There’s a war on, you know. And it’s the worst kind: internal. The old placard-carrying activist trying to fix the world, is opposing the Town and Country magazine-reading, high-maintenance, self-involved princess.
Like a toddler in an old-timey playpen, things around me in Michiana catch my attention: crumbling infrastructure, a shrinking economy, unsatisfactory government leadership. I don’t have enough hands to hold the hurts. What to do? Wail at the external plight, feeling all alone here in “The Village of the Damned” with these undesirable “playthings,” or sit down and indulge in naval-gazing as a defense mechanism? I lean toward the latter. It’s far cheerier to think about funky shoes than joblessness. As that fashion-maven Diana Vreeland said, “Fashion must be the intoxicating release from the banality of the world.” A.k.a., periodically being shallow has definite advantages.
My friend Melinda just retired. To celebrate her joy at this and to gloat a bit about her new position to those of us who have yet to achieve this Nirvana, she had a party. After quaffing some of Kentucky’s finest products, out came photos of us taken shortly after the invention of photography. How young we were! How long ago those photos were made! Nonetheless, we all remembered in great detail the clothing that we were wearing in those photos. There in black and white was that Mary Quant blouse that I hadn’t thought about in 35 years. In an instant, though, I remembered that it was a cream color with red and blue flowers punctuating green vines. In the parlance of the day, I had felt so “mod” and had loved it so. The self-involved princess persona won that round!
Gloria Vanderbilt wrote an article for the recent New York Times fall fashion supplement where she reminisced about a particular dress that she had worn when she was 17. (It was yellow.) My princess-self empathized. These things may not have great import, but they have great resonance. Ilene Beckerman wrote an entire book, albeit a slim volume, titled Love, Loss and What I Wore. In it, she writes about her various ensembles: her Brownie Scout uniform, the dresses she wore when she married, with the same affection that I have when I think about the aqua and white dress that my mother brought back to me from her travels when I was five. Even without the aid of a photo, I remember that frock in every detail. That dress had come to this princess-of-the-hinterland from New York City!
“What are you going to wear?” said by a companion before sallying forth on a joint excursion is a bonding experience. Those of us who don’t need our mommies to buy Garanimals® for us sometimes care about putting together an ensemble. We follow Balzac’s dictum, “Carelessness in dressing is moral suicide.” Think of it in the oxymoronic term of making contemporary art history. It might be shallow, but it frees our hands from holding the hurts. And, if your hands are free, you can use them to accessorize!
Virginia Woolf said, “Vain trifles as they seem, clothes . . . . change our view of the world and the world’s view of us.” Art historian Anne Hollander agrees. In books with the intriguing titles such as Seeing through Clothes and Sex and Suits, she examines the significance of clothing choice and tells us that appearance is meaningful. So go ahead; let that self-involved princess win a skirmish or two in the internal war. She gives that moment of relief needed to buttress the spirit so that the placard-carrier gains the strength to venture forth for another go. Being shallow might not just be a façade; it can be a lot deeper than it appears!