Category Archives: Dresstory

Dresstory: The Turnabout Skirt

12 Wednesday Dec 2018

Posted by in Clothing, Dresstory, personal

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Two first dates, at least, and almost always with boots: the Pendleton plaid reversible pleated “Turnabout” skirt. I bought it in a long-gone shop on Thayer Street in Providence in 1989 or 1990 with money I earned working in the inter-library loan department at the Brown Science Library, the ugliest building on College Hill, until the apartments went in on Brook Street across from the Wheeler School. It would not have been cheap; that is, it probably cost enough to make me think twice, but it was a Pendleton, it was warm, heavy wool, and it fit. The knife pleats opened slightly when I walked, revealing a contrasting color. How could I resist? Practical and pretty, in a fabric more durable than the soles of my shoes, this skirt was made for walking.

The heavy wool was useful in the chilly frame triple-decker flats where I lived and kept the heat low for money’s sake. This would prove useful again, when I moved back west to Saint Louis, and had even less money as a graduate student than an entry-level library employee. Saint Louis had been home before, and the source of much of my vintage wardrobe, though I lost many pieces in a very bad breakup before I had the Green Eyed Lady dress. By the time I started my second round of graduate school, my wardrobe was a melange of slightly professional pieces, vintage clothing, well-worn jeans, and sweaters stolen from my father’s closet. Sometimes I think I must have looked like a walking laundry pile from a disgruntled teenager’s floor, but there I was, 24, and ready to take on anything in my eclectic armor.

I wasn’t wearing the Turnabout the night I met the man who really broke my heart, but I wore it on our first date the following Saturday when we went for a walk in Tower Grove Park. He was a photographer, living in a second-floor flat on a street named for a river on the near South Side of Saint Louis. I’d known him in college, or known who he was, as he had known who I was. Photography and sculpture were in the same studio building, and even among a group known for being obnoxious, I stood out.

A trip to Colorado

When I met him again late on a November Wednesday, in a partially-converted brewery, I was bored with an art opening, trying to decide whether to get a drink or go home. He stopped in the doorway to survey the gallery, a hazy golden light behind him like a Renaissance painting, so unlike the bruise-blue sky above the bony trees that waved outside my windows. A neon blue line, like the colored lines in a Thiebaud painting, wavered around him.

He talked me into a date that Saturday afternoon, picking me up at the studio so we could take his sandy-haired dog, Cooper, to the park. Cooper, distinguished as the only dog to survive eating both a Hasselblad and a Harris tweed jacket sleeve, kicked up brown leaves as he ran ahead of us. The late autumn light in Saint Louis made anything red more red, highlighting what leaves remained on trees, the painted pavilions, and the folds of my skirt.

His camera malfunctioned on what became a trip through irony

Over the months we dated and eventually lived together, Cooper went on many walks with us, and with me and my dog. I took in strays; my cat had kittens, adding half a dozen more to the three cats we already had. It was lively, and sad, and I proved too much for the photographer, who asked me leave just a few days after giving me a red Trek mountain bike for my birthday. I sold the bike, kept the cats and kittens and the skirt, and moved into my own pre-war flat on a street named for the river I now live near.

We kept being together and not together, so hard to quit seeing each other, like a bad cover of a Gun Club song. But we moved on, encountering each other in the grocery stores of the South Side for years, until I moved back to Providence. Two years later, I read his obituary in the alumni newsletter. I kept the skirt–it still fits, though more snugly than before I had a child. Twenty five years after my date with the photographer, I wore the skirt again on a rainy afternoon date with Drunk Tailor, walking the shore of Narragansett Bay in Colt State Park.

Note: The images of us are poor because they are taken from 35mm color negatives made in 1991, some of which were double exposed when the camera malfunctioned, and not printed until 2008. In the intervening decades, they acquired the dust which appears in the prints and subsequent scans.

Dresstory: The Green Eyed Lady

05 Wednesday Dec 2018

Posted by in Clothing, Dresstory, personal

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Almost my dress, thanks to PhotoShop

I didn’t know then that it was called changeable silk; what I knew was that the skirt rustled when I walked, and spread out like a plate when I twirled. Irresistible. Probably homemade, I would have found it in a junk shop on South Broadway in St. Louis, or at the Veterans Village thrift store on Natural Bridge Road, a place white girls like me had to be careful (respectful) about going to.

Square neck, tight waist, full skirt, side zip: at one point, I was skinny enough to pull it over my head without opening the zipper, as long as I wiggled just right. The only time I clearly remember wearing the Green Taffeta Party Dress was to the KWUR Student Radio end-of-year party at the Women’s Building on the Washington University Campus. April or May of 1987, probably, though possibly 1986, before I went to Skowhegan on a summer scholarship.

My date was my on-and-off boyfriend, another sculpture major, working on his master’s if it was 1986, and newly graduated if it was 1987. He had a shambling walk, shuffling, a little hunched over, as if 6 feet were too tall for the spaces he occupied, though the city was large enough. Sneakers, jeans, an Army fatigue jacket, a smile waiting for reactions, waiting to deploy. Patrick was the son of a firefighter and a nurse, and I stole him from his college sweetheart.

Rosemary Clooney in White Christmas. Velvet, but very similar.

The green of my dress was like the green of his car, dark and forest like. We made installations together, layering found objects and drawings in the small gallery in the studio building where we worked. We drifted into a relationship: his girlfriend visited every weekend, driving up from the smaller college town where they’d met. Red haired, pale-skinned, in burgundy beret, Roslyn sat on a stool and watched Patrick work. Across the wide wood shop, I watched her watching him, and smirked. Reader, I was unkind. My friend Jane and I played Raspberry Beret on repeat every time Rosyln visited, hard to do in the pre-CD era, but we managed.

My style icons at the time were Joe Strummer, the Beastie Boys, and Lydia Lunch and when we weren’t taunting Roslyn with Purple Beret, I was inflicting 8 Eyed Spy on my studio mates. Reader, I was a snob. Paddock boots and ankle-zip jeans; white high tops and baggy Marithe et Francois Girbaud trousers; and the occasional 1950s evening gowns comprised my idea of campus-appropriate dress. My wardrobe came from thrift stores, gifts from my mother and grandmother (the Girbaud trousers), and practical work wear I bought with money I earned in the summers (high tops and paddock boots). In winter, I had a ca. 1950 Army trench coat with a button-in lining, which I insisted upon wearing to a Fortnightly dance in Chicago my senior year of high school. It is amazing my mother lived through all this sartorial humiliation, and amazing, too, that I was harassed as little as I was on the streets of Chicago and Saint Louis.

Wash U Women’s Building. KWUR was in the basement.

The KWUR Prom was in May, though I think of that evening as summer, so I would have needed nothing over the dress. I wore it with a gartered corset, black fishnet stockings, and Johnson motorcycle boots styled like paratroopers boots, leather soles slick from walking, and good for dancing. By May of the year I met Patrick, he’d broken up with Roslyn. We started making art together on a dare, and in our rambles collecting window screens, broken chairs, old medicine cabinets and other detritus, we grew closer, stopped being adversarial and became friends, and then lovers, until we were not. I wonder about Roslyn sometimes, and what became of her; I know where Patrick is, though we have not spoken since 1991. I broke his heart, for a time, after he broke mine, and now he lives where I began.