On a recent Thursday night, I opened my closet for the first time in almost a year. I had to push my partner’s sit-up bench, where we’d heaped towels too dirty for the clean-towel place but not dirty enough for the hamper, away from the door. Inside hung “outfits,” garments I used to wear to work or to an evening out with friends: sweaters in dark colors, the slump of a dress, a pair of tops with their long, pale sleeves twined together. My nice shoes lay under a silky, tunic-like number I’d forgotten I owned, which had slipped to the ground, like the heroine of an opera. The air bore traces of something floral, rich, and oddly threatening. I could not shake the feeling that I’d disturbed a tomb.
There’s a difference between getting dressed and getting dressed. The first act, at least during my past year in quarantine, has connoted comfort: my partner’s T-shirts and boxers, a gray rotation of pullovers, socks, and sweatpants. The priority is softness, give, practicality—everything as indeterminate and yielding as our shut-in lives. In May of 2020, I put on a bra and found the experience so distressing that I tweeted about it. Later, I saw the tweet included in an Elle article about how women were giving up on “shapewear”—a term whose meaning I had to guess from context—possibly forever.
Getting dressed, meanwhile, bears a sense of address: of speaking to an audience and, because you double as the message, being spoken. With the great unpause upon us, it is this idea that makes me feel, like our sit-up bench, swamped by anxieties that have piled up for months. My apprehension has to do, in part, with again needing to wonder whether the material on my body is too tight or loose or busy, or whether it’s the wrong cut for my build or a bad color for my complexion. (In truth, I’m not sure that I ever devoted enough energy to these questions—ask my co-workers—but I used to cultivate vague guilt around them, at least.) A bigger part, though, may relate to “frock consciousness,” a phrase that Virginia Woolf coined to hint at how clothing might reveal character in fiction. “My love of clothes interests me profoundly,” Woolf wrote in her diary, “only it is not love; and what it is I must discover.” Outfits, Woolf knew, could serve as markers of identity, attesting not just to social class or occupation but to the nuances of personality. This expressivity—a rich parallel language of hues and accents—prompted something in Woolf, a feeling intense enough to be mistaken for love.
To some extent, every language is a love language, an offering of oneself. Having a style is a way of being generous with your public: you may not know me, but now you know I like a thin plaid. Speaking this language also means getting swept into the river of other people’s interpretation—ah, so you’re Scottish? Perhaps it’s this loss of agency that I resist: the expectations projected onto a pair of pants, which I imagine to be fascistically intolerant of a big lunch—the patriarchal spectre in the clothes. And yet my dread doesn’t quite slot into a feminist critique of fashion. Instead, sartorial symbols strike me as mystifying, hard to maneuver. My inability to communicate through them bothers me. I don’t want strangers to look at me and believe they’re divining a message that’s not there.
In the past, I never harbored especially strong feelings about getting dressed. It was, if you squinted, prosocial, part of the everyday enterprise of existing in public. One learns to conceive of oneself as, among other things, a set of pleasing or displeasing surfaces, because one is usually the scenery, not the protagonist. And there’s a freedom, even an art, to presentation. My mother loves dressing up, loves knowing, at a glance, the right spot for a hem to hit, or how to choreograph lines and angles into a silhouette. She treats her body like a canvas. (She’s also a painter.) I’ve lived at various times in service to and in revolt against this idea. When I troubled the ghosts in my closet, I also roused an old argument, one described by the linguist Deborah Tannen in “You’re Wearing That?,” her landmark work on conversations between mothers and daughters. From the mother’s perspective, Tannen writes, “your job has always been to help and protect your daughter, give her guidance based on your greater experience, and ensure that all goes as well as it can for her.” But, Tannen continues, advice also implies criticism; for a daughter, a kindly comment about attire can evoke not connection but control.
People have long used clothing for self-expression, but doing so got easier after the Industrial Revolution made cheap, mass-produced garments widely available. “The fashion impulse is universally present,” Justine De Young, an art historian at the Fashion Institute of Technology, told me. “It’s a question of attainability.” Today, the expressive urge is even stronger—not because textiles are serving as texts, which they often have, but because cultural and economic forces encourage us to broadcast our identity at all times. Supplemental “texts,” in other words, are everywhere: favorite television shows, preferred fonts, the neighborhood bar you suggest when a new friend wants to meet up. At times, it can feel as though anything you do will be turned into data—essentialized, fastened to your “brand,” and, probably, sold.
For femme people, especially, there’s a pressure to pour ourselves into our appearances, because here, at least, we’ve enjoyed some latitude. And, having been inside for so long, it makes sense that people might find their creative energies spilling outward, in fluttery silks and dark denims, combat boots and unusual coats. After calamities, De Young told me, fashion often tends toward exuberance—the glitz of the Roaring Twenties, ruffles in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War. But disasters can also usher in a renewal of conservative gender roles. Flapper garb was sultry but unmistakably feminine; after the Second World War, lavish skirts and narrow waistlines visually forced American women back into the home. I bring this up not really (or only) to make a point about sexism but to observe the layers of coercion hidden in the invitation to appear. Millions of people, as they get ready to reënter public life, are surveying their pre-covid identities with post-covid eyes. When we finally take ourselves back out into the world, who will the world want us to be?
For Woolf, the tension between self-preservation and self-expression lay at the center of “frock consciousness.” A piece of fabric could signify the self, mediate between public and private—but it could also substitute for it, relegating the wearer to a mute oblivion. (“There is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us and not we them,” she wrote.) I think of my maternal grandmother, who struggled with the role of homemaker; she would have chosen, instead, to be a painter. In her frustration, she focussed on “looking the part” of the female artist: incandescently beautiful, effortlessly stylish. It’s clear to me now that she used clothing to assert her character, to exercise a form of control. But clothes also, in a way, controlled her, and she pressed their language, often cruelly, onto her daughters, by harping relentlessly on their appearance. My mom—who absorbed her mother’s anger, but managed to tame it such that our own squabbles fall squarely into Tannen territory—dresses carefully because she likes to. Fashion, for her, is a playground, not a battlefield, and its ceremonies channel the self without surrendering it.
My own preferred mode of expression is language. I use words to care for others and to reconstruct reality on terms I can live with. You’ve probably surmised that my grandmother and I had a cold relationship, and I remember one childhood visit during which I refused to talk in her presence. I think my intention was to protect the inner terrain that she couldn’t see, but it was also to withhold love, to keep my language severed from her own. This memory surged back when I faced my closet anew. The pieces on their hangers were not hand-me-downs, and yet to put them on, I felt, was to tangle with my grandmother. I thought I could sense the depth of her desire, which would grab on to whatever was at hand, to speak, to be the meaning expressed. I was gripped by a petulant determination that I would not facilitate this. My anger rose and rose and finally burned itself out, like a fever.
Seventeen months ago, an invisible killer began to circulate through people’s bodies, causing a shutdown that left us lonely and depleted. Now, after a season like a prolonged funeral, we are finally peeling ourselves out of our mourning costumes. (“I’m Ready to Dress Uncomfortably Again,” a representative headline in “The Cut” proclaimed.) There are hopeful visions of layers flying off, flesh and fluids tumbling together. I can’t wait to hug my friends and jump around in big crowds of strangers. But something about the intentionality of pandemic socializing—the care with which we decided when and how to be present for one another—transformed each relationship into a flame to be tended. I want to hold on to the power of deciding when to disclose, and how much, so that the act of connection carries the meaning it deserves. This is different from hiding forever. Recently, I’ve been trying to imagine what the first day “back” will be like. I visualize leaving my apartment and heading down the block to the subway, which will take me into Manhattan, to the office. I imagine that short, sunny walk to my stop, and thronging with my neighbors at the top of the stairs. And I imagine the joy—although it feels impossible to conjure, at the moment, how exactly I’ll feel—of making my way underground.
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