Hello! Welcome! It was a busy weekend; I moved! (still in NYC just noting that the move has consumed the last week of my life)
Books I’ve read recently and enjoyed: Subtly Worded, Teffi; Fathers and Sons, Ivan Turgenev, A Heart So White, Javier Marías.
This issue is a little bit different. As I’ve mentioned before; I want to use this space to explore all kinds of issues and forms of fashion writing. One of my favorite fashion publications has been and still is Vestoj. One thing I really admire is the scope in which they present fashion—through opinion, prose, fiction, and non-fiction. They are dedicated to asking the most complex of the simplest questions.
Lately, I’ve been extremely interested in the consciousness of getting dressed and how this is inextricable from the existence of modern feminine expression. Ingeborg Bachmann and Shirley Hazard have been recent inspirations in this experiment. Transit of Venus may really be one of the most perfect pieces of prose that I have ever read.
This piece below is a brief snippet from a piece of creative writing that I have been working on surrounding these exact topics. It’s about a dress but it’s not about a dress. It’s about how you get dressed and who your dance partner is. It’s also about the body and mind we are born with.
How do you get dressed?
She walks towards it. It’s a day dress. One for errands– too little to go out into the world in a meaningful way. Not too little, it’s too much for the stranger in the mirror, but she’s still not supposed to realize it. The stranger doesn’t know that someone told her, but that’s part of the game. Even if it knows that she knows, it doesn’t go away; it can never go away. It’s her left shoulder blade. It’s the carpet in between her toes. It’s impermanently attached to her but it will never leave her.
The dress–it hugs her hips. Is it too tight? The answer is always no. The answer is always yes.
She and the stranger answer in unison and they answer in conflict. They shouldn’t represent the same thing but they do, because she could never be born without a left shoulder blade and she could never avoid walking barefoot on carpet. Hypothetically yes, but no.
The green in the dress is so beautiful, so complimenting to her features. They agree. She doesn’t want the stranger to agree, let alone have a comment. The stranger says that she can request it’s absence whenever she wants but it doesn’t understand that that kind of radical alteration to her body and mind might not be possible yet.
_________
She walks away. Any good mirage of a lady would first falter and then resign herself to do the same. For what is worth grasping when every step forward devalues herself in her own mind. It’s a paradox to be independent in the modern age. It’s as if the modern age hasn’t existed at all. The only thing that remains is the memory of our sensations already passed. Except memory isn’t real and we’ve never actually experienced the present. The message ceratinaly has not changed; the method perhaps.
So she kept walking away on the mildly humid night. Nothing was particularly wrong, nor was it news, but the dull reverberation of a stranger’s voice on the plush air felt like the unsurprising blow of a repeated bruise now finally felt. The blunt break is the best, the softening blow of the thought long precipitated within the mind.
The simmering realization of yet another supposed freedom remains. And so she walks away. Slowly as if peeling one’s body from a particularly extensive fly trap, but without twisting back to peek at what has been left behind. Because, if there’s one modicum that has been gifted, at least delusionally, within the new century, it’s her pride.
And so she walked away. The stranger’s voice remained; it would never leave. Because it didn’t belong to any one particular person, not even the one from which she departed. It belonged to the tango partner of her youth. The stranger that wandered through every aspect of her surname’s outline sauntering away in the damp dark. The stranger who never used to be a conscious companion until a secondary, violent pubescent awakening. The stranger would never leave her, despite the countless times that she would leave it.
The act of leaving could have been as crisp as a dry piece of birch, but both the external and the internal stranger denied this self-actualization. Instead it moaned and wept and slopped off like the remainder of a cancerous flesh.
And so she walked away. With a heap of her skin sloughing away behind her in the soggy air.
So yeah, that was something different!
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