Women in Clothes

by Sheila Heti

  COLLECTION

  CLAUDIA DEY’s fedoras

  ON DRESSING

  GOOD MORNING

  ELIF BATUMAN

  Last summer, when I was living in Istanbul, Sheila Heti asked me to compliment a series of women on their clothes and record our subsequent conversations. The women were supposed to be strangers, and I was supposed to meet them in elevators. There were many, many reasons why I never did end up asking strange women about their clothes in elevators in Istanbul. The only place where I used the elevator was at the gym. I felt like the women at my gym already weren’t that crazy about me, and to be honest, their clothes were nothing special. I did once compliment the Pilates instructor, a former ballerina, whose insistence on relaxing and natural breathing seemed somehow fraught with anxiety, on her amazing earrings: one of the tiny silver studs was connected, by a long, fine chain, to an equally fine necklace. I didn’t have a tape recorder, but luckily she just smiled politely. She was folding “resistance bands.”

  Later that week, I had lunch with the writer Elif Şafak. We had first met some months earlier, when she accidentally walked into me at a huge dinner in London. She had been walking backward, for some reason. This was our second meeting. She was wearing marvelous clothes, about which I remember only that each article had a different texture, everything looked expensive, and all of it was black, though it was July. When I told her how wonderful she looked, she gave me a look full of compassion and, reaching across the table, wordlessly squeezed my hands.

  All summer, antigovernment protests raged in Istanbul, and in cities all over the country. My apartment was often full of tear gas, and also full of journalists and protesters and, on one occasion, a protester’s small, demanding dog. One journalist had come from Bulgaria; most mornings starting at seven, he was reporting to Bulgarian national radio, speaking very loudly, since it wasn’t a good line. Every day, one or the other of my parents called, urging me to come home to the U.S. early. Nobody was sleeping, or getting any work done. Feeling overwhelmed, I packed a bag and took a commuter ferry to Heybeliada, an island in the Sea of Marmara. Though Heybeliada is in the Istanbul municipality, stepping off the boat was like landing on a different planet. There were no police vehicles, no police, no protesters, no gas masks, no gas, no graffiti. It was as if the past weeks had never happened.

  “Where are all the police?” I asked when I reached the pension where I had booked a room.

  “We have four police on the island,” the owner replied. “They mostly concern themselves with picnickers.”

  When I stepped outside the next morning, a beautiful orange cat rubbed up against my leg. The sun seemed to pour over your whole body in a way that was full of love. Walking downhill toward the sea, past the ruined white Ottoman houses that resembled, with their gingerbread trim, heaps of old lace, I came upon a woman sitting on the curb. In her forties, deeply tanned, she wore a headscarf, and a severe expression. As I approached, I felt that she was actually glowering at me.

  “Good morning,” I said cheerfully, hoping to defuse the atmosphere, even as I wondered whether the woman was religious, and how the people who lived here felt about women traveling alone.

  The woman’s face was suddenly, utterly transformed, by what I realized was a smile. “Good morning,” she said, beaming. “I was just admiring your skirt. That’s why I was looking at you like that.”

  SURVEY

  WOMEN LOOKING AT WOMEN

  “Sometimes I’ll see a woman dressed in a way that makes me think we must be similar, like in another world we’d be friends.” —SASHA ARCHIBALD

  ANN IRELAND Often, I’ll spot a woman crossing the road who is wearing just the narrow gray-black pants I want. Or sneakers that are just one color with no ugly stripes. Maybe I could get away with that Indian dress! Those Jesus sandals are just the ticket—I bet they’re comfortable, too. Then I crave it, a sort of low-level fever that won’t lift until I’ve located the desired item and seen whether it works for me, too.

  VANESSA BERRY A woman selling vegetables at a market stall once complimented me on my wool shirt. Every time I looked back she was looking at me. I took it as a good sign that I should wear this shirt when I want to impress someone.

  ALESIA PULLINS I like complimenting other black women—women of color in general—because I feel like a lot of times the only people giving us compliments are other women of color. It’s not a conscious thing where I’m like, “I’m going to go in here and find the two black girls and load them down with compliments.” It’s just something I tend to do because I realize, “Look, I see what you’re doing over there, I see what you’re working with, and I like it.”

  ANA KINSELLA When I was about nineteen, my friend and I were sitting outside the lecture theatre, smoking cigarettes and commenting on every girl who walked by and what she was wearing. We thought we were very cool and trendy and edgy. In retrospect we were idiots and I in particular looked like a fashion-crazed fool. But after an hour or so we figured out that the girls we considered the best-dressed were not the girls who wore the clothes we may have coveted most, but the ones who had a consistent style, a steady palette, and knew the silhouettes that worked best for them. I realized then that style is about knowing what you like and why you like it, more than anything else.

  GRACE DENTON In university, there was a girl who lived on my floor. She once came to my room and asked if her outfit looked okay. In the natural way young girls have with people they don’t really know yet, I said, “Yeah, you look great!” She was probably wearing something middle-of-the-road and vaguely hippy. Then I asked, “How about me?” as a kind of social exchange. She said, “Hmmm, yeah, I don’t know. You kind of look like you’re trying to look wacky.” This was a horrific revelation. Who the fuck . . . ! Why did she . . . ! I was wearing a polka-dot spaghetti-strap dress I loved, with a T-shirt underneath. It later became apparent that she had multiple social strangenesses, but the comment stuck. I still occasionally look at myself with her eyes and think, “Okay, trying too hard, take it back a step.” This makes me sad.

  JILL MARGO In my early twenties, there were a bunch of girls who swapped clothes or, rather, borrowed clothes from our most alpha female, who was very communally minded. They were considered lucky clothes—the ones that got us laid. Recently, I saw a photo from back then of my friend in one of the outfits. There is no way those things looked as good on any of us as they looked on her. What were we thinking?

  OLLA NAJAH AL-SHALCHI In high school, I started wearing a hijab, and was still trying to find a way of dressing like my peers, while also respecting my religion. So I would wear black pants, a beige shirt, a vest that was black and beige, and a beige hijab. But I love color, and this outfit was boring and lacked color. However, one day my friends told me that my outfit looked “sophisticated.” This got me thinking about how I didn’t really need to care about dressing like my peers. Dressing “sophisticated” made me feel better about the clothes I was wearing.

  KELLEY HOFFMAN It’s not just my clothing that changed my first year working at Vogue. I also picked up cues on how to speak and act. Whenever my editor would ask me to do something, I’d say casually, “No problem!” But when I heard another intern, who was much more sophisticated than I was, say, “Of course,” to this same editor, I thought it sounded much more refined, so I started saying “Of course,” too.

  JOSS LAKE My ex-girlfriend said, “You don’t have style, you have styles.” I’d always felt like I was failing to construct a coherent style—so it became a sort of Whitmanian mantra, not only for fashion, but for my personhood: “I contain multitudes. I contain multitudes.”

  STELLA BUGBEE Sometimes when I see a woman with particular charm or confidence or just interesting personal habits, I actually want to be her. And it’s not one kind of woman. Wildly different people inspire that kind of interest and awe. I never think that way about men, though.

  AREV DINKJIAN For the past few summers, I worked at an Armenian Youth Feder
ation camp. My outfits consisted of gym shorts, a dirty T-shirt, old tennis shoes, a messy bun, and a face with no makeup. It’s less than glamorous, yet I leave each year with more confidence than ever. I’m surrounded by girls who look up to me, who mimic my every move, who want to look and be just like me. They tell me every day that I’m beautiful and ask me to do their hair and pick out their dresses for the dances. I feel at my best because they look up to me in my most natural state. And I find them just as beautiful.

  LILI OWEN ROWLANDS I live with four girls and our wardrobes are an extension of each other. However, I find there’s a competitiveness in it. I love to borrow but hate to lend. Sometimes I make up excuses about wanting to wear items of my own wardrobe so others can’t wear them. I never understand where this sheer meanness comes from, but it happens and I hate it. I fear our slow homogenization. I’ve started wearing lots of yellow because I have told myself it suits only my colouring. I like to make a point of this sporadically at dinner: “Yellow only really works with a dark fringe.”

  KRISTI GOLDADE Last August, I was at an art fair and there was this Russian woman. She looked so pretty and dainty, her hair was cut in this shiny black bob, and she had a scarf around her neck. She was with her husband and kid. More than her look, I wanted her essence—it was so artistic and effortless. So in November, I cut my hair into a bob and now I try to do the seamless, sophisticated thing. I’m into it as a form.

  UMM ADAM When I was thirteen, I dressed like all my friends in a simple shalwar kameez with a dupatta around my neck. There were a few girls in my school who wore the hijab, but I thought that was a little too extreme. I did not look down on them or think they were old-fashioned. I respected their style, but felt that style was not for me. One day, my mom was showing me pictures from her trip to the U.S. and I was a little surprised to see that there were Muslim girls there who wore hijab. My mom said, “I wish you could cover like them.” That’s when I put my dupatta on my head and decided to wear hijab.

  SZILVIA MOLNAR I love noticing women who have a panoramic view of their environment when they’re walking down the street. Women who are engaged in the moment and are interested in looking at who or what is around them.

  HEATHER MALLICK When I was a child, we were on the subway in Montreal and I saw a beautiful black-haired young woman with perfect skin. She was in a red skirt with polka dots and was biting into a pistachio ice cream with her perfect large white teeth. I stared in awe and thought, “One day I will move to the city and live in my own apartment and dress like her.” Who was that woman? I think about her often.

  AMANDA M. At school, a Muslim girl spoke about why she chose the burka. She said, “You American girls have it rough. You constantly have to be thinking about what looks good on you, how to look hot, how to hide flaws. You’re slaves to fashion. I’m never self-conscious about how sexy I look.” When I see women in full coverings now, I wonder, “Are they freer than I am?”

  HELEN DeWITT Once in Paris a woman pulled up to the curb in a red Ferrari to exclaim over a pair of black stretch trousers with a white faux-Chinese-character pattern which I had bought for ten quid in the Roman Road.

  DIANA BECKER I was in line at the Guggenheim with my favorite cousin, who is a stylist. There was a woman in front of us and we couldn’t understand her. She had a beautiful sixty-something face but she felt like a girl. Her outfit was perfect, her body svelte, not yoga-tight or anything extreme. We were obsessed with her and labeled her one of the “young-old.” We still hunt for them and wonder if weather or cultures inspire more of them. What’s their secret? Do they have good taste, or is it their mental state, diet, exercise? And why are they mostly not American?