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Gender + Sexuality

'Is This Me?': Style Meets Existentialism with 'Women in Clothes'

A conversation with contributors to a new fashion tome, co-edited by Sheila Heti. Vancouver launch next week.

Sarah Berman 27 Sep 2014TheTyee.ca

Sarah Berman is an editor at The Tyee. Her writing has appeared in VICE, Adbusters, Maclean's, the Globe and Mail and many other publications.

It's a drizzly Thursday evening in Vancouver's Chinatown and I've had the foresight to wear a rain jacket and waterproof boots. In addition to feeling victoriously dry, I feel lucky to be sitting with two stylish women, both contributors to the new book Women in Clothes, edited by Toronto author Sheila Heti (How Should A Person Be?), Believer Magazine editor Heidi Julavits and illustrator Leanne Shapton. We're about to have a long conversation about style and self-presentation, which makes me both uneasy and excited.

Uneasy because, like many cash-strapped 20-somethings, I expend more mental energy ignoring the widening holes in my shoes and the long stretch of time since my last haircut than I do cultivating an intentional "style." But excited, too, because Women in Clothes is precisely the kind of book that bothers to ask women with holes in their shoes what they think and experience when putting on clothes.

Women in Clothes is a conversation starter. It juxtaposes stories, philosophies, interviews and artifacts curated from more than 600 women, a few of them named Kim Gordon, Cindy Sherman, Molly Ringwald and Lena Dunham. It begins with survey questions like, "When you see yourself in photographs, what do you think?" "Is there any article of clothing you have in multiples?" and "Does how you dress play into your ambitions for yourself?" Then the book sets out to compare and contrast the responses of artists, pilots, moms, dog-catchers and fashion industry insiders from around the world.

I'm sitting with Doretta Lau, a cultural journalist and Jennifer Croll, a former fashion magazine editor. Both are authors. Together, we make three Vancouver writers -- far from a perfect cross-section of the book -- but an inventory of our outfits reveals sartorial range: Jen's copper heart-shaped necklace charm has the word "nope" inscribed on it -- surprise snark against her understated Vince sweater. Doretta wears a crisp black-and-white striped shirt (one of the things she collects in multiples) accessorized with a non-ironic Fitbit around her arm.

For their viewing, I begin by lifting up one of my German hiking boots with campfire-melted soles.

Evolving from the oversized plaid

Like the Women in Clothes editors when they started this project, I'm hungry to learn what style means to other women. Who teaches us how to look good? What transformative conversations, as the book puts it, inform our style? I throw this last question at Doretta and Jen.

"I failed to answer that question in any meaningful way," replies Doretta. "One of the big breakthroughs for me was when my dad told me not everything needs to be dry-cleaned. If you know the fabric’s contents and they've listed it correctly, you can actually use Woolite to gently wash them. That was life-changing."

"I don’t think that’s an un-meaningful answer to that question," I say, genuinely excited to learn this is a technique. I have never purchased Woolite.

"I go the opposite way," I explain of my misshapen collection of synthetic-blend shirts. "I'll buy something, throw it in the washer and dryer, then hope for the best. It often makes clothes less good… Jen? Any transformative conversations?"

"Conversations with my mother would have been pretty shaping for me," Jen replies. "When I was about 13, she said to me, 'You would look really good in all black.' Then she started talking to me about beatniks and stuff, and I was like, 'I don't know about this.' One or two years later, I was wearing all black. I would hate to give her all the credit for that. I would like to think some of it was teenage rebellion, but perhaps that was the seed."

"Why doesn't teenage rebellion result in someone wearing all green?" Doretta quips. "It always goes there."

Though I attempt to talk shapes, trends and aesthetics, it's easy to slip into family anecdotes. Jen's mother draws my interest; a glamorous pre-parenting photo of her looks up at me from page 47 of Women in Clothes.

"I'm less influenced by her style choices than my own when I was younger," Jen explains. "My mom was so different from me. I don't look like her at all -- she had this long platinum blonde hair, a bit like Brigitte Bardot, and I don't look like that. In terms of style, she did a different thing."

Jen's mother died in 1997, which adds emotional weight to the photo. In searching for subtle reflections of herself -- in her mother’s eyes, perhaps her posture -- Jen's memory often returns to teen interactions with her mom.

"I was young at that point and didn't really have my teenage identity sorted out," she says of her transition from pre-teen "mall rat" to high school "weird girl." "I think what your parents will tolerate affects what you'll do. Both my parents found [my style] amusing; I was tolerated if not encouraged."

This invariably leads all of us to revisit our many former selves. Doretta's '90s grunge phase had her in plaid shirts four sizes too big. Jen went from buying "all of the Guess" to helping a Wicca-practicing friend cast a spell in nylon sleeves and cargo pants.

I dressed not unlike Wednesday Addams in high school, earning the nickname "Black Death" from my best friend's older brother. As a teen, my wallet chains, safety pins and other "alternative" fashion choices were rarely discouraged.

"I also went through this earnest indie rock phase where I wore local designers," Doretta recalls of her post-teen years. "People would say 'Oh, did you make that at home?'" We laugh. "It was very ‘put a bird on it.'"

Through these retellings, I realize how much of my personal style still feels defined in opposition to my mother's -- how her polite encouragement to buy a hair dryer and go to business school may be the reason I've looked feral most of my twenties.

Style without artifice

"I'm interested in the language used to talk about clothes," I say, steering myself out of existential shame. "I still don’t feel I've learned the right words to talk about style."

"One interesting thing about this book is that it takes away the artificial language used to talk about fashion in so many other places," Jen says.

"For example?" I ask.

"The one that really bothers me is 'obsessed,'" Jen replies. "As in, 'We're so obsessed with beige right now.' Are you really obsessed?"

"I feel like I'm an 'obsessed' aficionado though. I've been using that forever to describe everything," Doretta says. "Everyone has their personal vocabulary when talking about clothes, and you see it clearly in this book -- it's what a fashion magazine could read like if it was not about selling things but for people to discover what they really want."

While we don't agree on vocabulary, we do agree on compliments from women (awesome), the East Vancouver uniform (toque over ombre-dyed hair) and the regional ubiquity of Gore-tex and Lululemon. But the longer we chat, the more we keep coming back to the big questions: how do garments define us? Who's your cobbler? Can a person be funny and attractive simultaneously?

The more we ponder these questions, the more I begin to see Women in Clothes as a logical extension of Heti's last book, How Should A Person Be? Both have been dismissed as self-important and narcissistic,* yet both have enough potency to help form and articulate identity.

Like our discussion, Women in Clothes is a book that sets out talking about fashion, but ends up essentially about people and ideas. I didn't walk away from it with a need to look different -- there are no photos of the contributors to imitate, anyway -- but I did see a few of my own choices a little more clearly.

"I guess it takes a long time to be able to say, 'This is the kind of person I am and these are the kind of clothes that I like,'" Doretta suggests.

Is this me? I wonder, in my black Urban Outfitters jeans, unkempt curls and melted boot soles. I'm not sure, but I'm glad I asked.

The Women in Clothes' Vancouver launch is on Sept. 29 at Cavalier, with guest panelists Mina Shum, Joy Pecknold, Amber Dawn and more. See here for details.  [Tyee]

*A previous version of this story referenced a passage of Women in Clothes that is not included in the final text. Updated Monday, Sept. 29.

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