What Your Clothes Make of You
Fashion trends are about one thing: a collective yearning. A Calvin Klein senses the frustration of clutter in our lives and gives us minimalism. A Tom Ford feels our repressed sexuality and gives us raunch. We respond. A trend is born.
But clothes are about something else. Clothes, the ones that make their way into our closets as impulse buys, gifts or obligatory purchases for compulsory events, are about ourselves. If we bought Gucci leather trousers and a sheer shirt last season, it says we saw something of ourselves in those tarty trappings. But what we actually decide to put on our backs each day and venture out into the world in has nothing to do with trends or marketing. It has to do with who we want to show the world we are. Or who we want to convince ourselves we could be.
In the photographs on the next page, people were asked to contribute pictures of themselves when they felt at their personal best. And to a one, the images illustrate how feeling good in clothes has little to do with being fashionable. The clothes set the mood in each photo not because they fit a trend but because they fit the person, and who each one was at the moment the photo was snapped. So perhaps people aren't the slaves to trends that the fashion industry has so long depicted them as being; perhaps the trends are a slave to the individual, who uses them to say something about himself or herself in a particular point in his or her life.
Of course, as long as we have the clothes from our past in a closet, we can always revisit ourselves. When hooded sweaters, a trend from my teens in the 70's, came back into style two years ago, I bought one. Immediately, I felt regressed. Wearing it made me feel awkward and unconfident, all Farrah Fawcett hair and pimpled and chubby-cheeked. This time, the hooded sweater was cashmere, not cotton, but the price didn't remove the associations. I never wore it out of the house.
A closet is a sort of contemporary biography of your life, which is to say, part 'Dutch' and part 'Fortunate Son.' Were you really as wild as that fringed jacket lets on? Were you as conservative as that navy blazer suggests? Did you really ever feel that Greek letters on the rump of your sweat pants said everything that needed to be said about you? What about that Grateful Dead T-shirt? Or that Morgan Stanley baseball cap? No particular item or outfit can represent your complete self. If you are what you wear, then you are buffeted daily by compromises to your identity.
I have clothes for courage -- anything that feels punk or hip-hop or brash or too young for me to really get away with, like a Clash T-shirt and my ripped Levi's. Or my army pants decorated with studs. I have clothes that are camouflage -- in my case lean suits to be worn with Manolo Blahniks, a costume that reeks of authority in my role as style editor. I have boyfriend clothes: short skirts and tight sweaters that I so named before my boyfriend became my husband.
I would never wear my boyfriend clothes to a fashion party. I would never wear my fashion clothes on a romantic holiday with my husband. Clothes are really identifiers of each person as a performer in his own life. And a lot of what we wear has to do with who is going to be looking. Remember Miss Lonely Hearts in Alfred Hitchcock's 'Rear Window'? She is rendered a pathetic character just by the knowledge that she would dress up in her 'boyfriend clothes' and then spend the night alone. Clothes without an audience are poignant reminders of how little we ever wear only for ourselves.
Of course, clothes are anything but a pure, clear form of communication. On pages spread throughout this issue are photos of people picked from the streets of New York City. Can you tell who they are from what they are wearing? A panel of experts, for the most part, couldn't. Each outfit reflects a personality, but the clothes also show what each person considers to be armor, clothes that confer power in a city that too often ignores the identities of its residents.
And the compromises you make because of what you own or what you can afford only complicate the picture. For instance, you would have been Calvin Klein minimalist today, but the impending lunch with your mother-in-law drove you toward Ungaro. You're a ripped-denim guy trapped in middle management worsted wool. You gained 10 pounds, or you would have been a Lycra-wrapped vixen instead of a smocked flowered chiffon hausfrau.
Very few occasions really allow you to be what you wear, fully and completely. Which is why those occasions -- the vacation to the place where no one knew you, the party where you could let your hair down, your childhood -- are always so dear to each of us. We dressed more completely for ourselves than at any other time.
One reason that clothing can stereotype us so inescapably is that even the most minute detail can signify an entire personality type. There's no need for Marcel Proust flourishes of prose. If the descriptive is as limited as 'ruffles,' the woman becomes immediately clear. In Peter Biskind's book 'Easy Riders, Raging Bulls,' a young Steven Spielberg is described as a guy with too many zippers on his pants. Which tells you something about Spielberg (or one aspect of Spielberg) that his entire film opus can't.
Anyone who has ever stood passively and been dressed by someone else -- her mother or lover or a stylist to the stars -- knows how quickly identity disappears. It was common in my parents' generation for wives to dress their husbands; maybe that contributed to the confusion about who our fathers really were.
Once, when I was being photographed for Vogue magazine, an editor put me in a bright red wool suit with a skirt that flared and a collarless boxy jacket. My own mother went through the issue five times and couldn't find me on the full page I occupied.
The clothes we select for ourselves are a better indicator of who we think we are than our faces or our bodies, which we didn't choose. Clothes are our one chance to right whatever physical wrongs God has imposed on us. They can be a mirror of what's inside, or a veneer of camouflage against a world that judges quickly on surfaces, or a map to display your aspirations. You are what you wear, but that turns out to be as complex as you are.
Amy M. Spindler is the style editor of the magazine.
Correction:  December 19, 1999, Sunday  A picture caption on Nov. 14 with an article about dressing and identity misstated the year of a photograph of the actress Gina Gershon taken when she was 5. It was 1970, not 1967.