Women in Clothes

by Sheila Heti

  REN JENDER I’ve always wished that toplessness were legal for women in my state, and didn’t draw as much attention as in the states where it is legal, especially during heat waves.

  HILARY PROSSER I went through a nudist period and for a long time I didn’t wear any underwear. I guess it was about feeling unrestrained. I did quite a lot of unintentional nudity as my clothing fixes were always sloppy and there were many times when the safety pin holding my outfit together completely gave way. I must have caused embarrassment to a lot of people, not least my parents, who had to endure my nude-cooked dinners.

  PROJECT

  WEAR AREAS | ADITI SADEQA RAO

  1 They say I have my grandmother’s peshani (forehead). What an innocuous thing to receive from an ancestor. But this peshani fills me with a sense of belonging. It was given to me by a lady I’ve never met but whose presence, strangely, follows me everywhere.

  2 I have a big tush and my hips are much wider than my otherwise petite frame. My friends think that I could pass for a South Indian porn star. On good days I accept that comment graciously. On not-so-good days I try to find hope in people like J.Lo and Beyoncé. On the worst days my heels are higher, my lipstick thicker.

  3 This is where I will get my second tattoo. It will be a line of words chosen from an Urdu song I love. I will wear lots of anklets so that people won’t be able to tell what is what—skin, ink, jewelry.

  COLLECTION

  LISA PRZYSTUP’s marled socks

  CONVERSATION

  1989

  CATH LE COUTEUR as told to Heidi Julavits

  I started university in ’89. This was a time of AIDS, a time of much sadness, a time, too, when queer nightlife in Sydney celebrated sex, style, and play while the media was telling us that being gay meant we were going to die.

  It was still pre-treatments. So many guys were dying. Dressing up at night was a way to take action against the AIDS horror and stigma. One shouldn’t underestimate the power this kind of style activism had. Sydney became renowned as the activist place where HIV prevention evolved from abstinence to safe sex.

  The goal when we dressed up was to be as outrageous and in-your-face as possible. Also more sexual than ever. A really important aspect was to acknowledge sex and desire as still integral to gay identity—humor and fun, too. People would go out in the most brilliant outfits, like all Burberry plaid—face, skin, hair, bag, shoes. My friend Nic tied a clear plastic tube around his waist and filled it with water and live goldfish. Car Crash Victim was a costume I really liked—I’d go out like I had just been hit by a car. Or as Ken from Ken and Barbie. Or I would dress up as a cupid boy angel with glittery wings and smuggle Ecstasy and fags into the hospitals to the gay guys who were seriously ill. These guys had pneumonia and collapsed lungs and they were like, “Keep bringing me fags.” My friends and I did that a lot. In our cupid outfits, we were basically saying, “Here we are with our love! Here we are with our Ecstasy for you. We’re here to make you happy. You might be dying, but you’re gonna go out feeling fucking great.” That was part of our duty, really.

  Brenton Heath-Kerr, this amazing artist who died in ’95, aged thirty-three—he was famous for his gingham-print look. In fact, he was the one who kicked off the all-one-pattern outfits, as in all polka dots or plaids or stripes, hair and skin included. Toward the end he did a show dressed in a full-body skeleton outfit, holding a drip. He’d perform in nightclubs, skinny as fuck. He was in real physical pain by then, but so defiant, so brave. It was dark, we were all on drugs, it was messy and super-sad, but it was also extraordinary.

  There was also an explosion of what we used to call sex subculture parties, boys and girls mixed up all the time, so “queer” really took on its identity as a practice and a community and an activist group. Every possible sex practice you can think of was explored at these parties. The idea of multiple representations was very much a part of things. In the lesbian community, girls were reading glamour mags and wearing leather and lots of lipstick and playing around with being femme or butch or combination or trans or whatever. It was all about a fluid identity and politics—not the old-school “You can’t shave under your arms and you’ve got to wear dungarees if you’ve got any lesbian integrity.” It was about the girls’ going designer, wanting fast and loose sex, aping the boys in that way.

  Then there were these dance productions we’d put on twice a year. Boy George, Kylie Minogue, those kinds of people would headline. Grace Jones. The shows would go all through the night—till seven. We’d spend three months rehearsing for this one night. The tryouts were fierce. In one show I wore the brushes of a red broom as a mohawk, and red leather shorts, and my tits were popping out of this red bra thing. That was not an outfit I’d wear normally—it was too girly for me. I wouldn’t go around with my tits out. Lots of girls did on a regular basis. I loved men’s suits. I’ve always loved men’s suits.

  I was working as a waitress. Daytime was jeans and a T-shirt. But we’d knock off from waitressing or whatever, meet around four, and people would start asking, “What’s your outfit?” This was for a normal Tuesday night. Outfits required hours of thought and cheap solutions. We would trip down to the hardware store because there were always amazing things, like chains and ropes and flags, plumber bits and tubes; then we’d go to the cheapest supermarket and get Glad wrap and foil. You were never allowed to borrow people’s ideas. Don’t ever do that. You had to be totally original. You could repeat your own outfits, but you certainly couldn’t repeat someone else’s. Nic, I remember, had this amazing bathing cap, fuck knows how he found it, it was a Jaws bathing cap, the head of the shark with the open mouth bouncing around when he walked. He painted his torso blue and wore a blue tutu and hard-core blue leather boots. And I remember him getting into a fight the following week when someone else wore the same shark cap. He was like, “You fuck,” and the other guy said, “Bitch, it looks different,” and Nic said, “Take it off right now! It’s mine!” It mattered.

  Of course, it wasn’t always fun and easy to be dressed this way. Along one strip of Oxford Street—our gay mile—and Darlinghurst—our gay ghetto—it was fine, but outside that it was not great. I remember once I was walking toward a group of drunk guys, fifteen, sixteen years old, there were about six or seven of them, and I was in a wetsuit jacket and an Astro Boy tee. I recognized really quickly that this was not a great scenario. I was like, They’re drinking, they’re checking me out, and there’s a group of them. I was trying to work out where to cross the street, but if I crossed, it might draw more attention to me. So I was like, No, I’m on a straight line here. I’m holding the course. Within ten feet, the first aggressive comment came: “Are you a boy or a girl?” I waited until I got really close, then I said, “Yes,” and kept walking.

  CONVERSATION

  IF YOU LIKE IT, I LIKE IT MORE

  NEWLYWEDS TALITA & BEN IN A CAR DURING LONDON RUSH HOUR

  BEN: If something interesting’s going on, it doesn’t matter what you’re wearing, obviously.

  TALITA: Interesting? Like what?

  BEN: Well, if we’re having a conversation.

  TALITA: Then it doesn’t matter what I’m wearing?

  BEN: Yeah, because it’s not the thing. But if nothing’s going on . . . what it does is it adds something. It adds a certain level of enjoyment to a day if you’re wearing something nice. So, you know, there’s a hundred thousand times a day I will just glance around and look at you, and if you’re wearing something nice, I might think: Oh, that looks nice. I will get enjoyment throughout the day.

  TALITA: Moment to moment.

  BEN: Yeah, moment to moment. I’ll keep getting a thrill out of looking at you. There’s a part of me that likes to think you’re not doing it just for me, because then it feels stupid, like I’ve asked you to do this and you’re doing it for me, rather than you like feeling sexy, too. Part of the experience is: If you like it, I like it more. If you don’t like it, I don’t want you to do it. Though I secret
ly want you to do it. But I also want you to like it.

  TALITA: This is all something I wasn’t that switched on to until I met you. But it’s something that’s changed a bit since I met you, my style and the clothes I wear. Like, I’ll wear high heels a lot more often, and it’s something, before I met you, that I would wear maybe once a year to some really posh thing.

  BEN: I don’t mind the idea that I’ve turned you on to a way of enjoying that—

  TALITA: Yeah. Because I love that interaction with you.

  BEN: And it’s a thing you can play with. It fulfills a bit of a fantasy of mine, and I also feel really grateful because I feel like you’re doing it for me. You don’t have to, but you are. And you’re willing.

  TALITA: Every time I get dressed I think: Do I look good for you? Which to me is a very welcome thing in my life, something to get dressed for. Like when I was at school, I actually enjoyed having uniforms because I thought: I’m wearing this for a purpose, which is being a student. I enjoyed that because it’s better than just waking up every day and opening your wardrobe and having all those questions.

  BEN: I think mistakes initially were made, in that you thought: I have to do this, otherwise he’s not going to love me. And I thought: I really want a guarantee that she’s prepared to do that because it’s important to me. It got to be too much pressure. But I think without the pressure, it just kind of works out nicely.

  TALITA: Yeah, we’ve found enjoyment. Of course, there is an element of neurosis, but I think we’ve sort of worked it in our favor.

  BEN: When we first met, I spent a lot of money on nice clothes and boots and everything for you. But that hasn’t carried on. It was like: Okay, you have that. It’s not like you have to get loads more clothes. It really is like a bit of a uniform, I guess. Without the horrible connotation, which is that you have to do it.

  TALITA: To me it is a sort of fantasized neurosis. Like one of those really rich bastards who have a . . . I don’t know, a swimming pool in their basement full of gold coins or something. When you have the ability to do that, the means, you can sort of roll in your neurosis.

  BEN: For me it’s just a sexual-enjoyment thing. I mean, why else would I care what you’re wearing?

  TALITA: Would you have that with me wearing a really expensive coat and that flannel shirt that you really like, that hangs on my boobs nicely?

  BEN: It depends. . . . I guess the sex thing is all about fantasy. The fantasy of like, You’re that woman I always wanted and I never thought I could have. Like a woman wearing a really sexy jacket and really nice boots and everything. Where I grew up and among the people I grew up with, nobody was interested in that. So I guess it becomes a fantasy: Wow, I’m actually with somebody like that. It sounds more neurotic than it is.

  TALITA: No, I think I understand.

  BEN: Once I found it, I was afraid: Oh my god, I’m going to become a horrible person if I indulge in it. It’s going to be this insatiable black hole of desire that twists you into something I don’t like and you don’t like, either. That’s the fear: that I would be happy to buy you clothes every day and tweak what you have every morning and spend half an hour saying, Oh no, don’t do this, don’t do that. But actually it’s not like that.

  TALITA: Yeah, it’s more relaxed once you’ve had the lack out of the way.

  BEN: Once I allowed it. There’s this feeling that the reason it’s bad is that you’re never going to be satisfied. But remember I told you about my watch? I was never happy with the watch I had, and I wanted something that I really liked. It wasn’t an obsession, but it was something I thought about. Then I saved up and bought this really nice Cartier watch, which I really liked. And then I thought, Okay, it’s going to wear off and I’m going to feel guilty about it, because I’m going to want the next thing. But it didn’t happen like that at all. I still get a lot of pleasure every time I look at it, pretty much the same as when I first bought it. It’s the same with you.

  TALITA: Part of the reason why I do it is to get it out of the way, because I know that if there was any sort of resistance to it, it would become a problem.

  BEN: That doesn’t sound good.

  TALITA: I mean, you do agree with me. It would be a bigger problem if I said, No, fuck that, it’s not important for me. It would be a bigger problem than if I just did it.

  BEN: Yeah, absolutely.

  TALITA: And if I just do it, then there’s room for me enjoying it.

  BEN: How many times have I mentioned it in the last five months?

  TALITA: Not very often, it’s true. We’ve spent days in our pajamas when you didn’t say anything, whereas in the past there was all that tension of, you know, Can you do your hair?

  BEN: I think clothes are just one of the ways where you can express something different and look different, and it’s exciting to look fresh, to look like a new person.

  TALITA: That threatens me.

  BEN: Does it? But if you wear the same thing every day, it becomes completely irrelevant what you’re wearing, it’s just you. Because you can change, it makes me look at you afresh. I think also it’s worth mentioning that I’m an incredibly aesthetic person. The aesthetics of things are extremely important to me.

  TALITA: True.

  BEN: When I first met you, your sense of style was really not that switched on, because you thought: Oh, I don’t have an attractive body.

  TALITA: I wouldn’t say that. I just hated spending money on clothes, so I’d get clothes from my mum.

  BEN: What I’m saying is that the relationship you had with your body was distorted, as it is for most women: they think they look a particular way and the most important thing is to hide that feature they don’t like, so they plan an outfit completely around a feature they don’t like, and actually it’s totally irrelevant. It creates something way more obvious.

  TALITA: What are you trying to say? What’s your point? Because—how do I explain this? I think how I felt was: If I can just try to convey this not-readiness in me, this girly thing, I don’t really have to think very much about who I want to be or what I want to show. There was all sorts of hiding. But I don’t think it was from being ashamed of certain things, it was more from not being particularly proud of anything, and therefore wanting to avoid the whole question of being a woman and owning it. Like when girls started wearing high heels and makeup. They were very ready for it, and I wasn’t, I think.

  BEN: A few girls I’ve been with, they’ve all felt like they can’t be that person, or they’ve missed the chance to do it. In some way they’ve missed the boat, and it’s too embarrassing, or it’s too much effort to admit that actually, yeah, I want that. Because they’ve been left behind in a way. So they turn it into reversal—I don’t want it anyway—and actually they secretly do. Like girls I’d help with shopping, they’d be really shocked that they could look like they wanted to.

  TALITA: Because of body image?

  BEN: No, because of some factor that happened in the teenage years. I don’t know what, I’ve never really discussed it, but maybe everyone else was being really enthusiastic about high heels and makeup, and you don’t feel like you can. You think: I’m not that attractive. Or you’re not hanging out with the cool kids, so you don’t enter that “Hey, I can do this” confidence.

  TALITA: I don’t think I wore shit clothes.

  BEN: Let’s say for example, my mum. She was always, I can’t wear high heels, they don’t fit my feet, they don’t look good, I look stupid. She had this whole thing she’d repeated to herself since she was a teenager. Then I bought her a pair of high heels for her birthday, and she was over the moon. She thought she looked really sexy, she felt super-good, it was like: Wow, I get to be a girl who wears heels! Oh my god, I never thought I could! It was all in her head. She just had this whole mental blockage about it.

  TALITA: Yeah, like my mental blockage.

  BEN: I’m not saying you have a huge mental blockage. But with a lot of women, I’ve noticed this latent d
esire to be that person.

  TALITA: I don’t think I’ve ever had a latent desire that I didn’t think I could fulfill. I think my mental block was more about “I’m superficial if I do this.” If I’m wearing something that is sort of blatantly sexy, I think I look dumb. I think I look smarter if I’m wearing something that’s kind of shit.

  BEN: Maybe it’s a fear of being laughed at because you’re trying.

  TALITA: Or not taken seriously. That is such a key feeling to girls growing up—you’re supposed to be really sexy, inhumanely sexy, but if you look like you’re trying to be sexy, you can very easily feel ridiculous.

  BEN: That’s the thing. It takes a leap into “Not only am I sexy, I know I’m sexy, I’m proud of it, and I’m going to own it,” which is like a super-confident, powerful position.

  TALITA: Yeah, it’s very easy to avoid all that if you’re a man. You can just not. . . .

  BEN: Exactly. No one cares. There’s no: Hey, I want to show my sexuality. If you go too far, people think you’re gay. And that’s it.

  TALITA: Yeah, there isn’t really a way to express your sexuality as a man. I think it’s true. I don’t know what it means.

  BEN: It means I just have to keep buying you clothes because I can’t buy myself them.

  TALITA: (laughs) I’m the loving, accepting wife of a transvestite.

  SURVEY Do you remember the first time you were conscious of what you were wearing?

  When I got my First Communion dress at age seven.—EITHNE BARRON • I remember being four years old and unable to choose between a yellow and a pink pair of underwear. So I wore them both right on top of each other! Now I’m an underwear designer.—DAPHNE JAVITCH • I remember a time when I tied a piece of a T-shirt to my shoe. I thought it was an innovative bit of Pippi Longstocking–influenced shabby-chic. The kids at school made fun of me. They said, “You thought you’d be so cool if you’d tie a rag to your shoe, didn’t you?” I was horribly ashamed that they saw right through me. I thought I was smarter than them, but they were smarter than me.—GABRIELLE BELL • I remember going to a Saturday art class with my mom where we painted fish with fabric paint and then pressed them against white T-shirts so that the image of the fish would appear on the shirt. —SIBYL S. • I wore my first training bra at a sleepover party. I didn’t need one. When I went to change for bed, all the girls giggled and made fun of me for wearing a bra. They were jealous, I know now, but I immediately threw the bra out.—M. WHITEFORD • In preschool we had a “Backwards Day” where we were told to come to school wearing our clothes backwards. This is the first time I remember having any intentionality behind getting dressed. I was self-conscious about wanting to fit in and be backwards enough—I didn’t want to do it wrong. I think it was supposed to be a fun day, but I was so anxious about all the changes it would require and how to navigate them that I nearly vomited.—ALISSA NUTTING • I was about four years old and I was wearing a dress my grandmother had gotten for me. I loved my grandmother but I hated that dress. My mom took us to Anthony’s Fish Restaurant for a nice lunch, and I refused to eat. Wearing that dress felt like the end of the world. My mom tells me that was the moment when she realized she would never dress me again.—CLAIRE COTTRELL • Wonder Woman underoos, 1979. I was three years old. I wanted them very badly because I believed if I wore them I would be Wonder Woman.—EMILY RABOTEAU