Fashion Redress: How a Clothes Horse Shelters in Her Closet

True Confessions

The expanse of my wardrobe is embarrassing. So is the depth of my dedication to it. There is no point in being discreet about this fixation because anyone who knows me is already fully aware of it. My wardrobe is not just about vanity and self-worth, it’s about artistic self-expression and esthetic problem-solving. It is inspired by a cinematic view of life and how one should be costumed for it. Capturing a mood with clothing is what I do instead of paint.

So what happens to a clothes horse when there is nowhere to ride and no one to see? Many of them are flooding malls right now as the economy opens up, eager to engage in the activity that makes having clothes necessary. Shopping. There is no escaping the absurd irony that many people shop primarily for things to shop in.

I love me a good ole rationalization so here’s one.  As a species, we can thank evolutionary biology for our love of adornment. Anthropologists look at burial as evidence of “humanity” in our family tree, but the desire to decorate ourselves emerges even earlier with primates. There is also anecdotal evidence of fashion trends among chimps, who exhibit both an enthusiasm for adornment and an aptitude for mimicry – the two defining requirements of homo fashionistas.

Shelter-in-place means, of course, that no one really gets to see much of what you’re wearing. We’ve probably all entertained ourselves by imagining news reporters on air in their ties and boxers.  For much the same reason, I find it hard to get my knickers in a knot over Zoom-shots showing only my collar. It feels almost like an abdication of fashion duty to think only about your neckline – but even someone who truly relishes couture must make peace with futility.  

Business Very-Casual

I’d be embarrassed to wear anything as put-together as an “ensemble” to an on-line meeting, especially when I’m actually sitting in my kitchen with the dog at my feet and oven mitts nearby. It doesn’t help to be talking to someone seated in front of a waving palm tree or the window in his den – or maybe Zoom’s stock photo version of the window in someone else’s den. Apparel decisions are calculated to reflect a sense of place and circumstance – who I am and where, what I’m doing there, and what kind of assumptions I might want people to make about my competence and my intentions.

The problem with remote work is that those projections and calculations are far more challenging to make when we can’t be together. The virtual environment is a set of on-line adjacencies, not one shared space. The context is in entirely in our heads, an unclear version of “there.” How can we possibly dress for that prismatic place? And how can we “dress” even for the one literal environment in which we spend most of the time? It’s a place where social activity consists largely of hands-free, face-free deliveries, leaving as proof of human presence only the parcels at the door. And when we do encounter others, our COVID masks – the indispensable wardrobe element that every truly well-dressed person should now be wearing – must inevitably upstage the idea of casual adornment. Which brings me to the notion of accessories.

Accessories After the Fact

There is much more to whine about than the wardrobe semiotics of our public health leaders, but in the early terrifying weeks of the pandemic, one of the things I found particularly frightening was Deborah Birx’s scarves. They were extensively written about, although I don’t believe that they earned quite as much condemnation as they actually deserved. At a time when most of us were huddled in our homes, thinking about our food and paper inventory as “rations,” and wondering when we would ever again have the privilege of getting our clothes dry-cleaned, Dr. Birx was turning an accessory into an insignia. She was insisting we look at her wardrobe, and in doing that, she was implying that her oddly fixated fashion decisions were an instrument of her professional credibility. By making us scarf-watch, she was winking at us. The rest of us can use our power suits to good effect on a conference podium, but when the stakes are truly high, fashion must not be allowed to matter. Or, at least, not in a way that people actually notice that it’s mattering. You can’t spread cultural optimism in times like these by accessorizing. Fashion flagrancy is appropriate only when nothing is grave. (It is perhaps worth noting that she made her last appearance without a scarf.  She might just as well have waved a white flag.)

So here I sit in yoga pants from Marshall’s which I never thought I’d wear, much less wear to the “office,” and I look ahead to a life in which all forms of interaction will be limited for a long time. Every one of us thinks constantly about when life will return to what we used to recognize as “normal” – a word that has spiked astronomically in Google Trends these past three months – or, if normalcy forever eludes us, what the alternative future reality will look like and whether we’ll be able to bear it. I visit my closet every few days with a sense of yearning, and also a sense of estrangement. It’s particularly painful at this moment, when the start of a new season and the celebration of life’s renewal cannot be enacted by unsheathing all my favorite summer outfits from their plastic storage bags. I am actually starting to forget why I cared so much about my clothing, and that is, itself, an alienating idea that I’d like to banish.

Fashion Instincts

It is tempting right now to assume that I will never again care so much about what I look or dress like when so much of our social and professional lives will be lived in tight virtual spaces for a long time. But I’m banking on the fact that old habits (around which personality has grown like a gnarled tree) are not so easily discarded. Though shaken by the irrelevance of couture in the face of tragedy, this old clothes horse will someday ride again – even if new priorities dull her fashion instincts and she is maybe too old by then to wear some of the things in her closet. The apparel industry will survive so long as the species survives. It will merely express our anguish and our yearnings and our new ways of living with a new set of style imperatives. We are human, after all. We bury our dead and we adorn ourselves. We are persistently vain and trivial.  But the impulse to express ourselves to others through adornment is part of what makes us profound.