When I was in high school, I had this New Yorker cartoon taped to the front of my planner:
Wittgenstein, who is NOT THE SUBJECT OF THIS NEWSLETTER PLEASE DO NOT RUN AWAY, was a 20th century analytic philosopher, and I “got into” him the summer before 11th grade because, like a normal teenager, I was taking a philosophy class for fun. Wittgenstein has cool theories about language that I guess I found exciting, and it was also just a great class full of inside jokes and a surprising number of people who I am somehow still in touch with (hello to my CTY Existentialism people who are reading this!). I saved the cartoon because I was tickled that the New Yorker had name-dropped a philosopher I liked. But it also turned out to be an extremely accurate prediction of a favorite social interaction I now have as an adult: talking about shopping with my friends, which is what this newsletter will actually be about.
While I was never much for conventional adolescent sartorial trends, I was always interested in clothes. In fact, I took pleasure in wearing things to high school that signaled that I was not especially conventional (see also: I taped a New Yorker cartoon to my planner), like a patterned skirt with buttons down the front that had belonged to my aunt in the 1970s, purple leather driving gloves, tall lace-up Camper boots, and a Talking Heads “Remain in Light” T-shirt. But I would not have been caught dead in Abercrombie or Uggs, and I also didn’t shop at Hot Topic, which was the major alternative option that I knew of for white kids in 2003. I just kinda did my own strange thing. So it’s interesting to me that my adult taste wound up becoming extremely predictable, in that I have fully bought into the millennial aesthetic. I wear glasses from Warby Parker and makeup from Glossier. I sleep in a bed from Floyd with a Leesa mattress and Brooklinen sheets. Today my entire outfit is from Madewell, in addition to a bracelet and earrings from Machete and a watch from Breda. I even have a pair of “unflattering pants” (while we’re Molly Fischering), also from Madewell. If you have not heard of these brands, I will assume that either you are not in my millennial femme demographic or else you live off the grid and somebody printed and mailed you a copy of this newsletter.
One possible explanation for my late-blooming interest in being trendy (or just a niche form of basic?) is that late-stage capitalism has gotten better at its game, thanks largely to social media, and therefore I am more susceptible to its influences. This is totally possible! But I don’t think that’s the whole of it. A couple of years ago, I read Jia Tolentino’s excellent critique of supposedly feminist but actually oppressive and stultifying wellness and beauty culture, in which she describes barre classes as “what a ballerina might do if you concussed her and then made her snort caffeine pills.”1 I repeat, the piece is a critique of barre, a form of exercise which Tolentino describes as overpriced, a “disciplinary ritual,” and “a bizarrely and clinically eroticized experience.” Nonetheless, I finished the piece and was immediately like, “Yes, that is the exercise I should do.” Was that because I had bought into patriarchal, corporate ideas about exercise and what female bodies should look like and how much money is reasonable to spend on such things? Sure, yes. But I think probably also it’s because Jia Tolentino said she did barre, and my wish was to signal that I am like Jia Tolentino in some fundamental way. To sort of paraphrase the New Yorker cartoon, I want my Outdoor Voices color-blocked matching sports bra and leggings outfit to say “I am a well-educated, lefty-liberal, and culturally with-it lady.”2 I want to be seen, and I want to be able to send out bat signals to other people who are like me. When I was a teenager, I only knew how to do this by dressing in a gently bonkers way, building my entire extra-curricular and romantic life around Quiz Bowl, and just straight up asking new people if they also liked Monty Python. It’s honestly nice to feel like I am part of a larger consumer demographic whose values I share, even if those values are somewhat vague and are being expressed in an entirely shallow consumerist paradigm.
The phenomenon of meaningful self-expression through shopping is more evident, and more powerful, when it comes to more overtly political identity statements, from hijabs to head wraps to all the various forms of identity-signaling through fashion in the queer community. Closer to home, I spend a lot of time with observant, feminist, femme Jewish women who wear headbands to express that they are those things. At this point in my life, my fashion choices are relatively apolitical, even though I am in many ways the Headband Nation type. I experimented a lot with more overt identity-signaling in my early twenties, but right now I’d say I’m primarily committed to the goal of feeling confident and unselfconscious when I’m out in the world, which is unfortunately harder to achieve if I’m worried that my tzitzit lines are visible through my pencil skirt. Maybe I’ll go back to tzitzit and/or headbands one day; who knows.
The intersection of clothes and identity and belonging plays out in my life in a somewhat different way these days. One of the highlights of my recent pandemic “social life” has been a WhatsApp group of about ten Jewish women — mostly academics and rabbis, plus one ex-academic who went into industry because you can do that when you’re a scientist — discussing almost nothing but clothes. We have talked about what to wear to outdoor shul in the winter, whether there were any good jumpsuits to buy for Passover (there weren’t), and the joys of Shabbos pants (flowy velvet wide-leg pants with elastic waists, which achieve the dual pandemic Shabbat goals of dressy and pajamas). Every once in a while someone brings up a question about Torah reading or job negotiating, but mostly it’s just clothes. I will concede that all our shopping is just (literally) buying into what is ultimately an anti-feminist and exploitative capitalist system, but the sharing and the advice is 100% a network of care for which I am extremely grateful. It is deeply gratifying to have not just one friend but a whole group of women who can ask each other “Should I buy this plaid blazer to wear to conferences?” or “Are these earrings too wacky for teaching donors over Zoom?” and everybody understands the stakes and ramifications, all the professional and religious and gender and just plain old personality expressions that are at play. All these years later, I finally get to live what I don’t even think I understood at the time was my high school dream.
“Always Be Optimizing,” from Tolentino’s excellent essay collection Trick Mirror.
I did start doing a kind of yoga-barre hybrid that I genuinely enjoyed and was not so insane or overpriced. Even though I never wound up buying any OV gear myself, there was another woman in my class who wore an awesome green Outdoor Voices matching set. Eventually we had a conversation and it turned out she had also gone to Yale and then, after being hospitalized during the earliest wave of the virus last spring, she became a very impressive public voice and community builder for people suffering from long Covid. See???? The branding never lies!!!
Readings this made me miss you deeply. I have always appreciated your unique style in all things.
A lovely, smart essay--thanks!