Clothes..and Other Things that Matter

I just finished reading Clothes…and Other Things that Matter, a fashion retrospective by Alexandra Shulman, former Editor in Chief of British Vogue. The book begins with a reflection on the changing role of clothes and appearance during the pandemic. Having not read any reviews in advance, I actually expected that the entire book was going to continue in this vein, and I was all for it. It would have been nice to know that I wasn’t the only ridiculous person who spent months obsessing about exactly the right handbag and jacket, two essential “going out” items, during a time in which I was going nowhere. 

Instead, it’s sort of a sartorial autobiography going all the way back to the 1960s, examining each of the “icon” pieces that Ms. Shulman owned and wore, through both the magnifying glass of personal experience and the telescope of fashion history and cultural relevance. Ilene Beckerman did something similar in the absolutely wonderful Love, Loss, and What I Wore. I was thinking about another book that I read that also examined a series of style “icons,” a book whose title and author I could not remember, so I Googled “icons book fashion” and I got at least 100 results. The book that I had been thinking of was Dodie Kazanjian’s Icons: The Absolutes of Style, but there are tons more on the subject. 

So this isn’t really an original concept, but that doesn’t matter. There are really only a handful of literary forms. There is nothing new under the sun and all that. What matters is execution, and this book is delightful, mostly because Shulman herself seems delightful. This is a woman who holds an OBE and a CBE, who sits front row at fashion shows in Paris and Milan and New York, who socializes with Elton John and Prince Charles and Anna Wintour, and who still manages to come across as an everywoman who is not always sure of herself and who doesn’t always know what to wear. 

I don’t necessarily agree with all of Shulman’s “icon” choices. I never thought of a beanie as an iconic fashion item, for example; nor do tights really qualify. All of her other choices are the usual suspects–black clothes (including the icon of icons, the LBD), sneakers (trainers in Brit-speak), handbags, bikinis. “Icon” and “iconic” are both tiresome words used in any context outside of religious art, but they’re like business jargon; annoying but necessary shorthand that conveys an idea very succinctly. Most of the items that Shulman writes about are universals, available in every price point from Wal-Mart to couture, and worn or used by women in every social strata. Most of them have been around in one form or another for at least a century. There’s the formula: Universality plus Longevity = Icon. 

*****

In her essay on the boiler suit, the one-piece overall garment traditionally worn by factory workers and plumbers and electricians (and another rather unlikely candidate for icon status), Shulman recalls a glamorous, rebellious high school classmate who boldly appeared at school wearing a boiler suit. She writes, "Yearning for a piece of clothing that I knew would not suit me was still, all these years later, because I wanted to look like Cathy." When the boiler suit became fashionable once again, Shulman, though she knows that the style is not suitable for her body or her life, feels compelled to at least try one. She wants to see if she can replicate the way that her long-lost classmate's boiler suit inspired her, to see if she can find a boiler suit that makes her feel young and rebellious. In another essay, Shulman writes about a dress that she wore for a very important, high profile, red carpet party. She describes the dress and the party, but she writes much more about how that dress made her feel beautiful and powerful, yet completely comfortable and at ease.   

That's the real reason why we buy clothes, of course. It's so much more than warmth and comfort and decency and even fashion. We need clothes to help us not just look a certain way but to feel a certain way, to be a certain way. We can spend months or even years trying to find that one dress, that one jumpsuit, that one handbag that will help us feel the way we did at that one party or on that one day in school when everything came together and it seemed like life and friendship and love and adulthood might be manageable after all. 

Think about putting on a piece of clothing and looking in a mirror and being completely satisfied with your appearance. Then think about wearing that piece of clothing and feeling that you can do anything. Then think about also feeling physically comfortable; neither too warm nor too hot, neither overdressed nor underdressed, neither overly covered up nor immodestly bare. Think about one dress or one jacket or one boiler suit that allows you to stop thinking about yourself altogether, even for just a little while. When you really think about what an absolutely perfect piece of clothing can do for a person, you understand why a person would spend an unreasonable amount of time shopping for that one thing. You understand why a person would spend a ridiculous sum of money to buy that one thing. And you understand, finally, that “icon” might not be too big a word.