by Sheila Heti
FASHION MAGAZINE EDITOR MIRANDA PURVES SPEAKS TO LEANNE SHAPTON
LEANNE: When I first met you I was interested in you because you were this brainy academic who wore clothes in a way I hadn’t seen; and when I went to your house for the first time I saw you owned Miu Miu and Prada shoes, and I had never met anyone who owned designer clothes before. I wondered how it was that they had a place in your life. I remember some caramel loafers.
MIRANDA: I have always had an incredible drive for what I guess you might call a status object. As long as I can remember, I’ve always known the “important thing to have now.” When I was five, Kork-Ease, the wedge-heeled cork shoes, came out with kids’ Kork-Ease. I don’t know how I knew it or why I knew it, because my mom was a feminist who wouldn’t buy me Barbies or think it appropriate for me to be wearing heels. I said, “I will do anything for these.” She said, “If you keep your room clean for six months you can have them.” She just assumed I would forget because I was five and never kept my room clean, and six months to the day I said, “I kept my room clean, I want them now.” And she got them for me. I’ve always wanted to have the thing and had to have it first. It was like a talisman. If you know and you have that thing, you have some power. Obviously as I’ve gotten older and understood the horrors of the luxury business and mass-produced clothes, it’s all become so tainted. It’s complicated. Being an old person who chases trends is just Death in Venice.
LEANNE: What else did you want?
MIRANDA: I was the first girl to wear leg warmers at Seaview Elementary School, in Lantzville, British Columbia, the tiny town we moved to. I was mocked, in that way that fashion people are always mocked as freaks. I don’t even know where I saw leg warmers. We didn’t have a TV. Lantzville was a desert.
LEANNE: When I met you, you were twenty-seven and a student. How did you afford those Prada shoes?
MIRANDA: My first car was a Corvair convertible. I think it was $1,500, and I sold it for $3,000. I put that money in an American account, and when I’d visit my brother in New York, I’d spend the money on shoes. That was before the meme of girls being into shoes. Carrie Bradshaw came along and made it a thing. But that’s always been countered by my snobbery of not wanting to look obvious or like I’m trying too hard.
LEANNE: You worked the expensive shoes into your wardrobe pretty seamlessly. I was impressed.
MIRANDA: But I’m still that five-year-old girl. These jeans are a Margaret Howell collaboration with Edwin. I saw a woman wearing them at the fashion shows and I was eagle-eyed. What are those? I was ashamed to ask, but I broke down and did ask. I had an associate editor on a press trip to England, and I interrupted six hours of my workday to try and remotely ferry these jeans to her London hotel room. Some people are snotty about telling you what they’re wearing. Some women will go: Why are you clocking my shoes? Working at Elle was crazy like that. These girls would be wearing straight-off-the-runway head-to-toe outfits and then act all ruffly and huffily if you said anything about it. Maybe because by noticing it, it degrades it? Don’t you think?
LEANNE: It’s probably more like a British thing, that by noticing it, it degrades you.
MIRANDA: Successful vanity seems so magical—it’s you, it’s not something to be parsed and identified, so the minute you’re called out for your vanity, it’s shameful. Old-school fashion people don’t want to say what label. The red carpet “What are you wearing?” has made it more acceptable.
LEANNE: I want to talk about your experience working at fashion magazines.
MIRANDA: At Elle I was doing interiors and food and entertaining and travel, so I was the redheaded stepchild in that world. When I interacted with fashion people, there was a real divide.
LEANNE: Did the fashion people feel they were running it because it was all about attracting ad pages?
MIRANDA: The kind of people who are attracted to being in a fashion department—market editors, stylists, fashion directors—not always, but in general, tend to be snobs. A real awareness of hierarchy, a lot of paranoia: it’s a dark world in ways that surprised me. Very competitive. It’s bitchy.
LEANNE: Why?
MIRANDA: If you looked at individuals, you’d find something redeeming in all of them, but en masse there is a definite trauma bitch factor. It’s terrible to say something so clichéd, but the values of that world are the values of the surface. If you are trying to attain or create a surface, that has to be based on judgment and snobbery, because without those things it all dissolves, there’s nothing holding it up. Your entire identity is meaningless. So that’s not ground anyone wants to stand on. You’re defensive.
LEANNE: Who are fashion magazines speaking to?
MIRANDA: The question that comes up over and over is, How much does the reader want to know about anything, or do they just want to look at shiny, glittery shoes? That is a conflict in fashion magazines because a lot of the women who work at these magazines are really intelligent writers and thinkers and want a forum for that, but they’ve been steered into fashion magazines because that’s where you can get jobs. There’s always a conflict in thinking readers just want pretty things and shopping pages and presenting them with a fantasy of acquisition. Then, on the next level, people get analytical about it and say we want to empower women to make their own creative decisions. It’s a time of chaos because the old diktat model has been called into question. Editors are a bit at sea as to what readers want, but the idea is to give them that frisson of shopping. You want to ignite their interest in clothes and style. Every magazine is different. At Flare I wanted to think that there was a reader I could attract who wanted to self-style and didn’t want just prescription. That might not be the case. The shopping pages at Elle are tremendously popular. InStyle is consistently the best-selling fashion magazine out there, and the most anodyne. To me it’s the deglamorizing of fashion. Whether it’s Vogue or InStyle, all fashion magazines are—any month—working with the same shoes and bags, they all have this tiny basket of clothing and are just manipulating it with some visual rhetoric, some fantasy of what the fantasized reader wants. It’s like formal poetry.
LEANNE: To build a house for advertisers to live in, though, really.
MIRANDA: Yes and no, though more and more that’s the way it is. Advertisers count every single mention they get. And they take the editor to task. But creative people work at magazines, and if you have to write about a Chanel watch that’s based on the shape of Coco’s living room, within that you say, How can we do something fun?
LEANNE: What was the first time you were conscious of what you were wearing?
MIRANDA: My grandfather’s family all worked in the garment district in Montreal, and a cousin of my mom’s who owned a kids’ clothing factory came over with clothes. I remember these red pants with a matching mod-style tunic, and being so excited, then putting them on and thinking: There is something wrong with these. It was because they were polyester. It just did not feel right on my body. One day at school I was feeling this polyester feeling way too much and I realized I’d forgotten to wear underwear. I thought, How am I going to get through the day? It wasn’t embarrassing, it was sensory. Other things would feel so good. I had these baby-blue cord culottes that felt right. I was born a snob. But I fancied myself too snobby to be a snob. You should read Proust on snobbery.
LEANNE: Would being a snob make you feel attractive?
MIRANDA: I wanted to have the special item that someone would notice. I’ve got this bag now that’s made of teddy-bear fur and I get so many compliments on that bag. From women. All kinds of women. There is something democratic about fashion. Like from a woman in an airport, and it’s a moment of connection. But it’s a funny way to get your power, from owning something that few people can have.
LEANNE: Vanity can be healthy.
MIRANDA: But I wonder if I can give it up. I’m forty-three, I’ve got children. It’s hard to respect women who are too fashionable after a certain age. Why does it give you power to have th
at thing? I get scared about getting old and losing my sense of what is important. I have a fantasy of outwitting it all by having a uniform that then requires you to buy more things for your uniform, so you’re actually not outwitting any of it. But I also think there is something about my relationship to my sexuality and what I feel safely contained in. I want clothes that won’t make me feel shame.
LEANNE: What kind of clothing makes you feel shame?
MIRANDA: Anything overtly sexy make me feel shame.
LEANNE: Exposed or shame?
MIRANDA: Shame to not have the body to put those clothes on. I know enough about my body that it’s not that mold. So if I tried to put clothes on it that were for that mold it would be like having egg on my face.
LEANNE: Who do you talk to about clothes?
MIRANDA: Sometimes I get a bit resentful because I’m the person my girlfriends talk to about clothes. I’m in a phase where I’m slightly less interested and I don’t want to go through their permutations of angst about whether or not to buy something. Although as soon as I’m interested again, I’m the first to suck some poor friend into the loop of madness. I went to a bitch-and-swap the other day and I was marveling at how supportive everyone was being.
LEANNE: There’s so much to go around now.
MIRANDA: Yes, maybe it’s because we’re older or because there is more stuff everywhere, but now the relationship with bitch-and-swap is the sense that you hope it doesn’t look good on you, “Oh no, here I am trying it on, oh no, here I am taking it!”
LEANNE: Can you remember a transformative conversation you had with someone about clothes?
MIRANDA: I have satisfying conversations with my friend Morwyn about the slippery slope into the delirium of desire for these clothing items, the craziness of it. It usually has to do with the specifics of something we didn’t buy. We can still to this day reignite the knife-in-the-gut pain of not buying these Oscar de la Renta paint-splattered dresses a year and a half ago. They were on sale and we didn’t get them because it seemed like $700 was a lot to pay for a dress, but we will have those girl conversations: “But we would have worn them all the time!—But remember, they were $700! That’s a lot of money to spend!—Not for a great dress!—Yeah, and those really were great dresses!—Maybe they didn’t look that good on us and we can’t remember?—No, actually, they looked really good and would have come into their own.” You know, someone who understands the patheticness of it all. Clothes are so fundamental as a way to be aesthetic that is both serious and light. You couldn’t talk about art that way.
LEANNE: What do you do about being conflicted over fashion and sweatshops and all of the politics that go into it?
MIRANDA: In my last editor’s letter I featured our receptionist and pointed out that she got all her clothes at Goodwill. It was my final word: Goodwill! Get it secondhand! Not that it was a message that could breathe in that environment in any sustained way.
LEANNE: Do you think the answer is secondhand shopping?
MIRANDA: Yes, that’s what we should do at this point. Right? There is no reason to buy anything new. With globalized non-union labor, the new has become the shabby.
LEANNE: What math do you do in your head when you get dressed? Do you do aesthetic and ethical math?
MIRANDA: I have all these rules I’m constantly breaking that I try to live by. 1. Buy vintage. 2. Buy only locally made clothes and sustainable-processed clothes. 3. Spend more for the piece that has those qualities. 4. Buy fewer things. 5. Don’t interlard with J.Crew. I do see it as social injustice to have a garment that was made in a sweatshop. I don’t understand when peers say they can’t afford to buy organic milk. You can afford to buy ten pairs of cheap shorts at Old Navy and some toxic flip-flops, but you can’t afford to buy from a humane farm? It comes between me and my friends sometimes, but if we’re not all making these changes, then what hope is there for anyone? What hope is there for people who really can’t afford it? It’s easy to be judgmental, harder to act right. I don’t think anyone who is really into fashion is making those sacrifices fully, me included.
LEANNE: Today as I was looking at some clothes in a vintage store I realized that the way I see clothes is in a moment—a dress might be two minutes, a sweater is ten seconds. I imagine where I would wear it and I see an image of myself and what I’m doing—paying for a coffee, waiting for the train, hunched over my desk, carrying my daughter on my hip—and I realize these little films starring these articles of clothing unfold within a space of time. Time doesn’t exist, so I thought: What am I doing with so many clothes; what am I clocking with these clothes? They are unnecessary, but there’s so much meaning I place in them.
MIRANDA: But it’s also a way of tricking time. I go into an altered state when I’m looking at clothes. It becomes a different kind of time. It’s a profoundly and fundamentally narcissistic experience.
SURVEY
STYLE AS CHARACTER
“In my ’70s fox-fur-collar spy coat I feel like a badass from a blaxploitation movie, like Pam Grier.” —ELISE PETERSON
MARSHA COURNEYA Knowing that the most valuable, courageous, and intelligent women of Tolstoy, Fontane, Hugo, and the Brontës wore finery at their finest moments has led me to feel empowered by feminine dresses. I often feel like my strength of character at any given moment is directly related to how close I feel to the heroines of literature I idolize.
SASHA GREY On an adult film set, you always bring your own clothing. Only occasionally are clothes provided. When I was acting, I wanted to distort the perception of the kind of girl I was. The more I saw how effective this was, the more I wanted to try different things. I could vacillate between the white-trash doll, the goth dom, and the classy pinup. I think this led to a lot of confusion and mystery.
ANISE LEANN I call it my “Margot Tenenbaum” when I wear the same thing every day, which I do often. If I could have it my way, I’d wear a ballet top with skinny jeans always. It makes me feel sexy, artistic, and I love wearing my hair up and feeling like a dancer.
MASHA TUPITSYN I admire a stubborn yet effortless style. Joan Didion had that, and my teacher, the scholar Avital Ronell. There is a uniform/structural quality to people who have real style. It’s like a form of discipline. When you see that something unique and personal is going on with someone’s relationship to aesthetics and their body, it’s fascinating. Style, as opposed to fashion, is standing your ground, which at the end of the day is what individuality and intelligence are for me. You remain who you are—loyal to an identity that you’ve formulated for yourself. It’s neurotic to a certain extent.
SZILVIA MOLNAR I love the simplicity of a white T-shirt and blue jeans, and the straight angles that they create. I would also enjoy growing a thick beard and walking around, stroking it.
MOLLY RINGWALD If I’m playing a character, I don’t feel bad in her clothes, because I’m acting. But wearing clothes I don’t like as myself just feels depressing.
JENNY TROMSKI All of my force is gathered into the daylong internalization of whatever character I’ve become.
ALISSA NUTTING “I am an artist!” I felt the need to scream a few weeks ago, and maybe, I reasoned, people would get that more if I bought some Jeffrey Campbell troll-fur wedge sneakers and lots of clothes with donuts and googly eyes on them, and wore jewelry made from ethically sourced taxidermied animals. Except, you know, “I’m also an academic!” So when I went to buy a suit jacket for a conference, I was overcome with the need to have a great many outfits that could voice my professional drive and ambition (but in a slightly edgy and eclectic manner), so I bought tailored polka-dot dresses and plaid silk conical vestments and asymmetrical blazers and earrings that looked like vintage beaded nipple tassels.
LENAE DAY A smear or an overdrawing of the lips goes a long way toward not taking yourself so seriously. I have found that I am a lot funnier, therefore I feel more attractive, when I look like Lucille Ball.
CLAUDIA EVE BEAUCHESNE One of my role models is th
e “Charlie Girl” from the Charlie fragrance ads of the seventies and eighties. She embodies everything I want for myself—confidence, personal and financial independence, a “sunny disposition,” a fulfilling career, friends, fun, beautiful lovers, et cetera. I don’t like the way the perfume smells and I would never wear it, but I still aspire to be a Charlie Girl. I even listen to the TV jingle (“Kind of young, kind of now . . . kind of free, kind of wow”) to psych myself up before important meetings.
ALICIA ELLIOTT When I was in high school, I sold tickets at a speedway that also sold bright orange sweatshirts. At the time, I was in love with Clementine Kruczynski in the movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. For me, she was encapsulated in all her flawed and charismatic glory by the bright orange sweatshirt she wore. I wore my speedway sweatshirt half convinced that her awkward charm would manifest itself beneath its sleeves.
ANU HENDERSON When I was studying communications, I would go to the library and borrow films about Marshall McLuhan and Glenn Gould, and I’d listen to Glenn Gould on the record player, to make sure there was a harmony in my studies and in my environment. And at the time I would also dress like Glenn Gould, wearing overcoats and fingerless gloves.
IVY KNIGHT I have lots of black tights because I’m a lazy loser who wears such things.
CHRISTY-CLAIRE KATIEN Often I am inspired by a movie or a photograph that resonates with my mood. I will challenge myself and my wardrobe with that emotion. For example, this past October, I discovered a photo of my grandmother from the seventies, wearing her hair in a chignon, a beautiful beige dress, and brown heels. Throughout the following week I wore my hair in that style and an item of clothing that was brown or beige, in homage to my grandmother. Emotional connections make getting dressed very easy.
LILI HORVATH In my teenage years, I spent about fifteen minutes each morning trying to assemble an outfit that would communicate who I was that day. When I was thirteen, in the morning my brain probably went, “Okay, so today I want to express that I am sad, I am angry, and that I fancy that boy in English class. Navy skirt for sad, oversized KoЯn T-shirt for teenage anger and . . . errm . . . let’s paint my nails pink to look feminine.”