How to Grow Up (4 page)

Fashion Victim

D
ear stranger, let me explain to you my love for fashion. I love fashion more than
anything
. If I have one regret in my life, it is not that I didn't go to college or live in New York City; it is that I didn't somehow claw my way into the fashion industry. I have loved style ever since I can remember, and I have paid dearly for it. From scream fights with my mom to having debris flung at me on the street, I learned very early that the whimsical dress-up box of childhood slams hard on the fingers of a person who wishes to maintain a sense of theater in her appearance well into her later years.

My childhood memories seem organized around what I was wearing when: the white party dress covered with colorful balloons that I was wearing when I jumped into the hotel pool while on vacation with my grandparents. The pair of denim jeans with “The Best” embroidered on the hip pocket I wore to the library.
The brown polyester and chiffon Easter dress I pitched a crying fit over: Really?
Brown
at Easter? I was
so upset
.

Actually, lots of my fashion memories feature if not
me
being so upset, then some adult in my immediate vicinity feeling provoked by my choices. Around first grade I dressed myself in a colorful combination of clothing (a red skirt, a yellow shirt, some aqua sandals), only to be told by an aunt that I looked like a Puerto Rican—an obvious compliment, yet those in my family seemed to think otherwise. My first experience of high fashion came at first Communion, when I was actually
required
to wear not only a dress with layers and layers of frothy white lace, but an actual
crown
made of shiny fake pearls. From the crown cascaded a motherfucking
veil
. Never again would I be so thrilled to be part of the Catholic Church! I persuaded the powers that be to allow me to visit Benson's Animal Farm, a scrubby petting zoo with attendant low-rent carnival rides, in this outfit, which I told people all day long made me feel like a princess. Nobody liked the scrim of dust I'd kicked up over that once pristinely white lace hem, or the way my veil got mangled on the roller coaster. My family seemed to have an unhealthy fashion philosophy—while it probably
is
the most important thing on earth, the only art form we all participate in every single day of our lives, they thought it should never be taken so seriously.

In sixth grade, the slutty eighties were in full swing, and MTV was beaming images of Missing Persons' Dale Bozzio wearing see-through miniature plastic outfits. I was in love with her, and in love with my boobalicious Barbies, and in love with all
the sexy ladies I was stealing glimpses of on cable TV. One day, my godmother took me shopping at the Salvation Army. All the women in my family love
the Salvation Army, half because everyone is broke and half because they have antiquing in their blood. They have an eye for snagging the luxury items unrecognized as such by Army management and given a ridiculously low price tag. I was not looking for anything so refined on this particular trip with my godmother, but more something Dale Bozzio would approve of. I quickly became obsessed with a pair of high-heeled clogs that I found in a bin of jumbled shoes. My godmother (who had married a Mormon and converted) squinted at the incredibly high wooden heel.

“Well,” she said uneasily, “I guess you can play dress-up in them.”

At home, my godmother sat in the kitchen with Mom drinking cups of decaffeinated tea while I assembled my Most Awesome Outfit Ever: my new skyscraper clogs plus a flirty bright-red miniskirt plus my pièce de résistance—a red-and-white-striped tube top. Not the type of tube top that wraps around your ribs, mind you, but a bandeau-style tube top, the smallest tube, which wrapped around my smallest, nonexistent boobs. Any of my Barbies would have looked excellent in this getup, as would any new-wave pop star on MTV, or any sexy hitchhiker on an episode of
CHiPs
.

“I'm going out!” I yelled casually to my mother and went to slip out the front door.

“Come say good-bye to your godmother,” my mother hollered back. Or,
Come say good-bye to ya gawdmutha
.

I wobbled into the kitchen. I bent down from my new height to give my gawdmutha a kiss. I acted like it was no big whoop that I was dressed like a sluttier version of Jodie Foster in
Taxi Driver
.

“Oh no,” my mother said. “You're not goin' out like that. Someone's gonna grab you.”

“Virginia, I only bought those for her to play dress-up in,” my godmother defended herself.

I
was
playing dress-up. I just wanted to play it outside. On the street. Where a cute boy might see me and be dumbstruck by how
awesome
I looked and fall in love with me so my life could finally start. Even though I looked like a PSA for the exploitation of underage girls, I actually had no idea there was anything inappropriate about my outfit. I just thought I looked really, really cool.

This blind spot would haunt me throughout my life. I always had a difficult time determining what outfits were appropriate for what situations, and this difficulty produced a frustration I could only relieve with rebellion. My petty little life in Chelsea, Massachusetts, was never going to provide me with the opportunity to wear the dramatic, decadent outfits I longed to dress in, and so mundane events would have to do. The occasional no-uniform days my Catholic school offered, for example. To a school-wide Christmas party in sixth grade I wore a striped mini-dress with actual ballet shoes as footwear and a feathered roach clip in my hair. A bean-shaped pleather Jordache cross-body purse cut across me on its ropy strap. The principal phoned my mother and asked her to please deliver a less-totally-awesome outfit for me to
change into, and so my pictures on Santa's lap that year featured me wearing a patchwork sack dress straight out of
Little House on the Prairie
. And I loved
Little House
, but word of Valley Girl culture had reached as far as Chelsea, and I was trying to look less prairie, more galleria.

The persecution was just beginning. By seventh grade I was taunted by classmates for my amazing hot-pink-and-black geometric-patterned sweat suit, jeered at for being “punk.” I was baffled—they said “punk” like it was a bad thing! A fight with Mom over what I would wear in my class pictures resulted in a photo of me red-faced, eyes swollen from crying, in a pastel sweater decorated with dancing teddy bears, the black-and-white-checked tunic with the spiked belt and asymmetrical-snap collar in a ball of defeat on my bedroom floor.

My fashion sense nearly prevented me from graduating eighth grade, because I had the audacity to wear a strapless dress to the ceremony. The principal—a nun whose own sweaters were suspiciously tight—called the dress “amoral,” and declared that I did not look like the product of a Catholic upbringing. I wasn't exactly sure what she was getting at, but I knew I
did
look like Cyndi Lauper, minus the orange hair (not for long!), and the only thing wrong with that outfit was the shapeless gold robe I had to cover it all up with to walk down the aisle. Sister Gertrude and I had spent the final months of my education in a ridiculous stalemate: Each morning, as the class pledged allegiance to the flag, she waited at the glass pane of the classroom door, glaring at me. As our childish voices chorused, “and justice for all,” she would swing open the door and march me to the bathroom to
oversee the scrubbing away of my navy-blue eyeliner. Every morning I arrived at Our Lady of Assumption School with my eyes smudgily ringed in Wet n Wild, and within an hour I was rubbing it off with a scratchy paper towel. I couldn't give in to Sister Gertrude, and Sister Gertrude couldn't give in to me. When I graduated, she went as far as to create a new dress code handbook for every future student to ponder, complete with crude drawings illustrating what a “punk” haircut looked like (it looked, frankly, like a mullet).

Starting afresh at my next Catholic school—high school this time, and all-girl at that—I dyed my hair black against my mother's wishes. She feared it would make me look like my father, whose existence we as a family were trying to forget. It might have brought out that family resemblance if I hadn't teased it into a sprawling inky mushroom cloud upon my head, with bangs that cascaded into my face, making it hard to see. This fantastic hairdo made my classmates at the all-girl Catholic school furious. I scooted out of class early each day to avoid a pummeling by the beefy Italian girls who were driven to rage at the sight of my tangles. Eventually the principal saw fit to put a stop to this bullying, dealing with it by kicking me out of school so that my classmates' education would not be ruined by the constant distraction of my hair.

I enrolled in the local public school, where I was shoved in the hallway for wearing, out of season, the Elvira-brand black lipstick sold at drugstores each Halloween. I became an acolyte of the darker operas of punk and Goth. The world recognizes these subcultures now, but in the mid-1980s, adopting the look
with the dedication I did—black lipstick, hair teased to the point of total destruction—outside the East Village or Camden Row was enough to get you killed. Okay, beat up. I hid in the bathroom or in empty classrooms during lunchtime, and I didn't talk about it at home. My mother would never have understood—she thought I looked crazy, too, and seemed to have more sympathy for the people moved to violence by my appearance than she did for me. After all, I could just dress normal and everyone would leave me alone. But I
couldn't
dress normal. That was the thing.

Though such violent disapproval of one's clothing selections could send many people back to the closet in search of something softer, my instinct was to fight back. I knew that there was nothing wrong with wearing, say, a black lace slip as a dress, with a pair of black Doc Martens. That the sight of me in such a getup could inspire a person to shout horrible, unprintable names at me on the street seemed a bit of an overreaction. Capitulating to the bad vibes the world was aiming at me felt like giving in to bullying, and it would have been.

Getting beat up for the way you look as a teenager is going to force you to make some hard and fast decisions about not just your life, but
life
. It will turn you into a little philosopher, which, by the way, goes very nicely with a high-necked black lace dress and a prim patent-leather purse. Whatever dent to my self-esteem the harassment may have given me, submitting to such meanness seemed far more dangerous. I didn't just like how I looked—I loved it. No amount of negative reactions could convince me that I didn't look totally awesome with my hair
crawling off my scalp like a blue-black tarantula, that the oversize crucifix intended to be hung on a wall didn't actually make a fantastic statement necklace. The joy I felt in discovering new looks, in exploring and feeding my burgeoning vanity, outweighed the stress of feeling vulnerable to attack.

I was young, and not so worldly, but somehow I understood that my style triggered not so much a punk hatred as a general xenophobia that included gay people, people of color, and homeless people. Anyone different from my straight, white, mostly male attackers earned their wrath. A larger understanding of oppression began to grow and, hardly knowing a gay person, a homeless person, or a person of color, I aligned myself with them in the world. And in this way my fashion both cast me out of the prevailing culture and signaled to the world my disdain of it. I hadn't started my fashion career angry at the world, but after years of having soda cans flung at your head, you sort of end up there.

My point, and I do hope I've made it, is that I'm a fashion person, down to my bones. As much as I hate when people redeem the needless suffering life has heaped upon them by saying it “made me who I am today,” I suppose I could admit the same about the decade or so I spent weathering the punishment our culture sometimes metes out to the differently dressed. Sure, as a sensitive person with strong empathy, I probably would have been drawn to social justice causes no matter what I looked like, but experiencing repressive violence firsthand at such a formative age gave me a political consciousness that has shaped much of my life. It taught me a rugged compassion, and it gave me a
longing to take some of the fight I have in me and offer it to those who could use some.

There was one dark fashion era, around age twenty-one, when my interest in social justice actually accomplished what so much bullying had failed to do—it broke my fashion spirit. I became obsessed with second-wave radical lesbian feminism
and
fiercely dedicated to animal rights, which prompted me to shave my head and wear nothing but oversize jeans held to my bony vegan hips with a hemp belt and Tevas on my feet regardless of the season. I got my groove back eventually, but honestly, my political affiliations have remained a constant challenge to my fashion tendencies. It can be hard to care about poverty and economic disparity and also immerse yourself in the fantasy world of fashion magazines, where the garments are often so expensive the price isn't printed. There is a dissonance in being a believer in a new standard of beauty, one that includes all races and body sizes and genders, while developing strange obsessions for particular models and feeling your heart skip absurdly when you recognize them in an editorial—in being a nonconforming, rebellious sort, yet turning hungrily to an industry that instructs you what to cease wearing and what to wear instead; instruction I actually believe.

But, for all the paradoxical mind-fuckery, there was something powerful in my embrace of fashion, something that felt alluring and confusing, yet correct. And that was beauty.
Beauty.
During my conflicted fashion moment, beauty seemed more a tool used to whack women around with than anything else. Looking to subvert if not destroy the concept, I'd cultivated a
“beauty” in myself that seemed at odds with the current standards—weird where I could be normal, torn where I could be tailored. I'd set out to widen my scope of beauty to include forms mainstream culture ignored or punished. But what I'd done along the way was demonize the rest of it. In this process, beauty had become my enemy. And suddenly I wanted to be its friend. I think it had something to do with getting sober—how thirsty I was for new things to occupy my psyche, or how the spiritual practice that was helping me stay away from alcohol cautioned against buying into the illusion that
anything
was my enemy. It seemed, after decades of fighting, of reveling in the sharp power of
No!
that the most radical thing left for me was a gigantic, all-encompassing
Yes!