Women want to wear what they do because of what goes on in their heads. Their size and shape have practically nothing to do with it.” – Elizabeth Hawes’s “Fashion Is Spinach”
| I have a closet full of clothes in different sizes. I WILL be small enough to fit into my polar bear pajamas again. I know it. I love the little bells on the pajama shirt. It’s worth it for the Christmas bells. And yet I will NEVER fit into my mother’s white wedding nightgown, wrapped in tissue in a box, because she was probably a size 2, and I do not know why she gave it to me. I have hardly any fashion sense; yet I enjoyed Elizabeth Hawes’s intelligent memoir, Fashion Is Spinach. She was a fashion designer who tried to revolutionize the women’s clothing industry. I also enjoy reading about clothes in fiction. I love the ballgowns in War and Peace, the detail of the evening gown worn in Paris in the daytime by Sally Jay Gorce in The Dud Avocado, Linda Radlett’s chic dresses bought in Paris by Fabrice, her rich French boyfriend, in The Pursuit of Love, and Lucy Snowe’s gray dresses in Villette. I am Lucy Snowe rather than Linda Radlett. Obviously. When I bicycle to the bookstore, I wear what I call “matron” clothes, linen slacks and rayon tees, so I won’t be mistaken for a homeless person. Once at an elite independent bookstore, to which I had bicycled when it was 92 degrees, the black-clad owner glared over cat-eye glasses, obviously thinking I might sweat on her comfy reading chair. Her look, that of a vampire, could kill. But I was dehydrated and I had to sit down and drink iced tea. I did not feel obligated to buy a book from her. In my ordinary life I wear soft clothes, old jeans or business-like pajamas, which one can wear to the neighborhood store without raising eyebrows. I rarely go shopping. Earlier this summer I shopped accidentally, lured by beautiful linen shirts flapping from a rack in the wind in front of a store full of gorgeous clothes. Fashion is seductive. Before I knew it I had 18 tops in the fitting room, and tried on all of them, like Cathy in the comic strip. I bought a couple of tops and something I call “the Garment.” Cathy might have understood my infatuation with the Garment. “This will look really cool with my jeans,” I thought when I tried on the Garment. OK, was it the same Garment when I got home? What looked stylish in the fitting room was, in my bedroom, a cross between an oversized beach wrap and an asymmetrical kite. I loved the blue floral print and soft cotton and would have worn the Garment as a bathrobe if I could have found the sleeves, which were puffy and fanned out like wings once you maneuvered into them. I tried on the Garment many times before I decided to take it back. Was it worth it to be fashionable for a minute? Yes, it was. I loved the idea of the Garment. I loved the idea of wearing something daring and avant-garde, yet age-appropriate. And it WAS that! It really was. But next time I go shopping I must take a shopping-resistant pill, perhaps a vitamin (there must be SOMETHING on the internet), because in my right mind I cannot understand what I’m looking at, what it means, or whether I can even put it on by myself. |
