042: All Dressed Up

On the process of getting dressed

Last weekend, I was listening to “La vie en rose” by Grace Jones and getting dressed to see Swan Lake. For weeks I had been thinking of what to wear to the ballet, and I won’t lie, what my dinner order would be at Cafe Fiorello. There is a difference, I think, between simply putting on clothes (in order to get out the door) and the meditativeness of getting dressed up: the former is utilitarian, hurried, and can be unthinking. Getting dressed is a meditative act that invokes fantasies, moods, it can draw from a song, a film, or a line in a book, a reflection of the subconscious or the very conscious, a deliberation of how we wish to present and protect ourselves. It is a private and rather sensuous act, our influences and feelings not readily discerned by an observer.

Since late December, when tickets for Swan Lake were purchased, I began fantasizing about what I would wear, vacillating between a simple black velvet Alaïa trapeze dress, a secondhand find at Pilgrim on Orchard Street, and a black cloqué mini dress by Simone Rocha, that could – if it really wanted to – stand on its own. If it’s not apparent, a reference to Odile was imperative. Hair and makeup is a cinch, as I am very unimaginative when it comes to both, my limited makeup skills largely unchanged for over a decade, and my hair succumbs ultimately to the pull of gravity, attempts at volume or dimension are fruitless. All that matters is that the eyebrows look like feuding sisters, or at worst, cousins.

On to wardrobe, but first music! Pedro Almodóvar’s “Pain and Glory” has recently been on my mind, a story of anguish and rebirth. It has a wonderful soundtrack, with music by Grace Jones, of course, Marilyn Monroe, Mina, and Chavela Vargas. By the time Mina’s “Come Sinfonia” was playing, the stand-alone dress was on, worn with a pair of jet-black opaque tights and black winged Prada flats with floral appliqué, which only comes out when I’m certain that a great deal of sitting will be involved. I chose a black and gold brocade potli bag with a short beaded strap and matching tassels to carry my keys, wallet, lipstick, and darn phone.

To keep out the cold, I put on a vintage Yves Saint Laurent Rive Gauche coat I’d bought without so much as a second thought. I’d never seen anything quite like it, ornate gold buttons with an emerald green center set on heavy wool of deep plum. The A-line coat came down to just above the ankles, the bodice fitted, the shoulders structured but with ease. I pair it almost always with a pair of gold floral filigree earrings that have a single delicate green stone set in each at its core, a precious gift from my best friend which she’d bought during a trip to Colombia.

When I was a child, getting dressed for a birthday party or even a weekend lunch at my grandmother’s was an exciting occasion for me. Because I wore a horribly ugly uniform to school five days of the week, a school that had strict rules about any extra adornment or individualization to our tastes, it was important to take advantage of any and all moments outside of it to get dressed up. This could mean, for example, playing music on my portable blue CD player and coordinating my little butterfly clips to complement my pastel cargo pants.

In my early twenties, when I moved to America, I was living in a suburb of Maryland, worked a lot, and had an almost non-existent social life. I felt very isolated, sometimes as though I was drifting, and to bring myself back down to earth and reconnect, even going to the grocery store or Target were opportunities for me to get dressed up, to think about which necklace went better with which shoes, or to finally put together a look I’d fantasized about on the bus ride home from work. Getting dressed up isn’t about eliciting a reaction from those around us. It is a restorative act of asserting one’s fully embodied existence.

The process of getting dressed, of not grabbing the first sweater or skirt within reach, of taking a moment or more to dress with purpose, I realize, has been valuable in re-establishing a greater appreciation not only for what I have and how I wear it, but of myself too. It is that taking of a moment, however long or abbreviated, that reframes the familiar drone of I have nothing to wear into I have such beautiful things to wear. The buying of clothes, and shoes and bags has increasingly become so mindless, and there is such a widespread conflation of accumulation with self-worth, that the romance in shopping and getting dressed, the storytelling, is easily lost. One’s own fantasies and unique expressions of self, how one wishes to present and protect themselves becomes elusive, replacing what moves us with what moves the economy.

My own practices around getting dressed up and the sentiments I attribute it with weren’t cultivated in a vacuum, but something I’d learned from my parents. Both had witnessed first-hand the violent attempt at erasure of their cultural identity and the valiant resistance against it. They have spent the majority of their adult lives living in countries systemically reluctant to embrace difference, some all-too enthusiastically dismantling any progress towards acceptance to refute the existence of one, or many.

Dressing up and dressing well is not an uncommon custom in minority communities; it is an exercise in self-preservation and care. When my mother gets dressed, whether for work or for a wedding, an abundance of intent is involved. For work, which she wakes at half past four in the morning for, my mother continues to not simply prepare an outfit the night before, but to really consider it, from her scarves to her shoes, selecting hues influenced by subconscious inspiration, to which bag suits her mood and her needs. For a wedding we are attending in August, she has already decided on a light gold Banarasi Katan sari she wore to mine. Taking the time to get dressed up is her way of maintaining and nurturing her dignity, or her ijjot, as she says in Bengali.

The self-righteous among us may turn their noses up at the notion of getting dressed up. Who cares? At a technical level, fashion is an easily accessible site of self-expression. Getting dressed up allows for channelling hopes, desires, anxieties, that one painting you saw, that line stuck in your head into a form of your own making. For some, it’s one of the few moments they’re afforded a release. For others, it’s reclaiming themselves.

A few months ago, I was speaking to Alessia Algani who said that for her, clothing functioned as armor. In a recent episode of the designer Bella Freud’s series “Fashion Neurosis”, the musician Honey Dijon shared that her clothing was her armor, fortifying her. If clothing is our armor, then the process of getting dressed up is preparing for battle. And these days, everything seems to be something of a battle.

And if you find yourself at Cafe Fiorello, do have the fried calamari with fried hot peppers and the lasagne for two!