Clothes

In the evening, when it is dark and cold outside, my daughter and I spend a few minutes before her bedtime reading a chapter from a book in English. (We’re read through lots of recommendations from Gretchen Rubin’s list of 81 Kid Lit / YA books) Curled up on the couch, we recently read this passage in Anne of Green Gables: “It is ever so much easier to be good if your clothes are fashionable. At least, it is easier for me. I suppose it doesn’t make such a difference to naturally good people.” She goes on to describe her coat and compliment her friend’s hat and concludes: “Do you suppose it’s wrong for us to think so much about our clothes? Marilla says it is very sinful. But it is such an interesting subject, isn’t it?”

I grew up with a mother who, reacting to her own childhood, scarred by other experiences, and fully committed to conservative Catholicism, dressed me in modest cleanliness from my birth to adulthood. When I left home, I had to learn how to figure out my own style. Sometimes the thought this exercise required and the shame it exposed made me feel resentful. I think that is why I find Anne’s quote so interesting, because once I could stop worrying so much about what I wore, there was space to concentrate on other things.

Growing up, clothes were humiliating, because I felt they set me apart when I wanted instead to fit in. Obsessively attributing the day’s good turnout or bad turnout based on what I was wearing felt silly even as I did it throughout high school. Clothing, I was supposed to understand, was a frivolous thing, much like Anne’s obsession over puffed sleeves. Thinking about it was impossible to justify. And yet, it was the clumsy handling, growing up, of “what is important” that still nags at me today. In the place of my mother, I’ve taken to books like Parisian Chic, Women in Clothes and The Sartorialist. They’ve shown me how clothes are “such an interesting subject.”