Tag: culture

I was on an elevator a few years back, on my way to a theater I’d been booked into, when two women boarded, both middle-aged and smelling of alcohol. It was autumn, and they had new-looking sweatshirts on. I assumed that the letters printed across the fronts of them were the initials of a university, and as the doors closed, I tried to guess which one it was. After deciding that the first letter—N—stood for “Northern,” I lost interest, and tried to recall when I’d last been in Traverse City. It’s a pretty little vacation town on a bay of Lake Michigan, the sort of place where it’s super easy to find fudge.

I started performing—a rather grand word for reading out loud—in the late 1980s, in Chicago. Back then, I was living hand to mouth, but always made it a point to dress for a show. I did it out of respect for the audience, but also because it made me look and feel professional, and I needed all the help I could get. It didn’t require a great deal of effort. All I really did was wear slacks rather than jeans or shorts. I’d make certain my shirt was pressed, and put on a tie. I added jackets only after my second book came out, and I began to undertake lengthy tours, lasting anywhere from six weeks to two months at a time. At first, the jackets were bought for me at Barneys by my boyfriend, Hugh, who worked at the Gap in high school and told me that shoppers would sometimes defecate in the dressing rooms there. It wasn’t about a scarceness of toilets—there were plenty in the mall his store was a part of. It didn’t even have anything to do with the Gap. When I started talking about it onstage, I learned that it happened at Banana Republic as well; at J. Crew and Old Navy, even at big-box places like Walmart, where folks would pull down their pants and crouch in the center of those circular clothing racks. It’s a compulsion certain people have.

Hugh learned to fold at the Gap and perfected his technique after college, when, for a brief time, he worked at Comme des Garçons in New York. This was in the late ’80s, when I was still in Chicago. Back then, the men’s Homme Plus jackets could be slightly off-kilter. If you looked at one closely, you’d maybe notice a barely discernible camouflage pattern or see that it was polka-dotted. Examine a shirt or a pair of slacks, and, if you were in any way sensitive to such things, you’d see that they were extremely well made, that the collar wouldn’t fray anytime soon and that the buttons would likely stay put.

During the time that Hugh worked at Comme des Garçons, no one ever defecated in the dressing room. Maybe the people who do that sort of thing were too intimidated to enter, though I have to say I’ve always found the sales team in the New York store to be excessively kind and welcoming—the same at the Paris and Tokyo outlets, and at London’s Dover Street Market. That said, it took me years to enter one of their stores. I was afraid that I’d be sized up and judged unworthy. It’s nothing the staff did or said; rather, these were insecurities I brought through the front door with me: I’m not good-looking enough. I need more hair. My legs should be longer. My tongue’s too fat. Comme des Garçons is not about that, though. Its designer, Rei Kawakubo, doesn’t traffic in young and sexy. If she could magically reposition a woman’s breasts—move them from her chest to the top of her head—I have no doubt that she’d do it. Likewise, there’s nothing aggressively masculine about her menswear. (I mean, business shirts with five-foot-long pussy bows?) I started off timidly with ties. Now I buy almost all my clothing there.

The thing about Kawakubo’s more recent Homme Plus wear is that it’s very hard to describe. “It’s a traditional sport coat until the bottom of the rib cage, where the wool is replaced by a sort of gathered curtain, the kind you’d see on the windows of a hearse,” I found myself saying once, in reference to a jacket I’d recently bought. “Five inches of that, and it becomes a sport coat again and falls midway down my calves in a cascade of ruffles.”

The person I was talking to wasn’t getting it.

“You know the black dress Mammy wears to Bonnie Blue Butler’s funeral in Gone With the Wind? It feels like that, but for men, and it’s really heavy.”

The person still wasn’t getting it, so I pulled out my notebook and my pen and tried drawing it, which didn’t work either.

The jacket I was wearing on the elevator that evening in Traverse City, Michigan, was of a regular length but for the side pockets, which drooped like deflated airbags to my knees. With it, I had on a pair of stiff polyester culottes that felt like an outdoor tablecloth and had a pink and gold flower pattern on them. My shirt was white and had long, shoelace-like fringe running from the front yoke to a few inches below my waist.

“Let me guess,” said one of the women who’d boarded, looking me up and down. “Halloween, right?”

We were well into November, so I knew she didn’t actually think I was going to a costume party. Plus, it was a Tuesday. I should have just laughed. Instead I said, perhaps too haughtily, “I am the best-dressed person on this elevator.”

Then I went to the theater, did my sound check, and peed on the fringe dangling down my front. That’s the thing with some of these clothes. You think, Why aren’t all dress shirts this fun? Then you wear one to Thanksgiving dinner, come away with cranberry sauce on your oversize, leg-o’-mutton sleeves, and realize, Oh, that’s why. Once, I got a shirt that had a slightly larger, second pair of sleeves over the first. The outer ones were shredded from the shoulder to the cuff, and caught on every doorknob I passed.

My audience can name the assistant secretaries of both State and Commerce but has no idea who Rei Kawakubo is. I walk onstage, and as they laugh and point I think, Really? To my mind, I look great, or at least as good as it’s possible for me to look. It astonishes me that in this day and age anyone might question a man wearing a long skirt. Is it because I have it on sideways? I sometimes wonder when I’m intentionally wearing one sideways. Is it because it’s inside out? The salesperson suggested I wear it this way. “You can also tie it around your neck as a cape,” she’d said. “It’s great for keeping your back warm!”

It used to be that people would dress up for a night out, but as the years pass the sartorial difference between me and my audience grows ever wider. “Is that a bathing suit you’re wearing?” I asked a man one night as he stepped up to get his book signed.

He looked down. “How can you tell?”

“It has no fly, there are two strings hanging down the front, and the Nike swoosh is printed at the bottom of your left leg.”

I don’t feel slighted when people in my audience show up in sweatpants and cargo shorts. I’m just puzzled by it. Who doesn’t look forward to putting an interesting outfit together? I wonder. Especially if they’re going to a nice restaurant or have spent a lot of money on a theater or concert ticket? Actually, do you even need a reason? I wake in the morning and then lie in bed, wondering out loud what I’ll wear to my desk. “The upside-down trousers with the mangled sweater, or with a tie and the shirt that was printed to always look filthy?” Later, I’ll change for lunch, then again for dinner. Finally, there’ll be an après-bath outfit. It’s not necessarily called for; I just have a lot of clothes and like to keep them circulating.

Because I’m such a good customer, Comme des Garçons has started inviting me to its biannual Homme Plus runway shows in Paris. Most people in the audience are buyers for whom this might be their sixth appointment of the day. They’re dressed for endurance, which makes sense. Then there are us fanatics, a club of sorts that rarely gets to hobnob. At one of the recent shows, I sat near a man wearing a gown from that season’s women’s collection. What surprised and delighted me was how very unremarkable the part of him not designed by Rei Kawakubo looked. It was like seeing someone’s nebbishy accountant—balding and with squarish, wire-rimmed glasses—being swallowed almost completely by an enormous, man-eating tulip. “You’re amazing!” I shouted, figuring it must be hard for him to hear buried to the temples in all that fabric.

The day after the most recent runway show, I spoke to an Argentinian fashion editor I’d met a few years earlier. He’d just broken up with his girlfriend and told me he had spent the entire morning in tears. “Maybe if you beg really hard, you can get her back,” I said. »

“That won’t work,” he told me. “She left because I kind of cheated on her.”

“Okay,” I said. “How about this: Tell her you’re on some new medication. Admit that you hadn’t read the instructions that came with it, and that after a few drinks you woke up remembering nothing in this strange woman’s bed.”

“That won’t work,” the editor said. “The other woman was a friend of hers.” He looked at me then as if for the first time. “What are those shorts you’re wearing?”

“They’re from the Comme des Garçons Shirt line,” I told him. “This current season.”

His eyes moved from my head to my feet. “You know who you dress like?” I sucked in my stomach and waited for it.

“Mrs. Doubtfire,” he finally said.

“Is there anyone worse?” I asked my Japanese friend Michiko, who was standing there with me.

“Who is this Mrs. Doubtfire?” she asked.

“Someone who never cheated on her girlfriend,” I said.

Crushed, I walked back to my apartment and took off the two-tone clown shoes I’d bought because I have bunions and they’re soft with a wide toe box. I took off the culottes that were white polyester and unevenly printed with a madras pattern. Finally, I removed the shirt that was missing half its collar and changed into something an off-duty golf pro might have worn: white slacks and a blue polo shirt. I don’t own any loafers, so I stuck with a pair of suede derbies. Then I walked through the Luxembourg Gardens thinking, Who looks like Mrs. Doubtfire now, you skunk? I hate it when guys cheat and then try to get sympathy for it. “You were crying all morning?” I said, imagining that the editor was in front of me. “What about her? And it was with her friend of all people?”

All it really takes to pull off Comme des Garçons is confidence. With it, you can walk through a hotel lobby in Traverse City, Michigan, or Shreveport, Louisiana, and completely ignore the looks and comments you’re guaranteed to attract. You can appear on TV and laugh when the host makes a joke about your armless jacket because, well, it is funny that it has no arms, that it’s essentially a plaid bell, but that doesn’t mean you don’t look terrific in it. Though one might think otherwise, I never wanted to be stared at. I just wanted to wear the clothes I felt most at home in. If the price for that is unwanted attention, or even being compared to Mrs. Doubtfire, isn’t it still worth it? Especially when the alternative is so boring?

After two turns around the garden, I returned to my apartment and stepped back into some Comme des Garçons. “Do I look stupid?” I asked Hugh.

He kept his eyes on his laptop. “You? Of course not.”

“That’s all I needed to hear,” I said as I headed back into the world, my head held high in part because my stiff Elizabethan collar wouldn’t allow me to lower it.