My So-Clothed Life
Costume Changes
When I was in high school, I lived for drama club. My fellow drama geeks, the audience almost exclusively made up of our families, the costumes! Whether playing Nora in Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” or Madame Ranevskaya in Chekov’s “The Cherry Orchard” I couldn’t get enough of taffeta skirts and high-necked blouses and bustles and musty velvet bonnets. The audience may not have been transported to another place, another time, but I was.
As much as I enjoyed dressing up for dramatic roles, my personal style was careless, as befits a tomboyish free-spirit book nerd. I’d covet specific items from Seventeen Magazine (I recall a particular pair of striped Levi bellbottoms) which I would then track down at J.C. Penney or Macy’s. I was more interested in the fantasy behind the clothing than I was in their aesthetics. What would hook me was the print ad (for example, a model, wearing a puff-sleeved blouse with a floral yoke, was sitting, legs crossed just so in a shaft of sunlight in an old book store with a cute guy leaning over her shoulder). When I put on the blouse, I would find myself inhabiting that marketing moment.
Even my first job after college- modeling for the magazines I read as a teen- felt like a role requiring multiple costume changes. People asked if they let me keep the clothes. No, they didn’t, but also, I didn’t care. These outfits didn’t speak to me; they’d been selected by some art director or editor who didn’t know me at all, and I wore them dutifully, pinned and tucked so I dare not move lest I get yelled at/impaled. I was down to sell merchandise, but I couldn’t wait to quit sucking in my stomach and hitching my hip, to shed the clothes and become once again myself in my overalls and T-shirt.
Now, as a grown-up, my relationship to clothes is even less performative and even more perfunctory. I know how to dress for a funeral and I try to look kempt over Zoom. Mostly, though, I wear things that are comfy and free of obvious stains. That may be a low bar, but there you go. I looked at the women dressed up for the Kentucky Derby the other night and felt sorry for them. Maybe they were having fun with those hats. Drink enough mint juleps and anything is amusing/tolerable. But if I were them, I’d be counting down the seconds to sweatpants.
The sad fact, though, is when you are young, you can pull off dishabille, but when you’re older, you look like the cat lady on The Simpsons. People doubt not only your ability to pay by credit card, but your sanity.
I think the trick to senior sartorial indifference is simplicity. Right now, I’m wearing a pair of stretchy yoga pants and a sweatshirt and I’m about to go for a run. After that, my plan is to wear something minus the sweat, with a waistband and zipper. This will involve one of my four pairs of jeans, one of six T-shirts, a cardigan, and my Sanuk canvas slip-ons. I will feel perfectly presentable until five, when I can drop the charade and ease back into my yoga pants.
They say clothes say a lot about a person, but I disagree. For me, clothes have only ever said anything about who I aspired (or was paid) to be. Today, finally, I get to dress purely for the role I was born to play- me, myself, older and wiser, and now, blissfully, in a universe that includes Spandex.