In defense of buying trendy clothes

The New York Times has a guide called "How to Buy Clothes That Are Built to Last." It's in the Climate section, and so has a slightly different approach than investment-piece fashion advice along the lines of, here are some super-expensive trench coats that you will Wear For Years. Except, is it? Consider the opening sentence: "You may have removed last season’s hot fashion trend from your closet, but the effect of that item still lingers, from the energy used in its production to its continued presence in one of the nation’s landfills." Or, further into the guide: "we can rewear an outfit that our friends saw us in on social media." The idea being that the obstacle to sustainability is trendiness. It's a truism. But is it... true?

The actual reason people keep buying new clothes is that clothes only function properly for so long. Our culture defines 'polished-looking' as 'wearing the sorts of clothes that show wear, so that you can make it clear you have not in fact owned them for years.' So even though my sweatpants (one pair in gray, the other navy) have held up for years and despite tremendous amounts of wear (including I think to the hospital to give birth?) still look and fit as well as ever, these do not, apparently, count as 'dressed.' Our culture expects us to wear clothes that fit properly, which limits shelf-life, unless your build never fluctuates, in which case, by all means do buy a single pair of jeans to get you through the next decade.

And even if you don't think of yourself as trendy, you will very likely find something unclassifiable that's just off about clothes bought a while ago. Not all old clothes, but some, and... it's impossible to know which those will be ahead of time! When I look back at clothes I've purchased or admired over the years, some still seem interesting, others not, and I can't find much rhyme or reason to the divide. While I may have (repeatedly) overestimated my interest in button-down shirts and brown leather accessories, these are personal patterns, not related to trends. If my interest in pleated midi skirts has waned, it's coming to terms with how they look on me. The style itself is still around. If anything, when I've gone for 'classic' I haven't ended up much wearing whatever it was. The strategy of steering clear of trendy-seeming clothes does not work. Which brings us to the point of this post.

If you buy something you really like, you're more likely to wear it. That's the only pattern I can figure out. What does it mean, this really-liking of a garment? Maybe you were persuaded by purveyors of trendiness to like it. Maybe the desire didn't emerge spontaneously and timelessly from your heart of hearts. Maybe your attraction to the garment wasn't pure and untainted by the influence of other human beings. But what of it? Maybe a very of-the-moment look from 2019 will turn out to be part of your look forever or at least for a good long while. I'm sure trendiness influenced my 2011 boots decision but I still have those boots! I still wear that sale-rack athleisure reflective-material jacket! And yep, still on the Breton-striped bandwagon.

Oh, and: still doing the ombré hair even though that's over and would not say no to a skim mocha or arugula salad, either. I spent more than was sensible if still not as much as I feared might be necessary on an Aritzia blazer in this fall's plaid, Frank Costanza-inspired trend and it's so fabulous that I get the sense it has staying power for me, whether or not the college students to whom the blazer is explicitly marketed (I'm not kidding; a "dorm room" is referenced in the description) still wear theirs years down the line. Best to face facts that everything might be a fleeting trend and even if it is, you personally can extend it indefinitely.

Post-postpartum

The verdict is given at the six-week appointment: Are you back to normal? Your normal, not Gisele's, but both may seem similarly implausible. Six weeks is when - at least if you're nursing - your uterus is supposed to have shrunk down to its original size. This is a giant unspoken euphemism for: if you still look pregnant at that point, it's the pregnancy-exacerbated addiction to salt-and-pepper potato chips, but not pregnancy itself. (Or just... pregnancy more generally, which involves more than an expanded uterus? But anyway.)

The personal: It has been 10 weeks and while I feel a bunch more with-it than I did, say, 5 weeks ago, I still look... not just bigger than pre-pregnancy, but somewhat pregnant. I had and hadn't expected this. All bodies are different, so there's no actual answer to how permanent this and all other bodily changes might be.

There's all sorts of empowering language about this online: You just created and birthed a whole new human being! Be easy on yourself! Which, sure. But then there's life in the clothes limbo where the maternity clothes are excessive (or just too dreary to keep wearing), but all pre-pregnancy clothes - pants at least - seem like they belong to a small doll of some kind, so little of your current body would they possibly contain. (Admittedly this was the case with those black Levis from the get-go. What was I thinking there?)

And then this is all paired with the not-vanity physical aspects of recovering from childbirth - as much as a line can even be drawn.

And if it's winter in Canada, and your preferred form of exercise is jogging, and the only gym nearby costs $180 a month and that's with a discount, getting back (?) in shape - at whatever size - is a challenge.

What I've found, maybe of use to others, maybe not:

-Move more, but don't diet. This is essential if nursing but probably the way to go regardless. So I'm forcing myself to jog, a bit, despite the terrible weather. (High school winter track, in an only slightly less-cold climate, was good preparation.) Also to do many dog-walks I might otherwise pass off to spouse or dog-walker. But apart from trying harder to remember that vegetables exist (even in winter, in Canada) and staying away from potato chips, I'm not changing how I eat.

There are practical aspects to this choice as well as values-ish ones. Practical being, having a newborn means scarfing down something, and quickly, when time permits. (I have not turned into a different person, so there are not casseroles or bean soups going into my freezer on Sunday nights. But now is not the moment for the David Tanis recipe where use of foraged asparagus is encouraged.) Values more like, I have a daughter, one who for better or worse will not be coming of age on the Upper East Side in the 1990s. Worse perhaps global-politics-wise but in terms of having the option of avoiding thinness-is-everything culture, better, I hope?

It can hard if you grew up in that culture to look at your newly-very-pudgy waistline and not think, this is a problem something must be done about. So I sort of allow myself to think this, but then remind myself that whatever the build is that results from eating normal food and getting some exercise is the one I'm best off having.

-'Invest' in jeans in the size you actually are. Just do it, don't overthink. I resisted doing so at first, both because I believed (correctly) that my build at 3 weeks postpartum or whatever would not continue, and because I figured (incorrectly!) I'd be fine alternating between sweats and leggings indefinitely. Turns out, it does wonders for a sense of normalcy, of resumption of life outside a postpartum haze, to put on some pants - yes, with stretch - that have a zipper.

But... get nice jeans. I don't necessarily mean $200 (a road I personally have yet to go down, now or otherwise), just ones that you genuinely like, and that don't feel temporary. Because who knows! They very well might not be temporary, and you don't want to be aiming for size goals rather than in-shape-ness ones all because you're sick of wearing crummy jeans in your 'just for now' size. I ordered two pairs from Everlane - one in black, inspired by Andréa in "Call My Agent!", and another in dark denim inspired by my need for a pair of regular jeans that can close around the waist - that are so nice that this will be the silver lining if I wind up having to get rid of all my previous pants.

-In-person clothes-shopping is not going to happen. Certainly not if you're carrying your baby in a carrier, or exclusively nursing (which in my experience means you never have more than 2 hours apart from baby, and get antsy after 30 minutes). Or if it does, don't expect to try anything on in the store. Normally I don't do online shopping. I have gotten over this.

-Accessories, always the obvious choice when clothes are for whatever reason complicated. But shoes are tricky because walking around with a baby (in winter, at least) is limiting style-wise even to those who don't normally wear anything all that impractical. (Got a pair of Blundstone boots in the third trimester and am trying to remember that I own other shoes, but the traction they provide on the perma-ice outside is making this difficult.) Bags, same - whatever it is will need to fit some baby-stuff, if not necessarily nearly as much as diaper bags suggest. But I ordered myself a bracelet (this, from Shlomit Ofir), which just arrived, and now feel massively more elegant. Have painted my nails red to go with. And the velvet scrunchies I bought in my last third-trimester outing-of-sorts (tacked onto a trip to the dentist) do liven up a sweatpants look.

The Uniqlo-clad poorhouse

Isn't it sad when a new mother has to pay her nanny (wild how nannies expect payment), and the nanny budget dips into the designer-clothing one, and she's forced to wear Uniqlo and J.Crew? Except... is that even the takeaway of this hard-to-interpret Vogue essay?

In one sense, it's a straightforward tiny-violins plight, complete with the requisite gesture acknowledging the far greater "sacrifices made by less well-advantaged moms in New York City, and across the country." In other countries as well, even, but I guess this was U.S. Vogue, so. As someone whose baseline apparently tragic existence involves a more restrained approach to shopping than the author's crisis-budget one, I should roll my eyes, right? But, in another sense... I don't work in fashion! No one expects me to go beyond circa-2009 Uniqlo! (But oh, I do go beyond it. There's some 2018 Uniqlo in there as well.) The author is in a different situation:

It’s not like I had a wardrobe allowance before the baby, and I wasn’t an influencer receiving bags of free stuff. ... The nanny budget made me feel shabby, especially during Fashion Week, when the unspoken dress code is in-season only and other women in my sphere show up in new outfits that easily tally up in the high four figures. Daily. 

So... maybe the issue isn't so much that she, Woman Clothes-Shopper, simply couldn't resist the latest thing, but that hunting down and purchasing the latest thing - sans reimbursement - is a requirement in that industry? Maybe the problem is an industry where a designer wardrobe is expected, but some entity other than one's employer (i.e., independent wealth, or credit-card debt) is expected to pay for it? A problem both for socioeconomic-representation-type reasons, and for industry workers themselves, who are maybe sort of taught to believe that the thing they have to do for work is actually just a frivolous craving they ought to suppress. It's an extreme version of the gendered thing where a woman can feel guilty for spending that she'd also feel guilty not doing. (We have seen this before.)

Which gets, tangentially, at the second question the essay left me with, inspired by this sentence: "We were about 1 percent shy of the 1 percent and we were broke." If that's indeed the case, and this "we" involves a husband as well, and the wife's job is fashion editorial which probably pays OK but probably not 2%-income-level OK, then... what was the husband spending? Was this genuinely that the wife's clothes-shopping — again, a requirement of sorts for her job — got out of hand? (Was she buying Manafort coats?) The clothes, that is, plus some car payments she mentions, which, again, for people that rich, would be negligible? Or is it possible, given the scale of all this, that he was maybe also overspending, and maybe... by quite a bit?

Or! Was this one of those cases where a childcare budget is viewed as coming from the woman's income? That sort of seems to have been the case, because the sentence, "My husband and I pooled our funds and paid her for that week," comes only after she has insufficient funds of her own money to pay (cash, which is another story...) her nanny's wages. 

Sure, I want to praise the author for resisting overshare, and for not spilling what could be potentially quite dirty familial laundry. But in restricting the story to one her own clothes-shopping habits, the author winds up telling a story that both reinforces clichéd notions of what overspending looks like, and that somehow feels as if it's missing key pieces.

Maternity garb, Part III: for when you're a sphere

As best as I can tell, pregnancy has two phases: the bit where it's hard to know if the whole thing is real, and the one where it's this tremendous effort to get out of bed or off the couch or out of a chair, can't bend over, can't go more than two hours without eating, can't bear the oppressive heat of weather over 65F, and pregnancy feels not only real but eternal. I've gone from not entirely believing I was pregnant to not remembering what it felt like not to be.

This second phase seems to coincide with passersby noting my sphericalness, and accurately noting the cause. It's hard for me to criticize them for this, as the interest has been manifesting itself mainly as concern: the man in the supermarket warning me not to slip on some spilled bulk red lentils.... because. Or the pastry-shop barista glancing at my midsection, then alerting me to the fact that their cappuccino normally comes with two shots of espresso. (I avoided the slippery lentils, and requested a cappuccino with one shot, all the while realizing every other espresso-based coffee out I've been having — not many, but not none — has probably had two.) Concern, or congratulations, sometimes with an "is this your first?", a friendly, small-talk question I don't blame anyone for asking, but one that nevertheless serves as a reminder that I am in fact 10,000 years old. I have yet to be criticized for Doing X While Pregnant, but this could well be because I don't do anything remotely interesting, unless going to a supermarket that sells bulk lentils counts.

But back to the theme of this series: shopping. Parts I and II addressed the question of what to wear when nothing fits. This, the third installment, is about when nothing fits, and you're also incredibly sweaty and uncomfortable. Here's what seems to be working:

-Men's t-shirts. All-cotton, and the cheaper the better. These will do; bought them in black and white, and they seem to shrink nicely but not excessively in the dryer. The main thing is for t-shirts to be long enough. That and not to wear existing now-far-too-tight ones, even if they do kind of fit (as in, are long enough), because "kind of" isn't cutting it, not for the sweat situation.

-The more tent-like of cotton t-shirt dresses. This seemed expensive for what it is but was very much worth it.

-Slip-on shoes. If you can't bend over, laced sneakers are tricky, although I have a pair of running-turned-regular sneakers that can kind of function as slip-ons. Mainly, though, it's either the Birkenstocks or the mules. The plan for colder weather: slip-on Frye boots from 2011, which I've already had re-heeled and de-salted in anticipation.

-Shameful but true: the NYMag recommended Lululemon Align leggings. The cropped in navy, and the full-length (or in my case, "7/8" length) in black. In retrospect I should have just gotten the full-length black ones, since every time it's been too warm for long leggings, cropped have been a bad idea in that regard as well. I did not need two pairs of these.

And here's what hasn't worked, or has proven more daunting:

-Painter's overalls. I don't know. I had this fantasy of finding the (white, industrial) overalls worn by some patissier contestants in a French professional-baking competition, but hadn't quite thought this through, and will be learning how one returns this from non-Amazon Amazon dealers. (They're both enormous and too-small, with an extra added bit of ill-fitting in the chest area.) Because I live in hope, and because they were at last reduced into the cheap-rather-than-moderate threshold, I have gone and ordered a pair of white actually-maternity overalls from an Etsy seller in Latvia. 

-Sweaters? Some blips of slightly cooler weather alerted me to the fact that my maternity garb is all summer-wear, which, living in Toronto, may pose a problem. Of my existing sweaters, a couple seem like they sort of fit now, which means who knows re: a month from now, while the rest either don't or aren't even worth trying.

The wide world of sweaters I don't already own has proven tricky. I became fixated on the notion of a drapey sweater that doesn't close, thereby eliminating size concerns. This led me to a weekend-long (well, part of the weekend) quest to track down the (absurdly-named) Diderot sweater at Aritzia. Sold out! Oh no! Except in the branch where they still had it, and it was... not an attractive garment, at least not once on. It's one of those things where it's not entirely clear how it's meant to be worn. A similarly spacious wrap sweater at the same store was a whole lot better but also $178 (!!!) which is unfathomably more than I'd spend on a regular sweater so definitely not in the cards where maternity's concerned. Then there was the actual maternity store in the mall, which... doesn't really sell sweaters?, but which did have some impressively hideous fitted-track-suit-jacket-type things.

Anyway. I wound up with this, from a millennial-oriented concept shop of all places, because the garment is unquestionably big/long enough, and is sort of pretty maybe?, and because $40 is not $178.

-Baby stuff? This has involved a lot of browsing but, as yet, no purchasing.

-A two-bedroom apartment? This too has involved much browsing but no purchasing.

Maternity garb, Part II: realities

To discuss maternity clothes is to discuss bodies. There's no one situation of The Pregnant Lady (or to expand further, and open up another whole set of questions: The Pregnant Person). Every thought you've ever had about your body — including relating to the pregnancy itself — is going to enter into the feelings that impact the day-to-day question of how to get dressed. I come from this topic from a specific place, as does everyone. Consider this not so much a privilege disclaimer as an everyone's-different reminder. What's been easy for me may have been difficult for others and vice versa. With that, moving on...

The challenges:

 -There’s an assumption behind maternity fashion advice one finds online: that you want to look pregnant rather than fat. On the one hand I get it – I am a woman living in our society! On the other, if you’re a woman who shows from approximately day one, you maybe don’t want to announce to every single person you interact with. So the first step is giving up the notion that you’re looking for something that’s somehow both slimming (or as it’s euphemized, in this age that gestures at body-positivity, flattering) and pregnancy-obscuring. Ultimately you may want some clothes from both categories. But ultimately-ultimately, at least in summer, at least if you're as short as I am, nothing's going to be ambiguous.

 -Also tricky: the conventionality of maternity clothing. Or maybe just the limited options, which assume a universally-shared female end goal of looking like the “after” on an episode of “What Not To Wear.” Or there are shirts that announce, with Pinterest-era graphics, the situation (with "mama" or baby-inside or whatever). If you're someone who values dressing like yourself, whatever that means to you, you kind of have to avoid maternity clothes, but sizing-wise, this may not be possible. 

-Oh yeah, and the big one: $$$. At just the moment in life when saving money starts to seem particularly important, it becomes necessary to buy all these new clothes for yourself. And not just any clothes, but ones a) that will only fleetingly fit, and b) that cost a ton because they can. (Forgive me for being a peasant, but $150 strikes me as steep for a plain t-shirt.) Avoiding the bleak-for-different-reasons paths of getting ripped off and wearing absolutely any potato sack involves a bit of thought.

Practically speaking, what works:

 -Oversize t-shirt dresses. Helpful in that I already owned some. Muji probably has the best (I have the Breton-striped, short- and long-sleeved), made of sturdy but chic material, and with pockets. Uniqlo Marimekko had one (also with pockets) but I think that’s done now. Regular Uniqlo (along with Gap) seems as if it would have this, but not so much. H&M is the place to go if you're willing to forgo pockets but just get $10 t-shirt dresses. And if you’re short, you have the option of actual long t-shirts, or so I tell myself. (I realize that in a pale-blue shirt-thingy I recently bought at Kotn, it looks like I’m going out without pants on, but I can live with this.) Giving up entirely on the idea of a waistline helps. Think enormous t-shirt, not merely jersey-material (but likely too fitted) dress.

 -Hideous but loose shorts. I bought some at H&M in very much the spirit of, this'll do, but when it’s very hot out and I need to take my dog out in something with pockets, they do the trick. They don’t have the maternity band (they’re not maternity shorts), which means they work when it’s a million degrees out. Why hideous? Among other reasons, because they’re not actually cut to be worn low-slung, so when I wear them it looks like I haven’t pulled my shorts up correctly. Oh well.

-Lululemon Align cropped leggings. New York Magazine was right, what can I say? I went two sizes up, and they fit where other leggings do not. Something to do with the waistband material. The seams are a bit itchier than one might ask of leggings that, with tax, approach the shame-on-me $100 mark, and the pocket situation is minimal (a tiny one hidden in the waistband), but... I haven’t found better? Very Tribeca Whole Foods Mom, even if she'd go for one of the more obscure and still pricier brands. (Did I mention I'm embarrassed I bought these leggings, even though I've worn them a ton, because doubtless somewhere out there are much cheaper ones that would have been fine?)

-Actual maternity bottoms from the mall. I’m just not a dresses-every-day person. It’s not what I generally feel like wearing, and it’s not even practical from a summer-laundry perspective. (I’m not buying a laundry cycle’s worth of t-shirt dresses, and if 85 degrees feels like 150 for me, I’m not keen to re-wear these a bunch of times before washing.) And the leggings-or-terrible-shorts thing was getting old. The prospect of buying clothing this fit-specific online didn’t appeal, so I (braved the unspecified threat to popular sites that day in downtown Toronto and) went to Thyme Maternity and got some regular shorts and jeans, both with the (too warm but what can be done) stretchy band, which together came to about $100. They're both... fine, I think — needed a shorter length in the jeans, so will see once those arrive. Both seem an improvement over the one such item I had already bought – Uniqlo maternity pants, I think the one style they sell, which were an acceptable $40 CAD but went from too big to too small, skipping the bit where they're meant to fit.

 -Random clothes you have around and can still squeeze into. I’m thanking my past self for not getting rid of enormous sleep t-shirts or very washed-out regular ones, but am also able to get into my usual t-shirts, even if they look very odd at this point. I even found a sleeveless, cowl-neck black dress from the Uniqlo Inès de la Fressange range circa 2014 that wasn't fabulous as a regular dress but that may now be my only correctly-fitting garment.

-The pregnancy-book advice to 'just wear your partner's clothes!' I was very skeptical at first in my case, what with the height difference, and was picturing going around in jeans a foot too long. But this approach may be what means I don't need to order maternity t-shirts. A task I'd been dreading, not least because wherever you get them, they'll cost three times that of an equivalent regular t-shirt. And what are you then supposed to do with those side-ruched, stretch-material t-shirts afterwards?

And now, what seems like it would work but does not:

 -Empire waist dresses. I know this is the look that says ‘pregnancy’ but this is, again, because the style gives the illusion of a larger midsection, and not because it’s actually comfortable when pregnant. The waist won’t fall where it needs to, and or will go from fitting right one day to near-bursting the next. I got an absolutely stunning navy prairie-ish dress at Durumi, a Korean boutique on Queen West – $35 down from $129! – that would be perfect for Park Slope Writer Mom. Empire-ish waist, button-up torso. Pockets. It fit perfectly for a week or so, but if I try again it will almost certainly rip.

 -The jeans you find when Googling “maternity jeans,” or stocked in the posh maternity boutiques where you can go to buy bras but not under any circumstances look around at the clothes. These jeans are $300 (in Canada, at least) and even if they’re good (which, judging by how they looked on a Tribeca Whole Foods Mom I saw in the Toronto obgyn waiting room, they very well might be), they can’t be that amazing, because they're still jeans with a strange stretchy inset, and that will only fit correctly for a few minutes. If I were ever to spend $300 on jeans (unlikely), I’d want at least the prospect of decent cost-per-wear, which this situation pretty much rules out.

Maternity garb, Part I: fantasies

Before the day came when I, personally, required special clothing to accommodate an ever-expanding midsection, I had only the vaguest idea of maternity style, or put another way, what you do when, abruptly, none of your clothes fit anymore, and yet the societal requirement to go outside dressed persists. This is at once the very least on my mind at this moment and, in a practical, day-to-day sense, the most. There's an immediate, daunting quality to trying and failing to get dressed in the morning, which the bigger-picture questions (aka anxieties) sort of lack. It is a good, and (relatively) manageable, problem to have.

While pregnant women of course come from throughout society, and have the whole spectrum of attitudes towards their situation, the ones I especially noticed, and who formed my impression of maternity style, were those who Garfinkel and Oates sing about in “Pregnant Women Are Smug.” Women, that is, for whom pregnancy is the pinnacle of bourgeois success. Who’ve checked every box and have now arrived at that one as well. Whose pregnancy look epitomizes that general sense that everything in their lives have lined up.

Do such women exist, really? Almost certainly not - with pregnancy at least as much as everything else in life, particularly where bodies are concerned, there's a lot, even in this supposed post-privacy age, that goes unsaid, or unpublicized.

What I was picking up on, then, was an aesthetic, or more accurately, two overlapping ones: Tribeca Whole Foods Mom, and Park Slope Writer Mom. As for why these two, it’s because these are the women several years my senior who I’d see when walking around New York in my early-mid 20s, as a grad student living in neighborhoods around or not far from such women.

Tribeca Whole Foods Mom – epitomized by Gwyneth Paltrow, who for all I know has never even been to that Whole Foods – involves being unfathomably rich, and toned in a way only possible with infinite money and personal training. There’s an enormous rock of an engagement ring. She wears head-to-toe name-brand, but understated, athleisure. She swaps out her Chanel and La Mer beauty products for still-pricier organic alternatives. This lady would have been selected to do a maternity installment of Into The Gloss’s Top Shelf, and would have inspired my 26-year-old, very much not-pregnant self to buy some too-expensive non-toxic nail polish. A California approach, but a bicoastal lifestyle. 

Park Slope Writer Mom, then, involves not quite as much money, but still a bunch. (A brownstone is likely, but could well have been purchased before those got so expensive.) Its essentials: clogs and in-the-know literary tote bags. As for clothing? Those long, notoriously plain dresses sold in Brooklyn boutiques where everything’s at least $400 (but ethically produced!) and nothing’s on sale. She was probably eating organic already but now that she's pregnant this isn't even a question. She not only has feelings about being pregnant (who doesn’t??) but the openness, talent, and connections needed to weave those into a well-received essay or memoir.

These two aesthetics, then, sit in the back of my mind as I try to sort out my own maternity style. I say “the back” because ultimately the question of style has not much entered into it.

Here’s what happened: One day, my clothing all fit. (I’ve moved apartments a lot, so stuff that didn’t fit for other reasons hadn’t moved with me.) Then it was like, neat, my jeans are snug, I really am pregnant! Then, suddenly, and earlier than the internet said this would happen, even leggings were too tight to get on. Dresses and shirts that probably made me look pregnant when I was not didn’t work, either – maternity-esque is not good enough. The lower bit of my wardrobe became limited to sweatpants and (certain) running shorts, not that I'm running anywhere in them. And now, at just past the halfway point, t-shirts have become an issue.

What I was left with was more an engineering (and frugality) challenge than a fashion one: How can I go outside and look decent, in the covered-up sense, not necessarily the elegance one? How do I convince myself to get past my usual rule for clothing purchases — only buying stuff I desperately want and have contemplated for months — when the time has come to emergency-purchase any cheap pair of pocket-having shorts that are big enough but don't fall down? And least expected of all, given my previous experience of Toronto 'summer' as a whole lot of nothing for which a/c isn't even required: How do I combine these new proportions with the fact that it's ten trillion degrees out this year, and in my current state feels hotter still, in a world where "maternity" is code for "thick band of fabric going up to the armpits"? These questions and more will be addressed in Part II...

Anatomy of a troll: why the yoga pants story is a Work of Art

Some texts demand close readings, and none more so than today's NYT op-ed by Honor Jones, "Why Yoga Pants Are Bad for Women." First, we have the author: not, as some surmised, a pseudonym. But it's the piece itself that I can't put aside. By design, no doubt, but, just, wow. Nearly a thousand comments! (Including from the requisite dude who doesn't care about fashion, doesn't care so much that he simply had to comment on a fashion article. Maybe several variations - haven't combed through all 910.) A nerve was, as they say, hit.

As a traditional op-ed, it's... not the greatest. It's not urgent, not topical, not consistent, but *is* mean-spirited. The premise - "Whatever happened to sweatpants?" - falls apart instantly, upon noticing that lots of people these days do indeed wear sweatpants, just not on the elliptical machine because they're too warm for that activity. 

As a trolling, 2018 NYT op-ed page installment, however, it is magnificent. I have this compelling, inexplicable need to pinpoint why. Here goes:

Feelings journalism:

"I got on the elliptical. A few women gave me funny looks. Maybe they felt sorry for me, or maybe they were concerned that my loose pants were going to get tangled in the machine’s gears. Men didn’t look at me at all."

What we're getting, to be clear, is not a report on something that happened. We're getting the author's feelings about others' feelings about her, as she imagines them. Projection, in other words. Like the original viral (also New Years-ish-themed!) yoga-class hate-read (the one in xoJane), we have a story built around one person's private anxieties, but presented as if offering the views of actual other people. I don't do yoga - maybe it lends itself to this? At any rate, feelings journalism is outrage-bait, because the reader immediately sees through the rhetoric and is like, you don't actually know what these other people are thinking, hmm!

A forced feminist thesis:

"It’s not good manners for women to tell other women how to dress; that’s the job of male fashion photographers."

This is, I think, the key to the text. Jones is making a feminist case for women telling other women they're dressed all wrong. Because... well, because it's a woman saying it, and because it's kind of like high heels, except it isn't. The problem - which is to say, the genius - is that yoga pants aren't uncomfortable, or some sort of tax on being a woman. They're just... leggings, give or take, which more men would wear if this were socially acceptable. "We aren’t wearing these workout clothes because they’re cooler or more comfortable. [...] We’re wearing them because they’re sexy." 

Except, are we? If this is the Very Enlightened Feminist Case Against Yoga Pants, why does Jones refers to them as "pants that [...] threaten to show every dimple and roll in every woman over 30"? Is the issue that women shouldn't try to look hot at the gym, or - and how exactly is this feminist? - that women are trying and failing? 

But the over-30 addition is just part of the sinister genius of the op-ed. How many NYT readers (or others who come across the article) are women, over 30, who own stretch pants? Add to that trillion the men with opinions on stretch pants on women of various ages and physiques, and there you have it.

Sartorial side note: there was a time when leggings showed everything, but the technology has improved, which may explain why women are all wearing yoga pants these days.

#MeToo, misunderstood:

"We felt we had to look hot on dates — a given. We felt we had to look hot at the office — problematic. But now we’ve internalized the idea that we have to look hot at the gym? Give me a break. The gym is one of the few places where we’re supposed to be able to focus on how our bodies feel, not just on how they look. We need to remember that. Sweatpants can help."

This brings up an interesting angle: Why not concentrate your spending - and your primping - on gymwear? Maybe we've finally gotten it right - office clothes can be purchased for not much money at H&M or Uniqlo or whatever (black slacks, navy sweater, done), whereas the outfits worn in the setting that's both me-time (or me-time-adjacent) and a place where it's (relatively) OK to flirt (again, compared with at work; caveat that I've never actually belonged to a gym, and have no idea) are the ones you really save up for. Maybe leggings should cost more than blazers! In the name of work-life balance!

But what we're looking at here is, it's like the ukelele video. Choosing to mention the need to look hot at work, in a piece not really about that, but offering up only an ironic "problematic" as commentary, is... problematic! Which is, I think, the point.

Inconsistency:

"Frankly, I’m annoyed by the whole booming industry around women’s exercise..."

Is this an article about women wearing the wrong thing to the gym, or about it being wrong to be at the gym in the first place? 

Personal-finance judginess:

Telling people they're paying too much for X is just always always always irritating. You can't know that someone with $100 yoga pants didn't save up for those, or that this is somehow evidence of financial irresponsibility. Also? There are a whole lot of cheapo leggings out there, so the fact that a woman is wearing stretchy pants doesn't mean she's wearing those stretchy pants. And sales exist, as do thrift stores. As do people who quite simply knowingly pay a lot for workout wear because they want to, what's it to her???

The 2016 election:

"Pantsuits had a moment, back in 2016. I think women are ready to give them another chance."

Hillary! No troll is complete without the opportunity to spark a Twitter debate over whether Bernie would have, if given the chance, won.

The elusive Birkin fit

For the last few weeks, I've had this notion of finding a pair of vintage Levis-or-similar jeans. I'm almost certain I got the idea from the Aritzia website's denim category called "Better Than Vintage." The mere concept struck me as both wasteful (I am 34) and poser-ish (I am also, in some sense, 14). Why not actual vintage, if that's what you're looking for? After all, Instagram is chock-full of French women (such as) in incredibly flattering, by all accounts real-vintage pairs. These women live in France, where vintage US denim has almost got to be harder to find than in Canada, yet they seem to have figured this out.

The plan seemed straightforward enough. I knew, from past trips to vintage clothing stores, where in Toronto the racks full of vintage jeans could be found. And over the course of two recent outings, a brief one to Little Portugal and the Kensington Market, and a more extensive (-feeling) one to Parkdale, I saw them all. OK, not all, but it sure did start to feel that way. I can't say I tried them all on because it was clear from just glancing at them that they would not fit. Not fit, that is, because these were men's jeans. I am a 5'2" woman. While there's no law that says people of my gender and physique can't wear men's jeans, the aesthetic fact is that we cannot do so and have the jeans in question be fitted. The chances are already slim-so-to-speak that a woman my height and general appearance will look like this (or, to put this in slightly more realistic terms, this) under any circumstances, but putting on a pair of large men's jeans seems not to further the cause.

The place with the best selection as well as a useable dressing room was probably In Vintage We Trust, in Parkdale. Even there, they were all too big, except for I think one pair that was too small in the way I remember jeans often being too small in dressing rooms of my youth, before stretch denim became ubiquitous. That is, too small in the waist, hips, etc., but sort of cartoonishly enormous through the legs. A fit that's uncomfortable and unflattering at the same time, and not in the modern-silhouette sense. No matter which pair, what size and shape the circa-1998 label promised, it looked like if Elaine Benes had put on Jerry's jeans.

The fantasy of perfectly-fitting vintage jeans is a complicated one. On some level, it's like all clothing fantasies - about having a flawless-by-society's-harsh-standards physique and looking amazing, especially from certain angles. But it's also a branch of the broader effortlessness dream. The idea is half that you're someone who had all the time in the world to try on evvvvery last pair until you found the one made for your body (that is, a leisure fantasy), half that you just happened upon these ones that fit you great because you're you and you're the sort of person who falls ass-backwards - literally, in this case - into good luck. It goes beyond high-end athleisure, which, while also taking its appeal in part from exclusivity, is nevertheless accessible to everyone under a certain dress size and with $90 to spend on leggings. Finding form-fitting non-stretch pants, with no consistent sizing, is a challenge of another order. Thus the carefree, 'They're vintage!' one is meant to utter to one's Instagram influenced fan base. Easy-breezy.

The unseen effort, I suspect - for there's always some - is that these jeans have been altered. Given that the pseudo-Jane Birkins of Instagram are if anything slimmer than I am, that these jeans fit me wrong in the way that they did suggests to me that these other women are getting their jeans altered. Altered, that is, in width. Not hemmed - nothing so short-person and pedestrian. No, I mean taken in, in the legs especially, so as to fit like the new, stretch-having jeans, while somehow being all-cotton. I have now Googled it and it's apparently a thing. It's not that all the effortless-chic Parisiennes have spent hours in the equivalent of Parkdale (in the Marais, as I wistfully recall) combing through used menswear. Who has the time?

But I think it was the leisure aspect that appealed to me about this quest. The dream wasn't so much the jeans themselves as the afternoon or evening I'd have, trying on as many as I felt like, and stopping for a coffee along the way. Neither my weekdays nor weekends have been conducive to that lately. Imagine having the time to sort through a pile of jeans that made their way to a Toronto vintage shop and find ones that just happened to fit me right!

Then when, yesterday, I declared that I was free to spend Saturday afternoon just trying on all the jeans, all of them if I so chose, I was promptly reminded that trying on a heap of ill-fitting pants is not actually a relaxing way to spend an afternoon. Reminded, too, that a jeans quest sparked by a practical-ish need - the fact that my light-denim pair was falling apart and becoming generally unwearable - would not be answered by purchasing a pair of pre-owned pants of any kind. So I full on gave up, de-romanticized the quest for jeans, and spent approximately two minutes trying on and purchasing these, which will do the trick.

The Red Sweater(s)

It was a big-news week. So many huge, important stories tweeted out as must-reads, which I would notice here and there in between teaching, and which I am catching up on, one by one.

I do not have the bandwidth, though, for follow-through on any of the stories of the moment. What I will tell you about instead is sweater-shopping.

It all started - as these things not infrequently do - with a photo of Emily Weiss. More specifically: of the Into The Gloss / Glossier founder in a red sweater that was just so great. Céline, evidently, and discounted to a price at the high end of what I'd consider plausible for a sweater to cost full-price, and at any rate, that was over a year ago, so for this whole host of reasons, that specific sweater wasn't going to happen. But something like it, why not? I loved the idea of a bright red sweater - an everyday item not in a fade-into-the-background navy, gray, or black, like my other sweaters. A pop of confident, grown-woman color.

If I speak of a quest, it sounds as if I was devoting every moment from whenever I saw that photo until the moment of locating a sweater along those lines in an attempt at finding one. That would not be an accurate way of describing the last year or so, to put it mildly. But it would be fair to say The Sweater was always on some level in the back of my mind. It inspired the purchase of a rayon, long-sleeve, bright-red shirt from Uniqlo in New York. But upon return to Toronto, the moment had come. I was going to find this sweater.

Uniqlo did not come through in that regard. It had numerous variations, each not quite right: v-neck rather than crewneck, short-sleeve rather than long, dark crimson rather than the perfect bright red. They clearly have the right fabric, but use it only for this one $150 turtleneck dress, which is definitely not the thing I was looking for.

I don't know what came over me, as this is not my normal way of shopping, but I decided to look on eBay. Sure enough, there it was. The great advantage to being ancient is that I can tell, from a photo, if something is likely to fit me, and indeed, this did. Even with all manner of I-live-in-Canada fees, it was something like $80 (CAD) - not cheap but not outrageous. I was thrilled.

I became a notch less thrilled about it when the Everlane pop-up appeared in Nordstrom, and... there it was. The Sweater. In the right color, at least. Too expensive ($140ish), but still. I had to know. Did The Sweater exist, even if I wasn't about to buy it? The eBay one is a true, bright red, but more like cherry-red, a bit darker than the neon, almost orange red (think Nars Heat Wave) I had been imagining. (On Pinterest they look identical, which tells you something about the level of color difference we're talking about here.) Had I foolishly bought a sweater online, in some confusing and effectively non-returnable way, only to see The Sweater in person?

Was it foolish, though, given that I would not spend that much on a sweater, even if it were The Sweater?

I am pleased to report that the sweater I already bought is the superior entity, at least for my subjective purposes. The Everlane one fit me all wrong (too long and generally odd-fitting), and the material was flimsier. As for the color itself, while it's for sure the color of The Sweater, I can now see that the shade is - like all permutations of orange - not great with my coloring, whereas the slightly darker red seems to work.

If there's a moral to this story, it could well be that it's sometimes worth it to look for clothing in places other than Dundas and Yonge, with all due respect to that most relied-upon of intersections.

A most sophisticated trip to the Eaton Centre

Who is Inès de La Fressange, and why does her name being on an item of Uniqlo clothing make a person ("a person") that much more intrigued by it?

For reasons stemming from the timing of poodle-grooming and the necessity of a TTC day pass for this, I had an excuse yesterday to check out Inès de La Fressange's new line at Uniqlo. I realize this isn't the most exciting use of the one true weekend day of a long weekend, but it seemed like it would be relaxing. Which I'm going to have to say it was.

To be clear, I know exactly who Inès de La Fressange is, or as much as is possible from having read various La Fressange profiles over the years, retaining dribs and drabs. She's very tall and thin. French. A former-and-current model - not young, but so French that she gets to embody glamor at any age. But I doubt the idea is to appeal specifically to whichever subset of the population has read these profiles. It is, I suspect, her name - French and aristocratic, but with Inès suggesting a still more cosmopolitan sophistication.*  It costs 75 euros to have her name on an otherwise nondescript t-shirt. A sinkhole investigation finds a whole Fressangian merch empire akin to the part of Hudson Bay where they sell everything, including all these random wooden paddles, in the store's trademark stripes. No La Fressange paddles, I don't think, but door stoppers, dog leashes...

What does La Fressange's involvement entail? Presumably she's not personally stitching together each garment. Has she designed them? (She's evidently designing something.) Does she serve as muse for a Uniqlo designer (maybe?), or does she get a catalog to look through and say whether or not she approves of whichever style having the stamp of La Fressange? How do they decide that Fressange-anointed items should cost $10 more than their regular-Uniqlo equivalents? If still - and pardon this most peasant of observations - less than, say, Aritzia, which was what brought me there in the first place.

$50 plus tax later and I'm the owner of dark red thick-wale corduroy miniskirt that has Toronto winter (by which I mean fall) practicality written all over it. I'd like to think La Fressange would approve. I also kind of think I once saw her on the street in New York, and that she smiled at La Caniche, but it's possible some other tall, French-looking woman did this.

*Wikipedia tells me her full name is Inès Marie Lætitia Églantine Isabelle de Seignard de La Fressange - the capital "La" explaining why her last name isn't just "Fressange" but rather "La Fressange," which is spectacular - and that her grandmother was part of a French-Jewish banking family, which makes Inès herself vaguely Jewish, which makes me basically Inès de La Fressange.

The French Girl vs. The Frenchwoman

Despite thinking the whole thing is silly - and despite knowing, about as much as any American could, that the whole thing is nonsense - I've never quite been able to avoid falling for the whole Frenchwoman thing. I get - and have long since gotten - that the entire thing is based on a myth. It's subtly racist, classist, and more. It essentializes French women, who are real people, not objects for Anglo tourists to gawk at as fashion references. I know - believe me, I know! it's what my degree is in! - that there's more to France than ballet-flat shopping.

And yet.

The women in the posh parts of Paris do have great style. Yes, this is circular - "great style" is defined, in much of the world, as looking like a rich Parisian woman. But I was reminded of this last year, when I was back in Paris for the first time in several years. Gosh but did these women look fantastic. How boring of me to think this, but there it was.

I left feeling inspired to dress like the women I saw there... all the while realizing that this would have to involve clothes purchased elsewhere (because my Canadian dollars add up to 1/16th of a consignment blazer), and that once assembled by me, once on me, nothing particularly Parisian would result. It's not as if taking inspiration from French classmates and professors during grad school (one, in particular, of each, now that I think of it) left me looking Parisian. But was that ever the point?

My thinking is, the appeal of looking like a French woman is really two different things, depending on your age. When I was younger, it was about the gamine look. Not that I ever looked all that gamine - I was, and am, the wrong build for "gamine" - but the idea was to look understated, elegant, not trying too hard. It was a way to look nice but not sexy, which, day-to-day, especially when you're in your early 20s, has its practical advantages. "Gamine" is also a way of tricking yourself getting excited enough about dressing in work attire that shopping for that sort of clothing doesn't seem like a chore, or like a reminder that you're no longer a young person. (Without the myth, without the belief that you're somehow channeling a New Wave actress, you're just a grad student buying used J. Crew ankle-length slacks.)

As I got closer to 30, Frenchwoman style started to be something else: the promise of getting older but not, I suppose, giving up. To me, at almost-34, it seems like a way to look good that doesn't involve trying to look younger. Which is immensely appealing because looking younger is not a thing that's going to happen. Not for any of us. While French women hold no secret where DGAF-ness about aging is concerned (witness the skincare industry of that country), there does seem to be a thing where women of all ages look glamorous. It's an aspiration, even if the reality is, I'm an American with the collection of sweats (school-name-bearing and generic) to prove it.

This is what I think is happening: Younger women and even teen girls in that bit of Paris dress what would seem in the US (and, as I understand it, the UK) to be sort of middle-aged, but the look works for them. Older women dress... exactly the same as younger women, and it works for them, too, at least as well. There isn't, in those neighborhoods, much of a youth culture, at least where clothes are concerned, but nor is there an assumption that The Elegant Uniform is for daughters, not mothers or grandmothers.

My own vision for Older Frenchwoman Chic, for the look I aspire to/to age into/to wear if I can sustain Effort for long enough, is a bit different from the gamine uniform. Fewer Breton-striped shirts. More... black boots? Skirts rather than cutoffs? How far this project goes beyond my imagination, we shall see.

Who is cool enough for Howard Street?

It's never a good sign when, upon entering a store, you hear two young French women discussing how a salesperson had told them (and for this one of them switched to English, presumably the language of the interaction) they didn't have whatever it was in big enough sizes. These women were, you know, slender. Were they talking about the store they were exiting, or another shopping experience? That I can't say.

What I can say is the store this was: Reformation, on Howard Street. This is significant because there's this stretch of southeast SoHo that has this aura of ultimate cool. While I'd like to think I've aged out of being too intimidated to enter certain stores, that part of the city sets off that old apprehensiveness. From Outdoor Voices (been inside) to Glossier (wouldn't dare), Opening Ceremony (dared, for fear-overcoming purposes, really), it's all just so cool. It gets a tiny bit less intimidating west of Broadway, for reasons I don't entirely understand. Agnes b. is expensive, yes, but is not, like, judging me. Oak and Fort might seem minimalist and daunting if I didn't know it from Toronto and, more specifically, from the mall in Toronto.

Anyway. This bit of the city is near the one store where I do actually shop - Uniqlo, still Uniqlo, plus Muji when that's open, plus Housing Works but not the Housing Works in that part of town for some reason - so I decided to take a look. I was feeling confident, for some professional reasons, but also because the trench coat I'd been considering had been on sale in my size and in the color I wanted. (I'd also had luck at a Cosabella sample sale, which makes me think of the lyric 54 seconds into this video.) Maybe these stores... had sale racks? Maybe I would see something gorgeous and splurge?

I started with Outdoor Voices and was reminded that it is - at least to my insufficiently honed tastes - meh, even if the space does look like one of my favorite Toronto coffee shops. (Specifically: Early Bird.) Glossier, sorry, way too intimidating, plus I've already spent too much on things I've heard about on Into The Gloss, so the danger was great that I'd wind up leaving with eyebrow mascara, which is not something I am in fact on the market for.

At this point I was thinking it was time to get food, but I was so close to Reformation and had this vague sense from online that it would be filled with clothes like that French Birkin-esque model-socialite wears/designs. (She'd done a collaboration with them. Why do I know this?)

I went in. And the stuff was gorgeous. On point is I think how I'd describe it if I were someone young and cool enough to shop there. And rich enough. The clothes are (unlike my $60 trench coat, if less than my similarly-priced Theory-via-Housing Works blazer) ethically produced, at least according to the website, which means I can't moan about the prices without either feeling guilty or launching into a rant about how ethical fashion as a concept seems (sometimes but not always) designed to make people who can afford to spend a lot on clothes feel good about themselves.

Who are the women who wear these dresses? This one, say? They're young (as in, I would feel, at 33, too old for that one specifically; this I think I'm just the right age for, but a foot too short), but they have $200 to spend on a dress they couldn't wear to work... or could they? What are their jobs, or are they just professionally fabulous? They're presumably not women who'd be too intimidated to go into the Glossier showroom/store/whatever it is, but I suspect they're so cool they're on the list to get sent the eyebrow mascara for free.

My wonderful new bag, an escapist post

A little while back, I saw a handbag - the handbag - on a Japanese Instagram account. It was Hervé Chapelier, a brand popular with private school girls on Upper East Side circa 1998, and a look I'd always sort of associated with 15-year-old girls dressed like grown women, but in a preppy way. But! The bag was camouflage. Camouflage in very much the same pattern as a skirt I had, in either middle or high school, from a punk store, I think. A kilt, with a pin, but camouflage. I loved that skirt. Somehow this all came together and... perfection. Also hundreds of dollars. Also readily available in Japan (where the brand appears to still be a thing) but nowhere more convenient.

Then I had the brilliant insight that such bags exist elsewhere. And sure enough! The L.L. Bean version, with zipper, was $39 with free shipping. Technically a hunting bag, but apparently also useful for "dog training," in which case, very practical! The bag arrived today. Looking at it, and one of the other Chapelier varieties online, I'm wondering whether the high-end version wasn't inspired by the less-so. Or vice versa because clearly the $39-and-available version would win out. The lining looks identical, which suggests some influence in some direction.

At any rate, I know exactly how to style it because of this thing called Instagram. Conveniently, what it goes best with are striped shirts, jeans, and sneakers or ballet flats. Probably also white Birkenstocks. Basically everything I own. And in an unanticipated actually-practical plus, it fits my computer.

No, this is not an ad; I'm not angling for any further tote bags. This one, however, is fantastic.

I want to like it: Summer 2016 trend ambivalence

Somewhere in that nebulous region between a desired/cherished clothing item or accessory and one that inspires indifference are the following:

-Rompers

They can look nice, I now understand, after a few months there of thinking it was odd how all the adult women in Toronto were dressing like toddlers. It grows on you. But... the bathroom. How do you use public restrooms when in a one-piece? Once you've Googled to find out how you'd go to the facilities in a given article of clothing, you're probably not purchasing it.

-Bucket bags

So chic! So plausible! So useless if it rains!

-Cutoffs

If Emily Weiss was wearing something in 2013, it's to be expected that the merely civilian-fashionable are wearing the same thing now. It's the look; bonus points if, when asked where the shorts are from, you reply with an insouciant, 'vintage Levis.' This is assuming that you're someone who can't go outside in shorts without being asked their provenance. This is not my situation. ('J. Crew outlet store' just doesn't have that ring to it, so it's for the best.) But I considered cutoffs. I browsed the used-clothing racks in front of a couple shops in the Kensington Market. I lost interest, partly because I'm not convinced shorts made out of thick denim (the only kind that works for the fringe and fit to be right) are really the way to go when it's 90 degrees and humid (even in Canada!), but mostly because - and this may well be Canada-specific - the look that shouts effortlessness is expensive. It was something like $35 for someone's used shorts. Relatedly...

-Athleisure

The entire country of Canada is basically sponsored by Lululemon. Every woman, and surprisingly a lot of men, are in this clothing and/or carrying its reusable tote bags. There are graffiti'd ads for the store on my street. Yes, it's the most attractive workout-wear. And yes, the brand is cheaper in Canada. No, still not cheap. As with cutoffs, the question is always, why would I buy this casual thing that costs at least as much as a gorgeous not-casual item would? I know this marks me as a Bad Millennial to think this way, but so be it.

-Loafers

Loved the idea of a sturdier, perhaps more modern, alternative to ballet flats. So after the L.L. Bean dog-walking ones disintegrated, I bought - no, invested in, as they were expensive-ish and purchased to be practical, to teach in - a pair of black Salamander loafers. Loafers which... never quite crossed over from frumpy to chic, and more to the point, which never broke in, and which remained uncomfortable in that very specific way shoes can, where they regularly destroy all your socks.

-Off-the-shoulder shirts

I'd wanted a black, fitted one, but never found the right one, and wound up wanting, and ultimately over the span of a couple months, getting (and wearing!) a pale blue striped one and a solid white one. Both look nice, I think, but never quite right. Never quite how I'd imagined. The blue one is too cropped, while the white one keeps riding up, as in, it's only off-the-shoulder if I periodically pull it down, and is entirely incompatible with such activities as, say, letting a dog into a dog run. And I'm not sure they're worth the extra sunscreen I've learned they require, ever since getting my worst (and only!) sunburn in ages in the blue one.

-Oh, and why not a food item? Bowls

There's a place near my apartment that sells vegetarian, gluten-free $12 lunches. Its clientele is very glamorous, and sometimes I think, I should be someone who occasionally spends $12 on an Instagrammable bowl of cuisine-less bland slop. But then I remember the superior alternatives - toasting a frozen Montreal-style bagel at home or, on splurgier occasions, getting a similarly $12-ish but substantial bowl of ramen. Toronto has excellent food options; the ones that are sad, arctic imitations of southern California can probably be skipped.

The long-anticipated Defense of Stuff

The piece I wrote recently for the New Republic about stuff vs. experiences seems to have gotten some interest. Elissa Strauss put the ideas into context helpfully in Slate, while Rebecca Schoenkoff had fun with the topic at Wonkette. The Atlantic included the piece in a "highlights" roundup. Miraculously I can still walk through the streets of Toronto unnoticed, but it's only a matter of time until we're talking sunglasses-and-autographs territory.

And there's now even a Bloggingheads on it! I got to debate materialism with Aryeh Cohen-Wade, who made the case for experiences. I was... meant to make the case for stuff, but never quite got there. What I did instead was make the point that much of what's often viewed as worse about 'stuff' applies no more to stuff than to experiences. The case, in other words, against being anti-stuff.

Because I ramble (slightly) less in writing, here's a second attempt at the positive argument for enjoyment of stuff:

For some people - for whichever mix of we-were-socialized-to and we're-just-like-that - it's fun to buy and/or make new things. This is a broad category that includes clothes-shopping and cooking, home decor and book accumulation. It doesn't mean enjoyment of all these categories, or indiscriminate enjoyment of any one of them. I can't speak to what it means for all, but for me, it means having a particular clothing item/recipe/book in mind (not quite at the home-decor life-stage, she types from her it'll-do IKEA couch) and being pleased to wear/use/read it.

But to simplify matters, I'll stick with the big one: clothes. That's the one with some shame attached. No one is judging me for owning condiments (with the possible exception of a broker my landlord hired to rent out our place, who passed along the not-false information that clear surfaces in the kitchen would make his job easier), or calling book-consumption shallow. But just saying I like clothes makes me sound cretinous. It demands disclaimers, apologies. But I'm going for positive here, so I'm going to save those for later.

Here's what 'liking clothes' involves, for me: I think of things I want to wear, inspired by women I know, or who I've seen on the street in Toronto, or on the street elsewhere when I have a chance to experience elsewhere, or on TV shows (female detectives!), or on fashion blogs (such as there still are), or because - and here I'm thinking specifically of the cherry-blossom sneakers; no other example is coming to mind - because I've seen something in a store window and thought how fantastic it is that this item even exists. I don't just go and buy all of it at once, both because $$$ and because that wouldn't be any fun. (How many times can I refer to Kei's brilliant concept of a "wanty list"?)

Because it's not about wanting white Birkenstocks since seeing a woman in Toronto with roughly my build and clothing color scheme wearing them. It's about sorting out which I'm looking for, in which material. And all that only after thinking about what, of what I already own, I'd wear them with. While I don't quite still view my wardrobe in terms of different fashion personalities, there's nearly always a vision for what will be worn how. What look it's all going for. And I'm not really an impulse-shopper. If I go to a store without a specific item in mind, or with only a vague plan ('I will buy a summer dress'), I wander around with... exactly the attitude of someone who hates shopping, and leave without buying anything.

But I got the sandals, and wearing them is great. I feel more myself in an outfit that I like, more together. And conveniently for me, I'm not so fickle as to require constant changing-it-up in the clothing department. If anything, I make the #KonMari mistake of hanging onto clothes (shoes) beyond repair, simply because I totally would still wear them if they hadn't fallen apart (red patent ballet flats), and sometimes do because... red patent ballet flats! Yes, that's what 'liking clothes' can mean - liking what you own so much that when it falls apart or no longer fits, this is a disappointment, so you keep wearing things a little too long. How oddly... not-wasteful.

For me - and who else would I have the authority to speak for on my very own Weblog? - putting in effort in this area is a matter of self-confidence, or something along those lines. At times when I've felt sort of ugh, I haven't felt I deserved either new clothes, or, on some level, even to wear the nicer things I already own. For others, who knows? If you're someone whose "ugh" leads to purchasing the entire contents of the nearest mall, this is not your experience, and maybe liking clothes is not, for you, a positive force in your life. For me, it is.

In a sense, the positive case for stuff is very straightforward. People like it! I don't need to explain why shopping can be fun, nor that in the history of humanity, people have acquired objects without falling into a sea of debt and hoarding. Thus why the anti-stuff tirades are always framed as, you only think you like stuff, but it's a mirage. What if it's just... not a mirage? What if the things in life that seem nice - new shoes, catching a glimpse of Justin Trudeau at the Pride parade - actually are?

And now the handwringing:

To like clothes isn't to like all clothes. Nor is it necessarily to like status clothes, or the clothes of the moment, although I see nothing wrong with either of these factors trickling into the great unknowable that is why we like the things we do. Nor does it mean spending a lot, or too much relative to income, on clothes. Nor, indeed, does it mean owning more clothes than people who just wear whatever. It means getting enjoyment out of deciding what to purchase and, once you own it, how to style it. It's that simple. No great sin has occurred.

Or, put another way: Those who go out of their way to make sure everything they wear is either used or (definitively) ethically produced (as in, not just expensive and marketed as an 'investment') get to hold a moral high ground. Those who simply don't care what they wear and have closets full of clothes they're indifferent to don't get any good-person points for non-enjoyment of the mall.

Oh, and if this needs stating: To like clothes isn't to get tremendous joy in one's own reflection in the mirror. I'm 20 years past losing sleep over questions of whether I'm stunning or hideous, having too many years' worth of accumulated knowledge that I - like nearly all of us - am neither. I fall into the same category as most, which is to say that if dressed reasonably nicely, I look quite a bit better than I do in sweats.

I'm not clear where the line exists between stuff and experiences. Yes, a plane ticket is in one category, and a knick-knack ordered online, another. But rarely is it that straightforward. (Or nor even there: maybe the flight is to a shopping trip, and maybe knick-knack-browsing online is a wonderful experience!) In a sense, maybe that's where my beef with the experiences-are-better-than-stuff brigade comes from. So, so, so often, the things praised as "experiences" and therefore noble sound awfully... stuff-y, while the things derided as "stuff" are basically about the experiences involved in acquiring the stuff, or that the stuff reminds someone of.

As came up on the Bloggingheads... while lots of stuff-acquisition is about keeping up with the Joneses, so, too, is plenty experience-having. Why does "stuff" suggest debt, while "experiences," which can be at least as expensive and ostentatious, get a pass? Indeed, given that everything gets photographed and shared these days, it's incredibly difficult for me to see how the mountain vista on a vacation that someone surely paid for is any different than a handbag.

In other words, insofar as there is a dichotomy, but it's not stuff vs. experiences. It's between the things (material or not) you actually get some sort of pleasure out of, and the ones you're under the impression you ought to consume, and consume reluctantly but out of a fear of what would happen if you did not. (There's a name for the latter category: kale.) If you find you're spending too much money and time on things you only think you should like, then... that's probably the place to cut back. As in, sure, the money I put towards new sandals could have gone towards one of those exercise classes that women of my demographics supposedly enjoy. But having once dipped a toe into the world of paying to exercise, I get the sense that it's not for me, not now, at least. I'd rather have the sandals, so I chose correctly.

T-shirts to blouses: In praise of the micro-makeover UPDATED

When I think of high school, specifically my time in high school, I think of gray t-shirts. V-neck, I believe. This wasn't like Mark Zuckerberg, with a gray-shirt uniform signaling a preoccupation with that which is more important. The gray t-shirt was, for me, a way of projecting invisibility. I wasn't making a thing of wearing gray t-shirts, and didn't only wear that color. It just seemed like the way to be clothed without endorsing a brand or asserting allegiance to a subculture (remember, these were the days when the worst thing ever was to be a poser). The gray t-shirt doesn't impose. It's so unimposing that it can go into the laundry with the whites or the colors. And you have to really try to find one that's expensive, which is another way of saying: they're cheap.

In more recent years - which is to say, I'm talking about items currently in my closet - I found myself intentionally embracing the same gray jersey-material garment. It seemed very Gwyneth Paltrow, or Parisian, or I don't even know, but it seemed not bland but classic, which is always dangerous to think when you're taking your aesthetic inspiration from GOOP, but there you have it. I would pair an Everlane scoopneck one (note the aspirational past tense) with some pale beige or pink nail polish, dark jeans, and ballet flats. A grown-up, sophisticated approach... that allowed me to wear the same boring shirts, but this time with narrow-cut jeans, rather than bootcut, because 2010s vs 2000s. Revolutionary.

(Crucial side note: While I've always owned a button-down or two for interviews and the like, I've never worked anywhere that wasn't gray-t-shirt-compatible, and between grad school and freelancing, have done a lot of work from home. And... maybe you shouldn't teach in gray t-shirts, in the abstract, but you can do things like pair them with black slacks and a fake-pearl necklace from the Kensington Market, or so I've heard.)

And then at some point over the last few months, it occurred to me: shirts. Blouses. I'm worth it! ("Worth" being key, as non-t-shirt shirts involve spending $30-plus rather than capping things at $20 but mainly staying at $10, as well as using the delicates cycle and line-dry approach; haven't quite made it to dry-clean-only.) While the same might not be true of Gwyneth Paltrow, who'd look good in an organic sweet-potato sack, I, at least, look a lot better in something dressier than a drab undershirt. It's the same level of improvement as lipstick or eyeliner. It's... effort. Which - and you wouldn't know it from the headlines - looks better than effortlessness.

I'm still experimenting with exactly which shirt-shirts this will be. In rotation - that is, on the days when I'm walking the walk - are the following:

-A blue long-sleeved Muji button-down with a white Peter Pan collar. Too warm for it now though.
-A white off-the-shoulder 3/4-sleeve from Zara.
-A pale-blue striped and slightly cropped (slightly) off-the-shoulder from Bershka at the mall in Rehovot.
-A sleeveless, also blue-and-white, part-peplum one that (bonus points!) buttons in the back, from Durumi, a Korean-brands boutique here in Toronto.
UPDATE: Forgot one! There's also a sleeveless white linen button-down, from Uniqlo.

As the limited nature of this collection would suggest, I have yet to truly take this plunge. But it's a start.