suddenly viewed my decision to wear the dress as absurd and unseemly, as evidence of an indiscreet hunger, a shameful, clownish craving. “Next time,” I thought, “I should just wear jeans.”
***
Maybe I’m a peahen in peacock garb—adorned in shimmering feathers yet drawn to watch and listen rather than seeking center stage.
***
After my disappearing act in college, clothing reminded me what it feels like to claim space. As a clothed body, I have felt painfully self-conscious at times, but I have never felt endangered or physically imperiled by taking up space in my preferred clothing. I have never felt targeted by racist police and never faced violence or overt hostility from someone objecting to my gender presentation. I routinely feel authorized—welcome—to inhabit civic, commercial, and academic spaces wearing whatever I choose.
And yet, regardless of how I experience wearing my preferred clothing, my clothed body enters the public sphere freighted with meanings conferred by history, culture, and politics, and cloaked in the ideologies, fantasies, desires, and resentments that others map onto my body and my clothes. Dressing is like writing, I remind myself; no matter how carefully I craft my words on the page, readers take them up in unexpected, unintended ways. And no matter what meanings I assign to my clothes and clothing practices, others read my clothed body through their own lenses. While the act of dressing involves attending to my own needs and desires, it also involves navigating my awareness (sometimes acute, sometimes latent) that others will inevitably read my clothed body in ways that feel like misrecognition or misunderstanding, and in ways that reinforce norms—such as white femininity—that I seek to challenge.
***
“I saw you from afar,” my colleague gushes, “and I wondered, ‘Who is wearing that perfect outfit?’ You look like you stepped off a movie set!” I thank her for the compliment, relieved that we have something to talk about. A week later, I do an abrupt about-face when I see her walking in my direction. I’m wearing the same outfit and feel overcome with shame at the thought of seeing her again. Heart pounding, I walk briskly and slip into the nearest side street.
Recalling this about-face years later, I find myself thinking about scarcity and adornment. For peacocks, the scarcity of available female partners makes scintillating adornment a necessity. For me, the youngest of many children with pressing needs, hats and clothing were tools for countering emotional scarcity, for connecting with my emotionally elusive mother. My need for such connection felt urgent, the key to staving off my disappearance. Now, when I experience scarcity in my relationship with another woman—a tenuous connection, or a sense that there is not enough space for both of us to thrive—vestigial magical thinking kicks in, tempting me to believe that wearing the right outfit will make me visible for who I am, foster meaningful communication, and strengthen our strained connection. When I conflate clothing and communication in this way, repeating an outfit feels embarrassing, like I’m recounting the same tired story or making an argument I’ve made before.
On an intellectual level, I understand that clothing can’t work this kind of magic; it can’t repair a strained relationship. I understand, too, that by focusing my attention on another’s responses to my clothing, I make myself a lightning rod in one of the oldest economies of scarcity: the gendered realm in which women are slated to compete with each other over our bodies and clothes. Relying on clothing to strengthen my relationships with particular women may thus exacerbate the very competition I hope to lessen.
I understand all of these things, but as I realized after slipping into that side street, old emotional habits die hard.
***
In Hans Christian Andersen’s version of “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” the swindlers posing as weavers claim to make magnificent clothes that remain invisible to those who are unfit for office. Fearing their own incompetence, all the adults in the story refuse to acknowledge that the Emperor is actually naked.
In my fractured fairy tale, the clothes aren’t invisible; the Emperor is. Actually, others see her and consider her fit for office, but the Emperor can’t see herself. So she piles on layers of clothing, hoping that all that silk, velvet, and brocade will protect her from being naked, risible, invisible.
When will the Emperor learn to see herself? Can a child’s voice persuade her to forgo fear?
***
The orange patch she sewed over Raggedy Ann’s heart, the Little House on the Prairie dress that transported me to another time, the gigantic poppies she wanted me to wear when I returned from Paris, the wordless package she mailed before her death: my mother’s forms of dress and redress, her oblique efforts to dress my wounds, goad me into claiming space, parent me in the best ways she could.
***
Clothing is my envoy and ambassador, my courier and secret spy, my emissary to myself. A trusted messenger on a diplomatic mission, clothing represents my best interests and keeps me in touch with the many versions of me. My envoy informs me of my secret intrigues and pressing needs, helps me to stay abreast of what’s going on behind the scenes. Clothing conveys my respects to far-flung reaches of myself, prepares us for high-stakes encounters, and when we’re on different pages, helps us to negotiate our differences and broker a peace.
***
Dress and redress: an ouroboros, a Mobius strip. Each inheres in the other, overlapping in meaning and practice. With its redundant “re-,” redress reminds me of the iterative nature of dressing: the steady beat of tending to what’s tender, arranging, aligning, putting things right. The recursive rhythm of remedying, relieving, restoring. The daily cadence of living.
With Darwin’s theory of sexual selection, here’s what fascinates me most: If peacocks’ ornamentation stems from their fundamental need to find a mate—in other words, if peacocks’ biological need ultimately engenders beauty—then primal need can blossom into aesthetic pleasure.
I wonder, though: As peacocks provide visual pleasure for others, do they appreciate their own splendor? Do they enjoy beauty for beauty’s sake, whether or not they find a mate?
***
“It’s an almost crushing pleasure,” says shop owner Lauren Naimola, explaining how a well-preserved Edwardian coat brings tears to her eyes. I nod, tears in my own eyes, thinking about the near-nausea, breathlessness, and system overload I often experience in the presence of vintage clothes. For some, it’s unsettling—even distasteful—to think about previous occupants of clothing. But for me, a vintage garment is an embodied archive, an intimate, deeply moving record of another’s experiences. As fashion scholar Jessamyn Hatcher notes, vintage garments “never lose the imprint of the body that was once inside them”; because chemical reactions between the fabric and the wearer’s body are ongoing, the wearer’s perspiration can alter the molecular structure of the fabric a hundred years later. Wearing a used garment—a kind of re-dress—reanimates its previous wearers through secondary epidermal contact, creating new, often unexpected lines of kinship. The “detritus of history” lingers within everyday objects, literary scholar Bill Brown reminds us, making them the “material unconscious” of a culture. For artist and author Edmund de Waal, the “sensuous, sinuous intertwining of things with memories” sparks questions not only about how we think and feel about objects but also about objects as witnesses. When I wear a hand-sewn Edwardian blouse, I feel a next-to-skin connection with the maker who dwells in her intricate handiwork, in the patterns of movement etched into the “memory” of the blouse, and in the ongoing chemical reactions between her body and the fabric. The blouse reminds me, too, of all that I will never know about what it has witnessed, all the ways in which “a chain of forgetting,” as de Waal calls it, accompanies accretions of stories.
***
A great-grandmother’s silk stockings, an antique christening dress, a bit of lace from a mother’s wedding veil: friends sometimes offer me clothing items that bear their own family histories. One friend sent vintage curtains that she thought I could repurpose into a jacket and skirt. Out of the blue, another gave me a large bag of her hand-me-down clothing, with a story to accompany each item. From a beloved friend who died of cancer, I inherited utterly impractical clothes that I treasure as heirlooms: a cobalt toreador jacket with Liberace-style embroidery; a corduroy hat with an enormous brim; an oversized vest made from the curlicue white fleece of a lamb. Wearing these items around the house, I entwine with my friend, hoping to inherit some of her luminosity and courage, her gift for finding possibility amidst rubble. An offering of a beautiful literary passage about clothing, the discovery of a mutual passion for sewing, an exchange about the solace that colorful fabric provides—through clothing and cloth, I interweave myself with others.
For Proust it was a madeleine; for me it’s clothing.
It was only a moment, fleeting and unexpected. I picked up a tie from a display in the men’s store, one that reminded me of him with its fine hand, autumn hues, and antique paisley print. Suddenly, he was alive again, in a wave of warmth and fullness that made me pause and close my eyes. When I opened them a few seconds later, I put the tie around my neck, asked my husband how to tie it, and bought my first tie. My husband can wear it, too, but I’ll think of it as my silk paisley lifeline to my dad.
***
I can’t recall what I was wearing on September 11th or on the day after the 2016 election, but I can go back decades in remembering what I’ve worn for significant personal occasions: first and last days of the school, family events, even social interactions. Suitcases of memories, my clothes make my past available for reflection, recounting, and revision.
***
She’s been dead fifteen years, but as I read “The Orange-and-White High-Heeled Shoes,” I ache with longing. In Bass’s poem, the daughter recalls how she and her mother slid into their shared pair of shoes “like girls diving into a cedar-tinged lake, like bees entering the trumpet of a flower, like birds disappearing into the green, green leaves of summer.” Neither of us liked heels, but my mother and I both wore size seven. That lake, those flowers, the green summer leaves—in another life, they could have been ours.
Sally Sweeney, sketchbook
Scientists, it turns out, have long debated my question about whether peacocks take pleasure in their own adornment. In his theory of sexual selection, Darwin posits that animals’ “taste for the beautiful” is not necessarily linked to survival; their “aesthetic faculty” allows them to appreciate beauty for its own sake. Present-day evolutionary ornithologist Richard Prum agrees. Animals’ beautiful adornment often stems from their “arbitrary” preferences, Prum argues, not from the adornment’s connection to specific survival advantages. “Animals are agents in their own evolution,” he insists, because their aesthetic tastes shape their own development. “Birds are beautiful because they are beautiful to themselves.”
As journalist Ferris Jabr explains, in the almost 150 years between Darwin’s and Prum’s writings, numerous scientists have ridiculed this notion of beauty without utility, in part because it presumes animals’ cognitive sophistication, and in part because it credits female desire—or “feminine caprice,” as one biologist put it—with creating standards of beauty. Trying to rescue beauty from purposelessness, many scientists have hypothesized that an animal’s ornamentation must be a signal for its survival skills, intelligence, health, fertility, or advantageous genes.
Lately, though, some biologists believe that animals’ beautiful adornment is “neither wholly purposeful nor entirely random,” neither totally adaptive nor totally arbitrary. From this perspective, a peacock’s tail embodies the confluence of two “equally important evolutionary forces: utility and beauty.” Multiple factors—environment, anatomy, evolutionary legacy, and peahens’ “innate sense of beauty”—have contributed to peacocks’ panache.
***
She wore my brother’s castoff t-shirts and jeans—hardly peacock material. She was all peacock, though, in yoking aesthetics and survival. Her own canvases were rock gardens and watercolor paintings, but she was on to me and clothing. And when I exposed the depth of my need long after dressing my dolls was an option, she seemed to view dressing me as the solution. I resisted her timing, her method, her aesthetic: too late, too controlling, too loud. But her impulse? Reach for what you find beautiful. Discover what shimmers. Claim it, use it, try not to let it go.
I tend to be an overpacker (two large suitcases for my first weekend home from college.) But for me, packing is less about choosing the right clothing and more about gathering my pieces, shoring up my edges, reassuring myself that I will not be unhomed. One Thanksgiving, I forgot to put my packed suitcase in the car and arrived at my family’s lake house with only the clothes on my back. Not having my suitcase didn’t really matter, though, because I had already done my gathering. My first flight to Paris still haunts me, its pairing of travel and abandonment embedded in muscle memory: the fear, the cold, the hunger. Then, I had no map of myself and couldn’t find my way home. Now, my packing ritual reminds me of my internal compass, my knack for experiencing home wherever I am.
***
Rubbing the freckles on my arm, she cocks her head as if trying to understand why I’m covered with spots. We don’t speak each other’s language, but I’m in her home in Gujarat, India as part of a textile tour, sitting on the floor of her front room with eighteen other tourists—primarily women, all older than me. Our tour guide is explaining our host’s complex process for dyeing saris. When our guide asks for a volunteer to model a sari, everyone points to me as the one who “can wear anything.” I stand at the front of the room, arms outstretched, embarrassed by the camera clicks and steady gazes. But as our host wraps me in yards of silk, I’m thrilled by my intimate connection with a woman whose language and skin differ from my own.
I’m in a high-end Tokyo department store, surrounded by silk kimonos in a painter’s palette of colors. When an elegant, kimono-clad saleswoman sees me admiring traditional obi belts, she invites me to try on a kimono and then starts circling my waist with a twelve-foot long piece of stiff silk. For the next twenty minutes, we’re all alone in the crowded store, communicating solely through gestures, touch, laughter, and our shared appreciation for the beautiful form she is creating from silk.
I’m in a small second-hand kimono shop in Kyoto, learning about the complex language of kimonos from a saleswoman dressed in a stunning, cobalt, flower-adorned, antique kimono. It’s my second visit to the shop. The saleswoman is teaching me how to recognize the saturated, complex colors characteristic of silk made before World War II, and how to choose an obi suited to the era, formality, and quality of a kimono. As she wraps several different kinds of obis around my waist, she explains her preference for older kimonos, which tend to be more subtle than the bold, brightly colored designs that younger women now wear. Tying her own obi still takes thirty-five minutes, she shares, even after years of practice. Our interaction is delimited by language barriers and commerce, but I find myself tearing up as we say goodbye.
Late at night, long after these interactions, I’m trying to understand why I found them so moving. As I recall Indian and Japanese women wrapping me in yards of silk, my mind drifts closer to home. I’m in my late teens, trying on dresses that my eighty-year-old great aunt can no longer wear. My favorite is emerald green, with soutache-trimmed sleeves. As my aunt regales me with stories about various dresses, we giggle about how well-endowed she is compared to me. Then I discover—to my aunt’s endless delight—that her dresses fit much better when I wear them backwards. Problem solved!
Clothing connecting women. Yes, that’s part of it. Culturally rich garments that embody openness in accommodating multiple shapes and sizes. Clothing fostering communication across barriers of age, race and ethnicity, nationality, and language. There’s a wonderful space of possibility at the interface of cultures, where new ideas, relationships, feelings, and forms of expression can emerge from spoken and non-spoken dialogue about clothing. One of the most intimate, daily aspects of human experience, clothing enables us to get proximate—at the level of skin—with the histories, practices, and beliefs imbued in its fibers. Through touch, smell, and visual pleasure, clothes can create kinship without replication, intimacy without neutralizing difference.
***
But with the sari and the kimono, there is something more: being wrapped in yards of cloth and being dressed by a woman as I stand with arms outstretched, almost like a doll.
There it is. My mother. Caring for me through clothing, caring for me through clothing my dolls. Clothing as swaddling, a tactile, tangible comfort that helps to bridge emotional chasms. “You look like a china doll,” I was often told as a child. I made a hard-won transition from china doll to flesh-and-blood, far-from-perfect, full-grown woman. But for a moment, I am the doll, uncomplicated and easy to love. Just wrap me in beautiful cloth and let time stand still.
“A dress is a thousand things,” I say to my friend, trying to convey my sense of the endless complexity of clothes. Clothing is a tool for internal reckoning and for external engagement. It signals individuality and social legibility. It’s a necessity and a privilege, protective and decorative, utilitarian and the stuff of consuming passion. Clothes foster entangling and disentangling, manage anxieties and create them, serve as armor and sometimes as sword. They hide and render visible. They preserve and defy conventions. They reconcile and ramify our various selves. Clothing is a domain of the deadly serious and a domain of the lighthearted. It’s a site of oppression and liberation, of forced labor and free expression, of violence and healing. It’s consumption and creativity, a tourist trap and an entry point for genuine cross-cultural engagement. It’s a means to live in the present and a repository of the past. Clothing is an environmental disaster and a resource for surviving—through meaning-making, merry-making, and community building—as the world burns around us. For me, a dress is never just a dress.
***
Since the days of my earliest plumage, clothing has served as my vehicle and guide for self-fashioning. Yet, in exploring this lifelong relationship, I’ve found myself trying—like Darwin’s detractors—to rescue beauty from purposelessness, to view my passion for clothing in terms of utility and survival rather than my “taste for the beautiful.” Now, though, Marilynne Robinson’s claim that “need can blossom into all the compensations it requires” calls to mind the surprising, incremental, yet ineluctable ways in which beauty and artistry emerge from scarcity and need. In this sense, my romance with clothing is an evolutionary tale, a story about learning to embrace the joys of dressing, of feasting my eyes on my clothes.
At the same time, maybe I’ve been a bit distracted by peacocks’ shimmer. Feeling invisible or hyper-visible, overlooked or scrutinized, is still a raw nerve for me, a close-to-the-surface wound that occasionally reopens and distorts perception. But in worrying about peacocks’ ostentatious displays, I’ve been slow to realize that the desire for recognition is not vanity; it’s a universal human need, inextricably intertwined with our needs for attachment, communication, and self-expression. Moreover, while my story has revolved around clothing, we humans devise innumerable ways to engage in the work of dress and redress: the daily, never-ending process of putting into proper alignment, smoothing our surfaces and tending to our wounds, compensating for wrong or loss.
Whether mottled brown or iridescent blue, my clothes keep me attuned to my own frequencies, to my hard-earned solidity, emotions, and relationships. “I know you,” I now say when magical thinking appears at my door, peddling its false promise that others will remember and value me if I don the perfect outfit. The trick, in such moments, is to recognize that clothing sparks conversation and connection, but it is not a magic key for maintaining meaningful relationships. The trick is to think like a hermit crab: shells come and go, but “home” is the relationships I carry with me wherever I go. The trick is to think wardrobe, not outfit, a body of work rather than a single phrase: the “me” I assemble when dressing is continuous no matter which adornments I choose.
Given all that we’ve been through, it seems fitting that I’m still a little starry-eyed about clothing. As language, talisman, and life preserver, as tool for self-invention, as boundary and buffer, as witness to the past, as envoy to myself and others, and as source of bone-deep joy, my clothes have been by my side, mending me as I mend them, constituting and sustaining the self they adorn.
Works Cited
Bass, Ellen. “The Orange-and-White High-Heeled Shoes.” The New Yorker 30 March 2015. 58.
De Waal, Edmund. The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance. New York: Picador, 2010.
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Megan Sweeney is Arthur F. Thurnau Associate Professor of English, Afroamerican and African Studies, and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her publications include an award-winning monograph, Reading Is My Window: Books and the Art of Reading in Women’s Prisons (2010); an edited collection, The Story Within Us: Women Prisoners Reflect on Reading (2012); numerous articles about reading, African American literature, and incarceration; and lyric essays published in Brevity, Entropy Magazine, and Bennington Review. Sweeney recently completed a creative nonfiction manuscript titled Mendings, and she is currently writing a book that explores the cultural and political significance of clothing worn and/or made by prisoners.
Opening photo credit to Michael Carlin
Essay artwork credit to Sophia Bauerschmidt-Sweeney