Closely Reading Clothes

The longer I live, the more I realize how difficult reading is.

For example, I tried to read George Orwell’s political novella “Animal Farm” when I was nine, and I hated it. I had no idea that it was an allegory about the 1917 Russian Revolution and a critique of Joseph Stalin and his communist Soviet Union. Totally oblivious, I quickly got bored of reading about a group of bossy pigs ordering around a bunch of horses and hens.

I kind of missed Orwell’s point.

An entire school of literary critique argues that it’s impossible to read a text and know the author’s intent. If you’ve ever been asked to do a “close reading” or “formal analysis” of a poem, you’ve encountered this school of thought. It teaches you to ignore outside research and analyze only what you find within a text, because we can only be sure about what’s written.

Theorists have struggled with this issue for decades, and many have concluded that there is simply no way to ensure that readers accurately understand what an author is trying to say. If you’re a writer, you must accept that you cannot control how people will interpret your work once you publish it.

As a writer myself, this makes me feel a little uncomfortable. But as a lover of clothes, it bothers me constantly.

Expressions like “reading a situation” or “emotion written on one’s face” illustrate how life is just one extended reading assignment. A lot of visual information is thrown at us, and we in turn must try to process it.

I can think of countless times when I thought my outfit said something about me but it was interpreted it in a completely unexpected way. Sometimes, the stakes are low or nonexistent, like the time I wore a Grateful Dead t-shirt and someone assumed I was a fan of the band. In actuality, I just like drawings of skulls, and this shirt featured a particularly unique one.

Other times, though, the stakes are much higher. Hypothetically, if I were to dress a random female college student in a revealing outfit—imagine an extremely short, tight dress with a plunging neckline—and send her onto the street, passersby would judge her in a variety of ways.

She might get catcalled by someone who sees her outfit as a cry for sexual attention. A person with conservative values might think she did not look respectable or perhaps seemed sleazy. A third-wave feminist would argue that this outfit has nothing to do with attracting sexual attention, that this woman is dressing for herself, and that we should congratulate her for exercising confidence and agency in her dress.

And no matter which reaction you think is appropriate, you may never know what drove the woman to wear the dress in the first place. In this hypothetical scenario, the woman has neither low self-esteem, as the conservative might think, nor high self-esteem, as the feminist would guess—she’s wearing the outfit because I told her to.

I experienced this in a dramatic way this semester while researching and writing a twenty-page paper about a pair of wedge sandals I had seen in Vogue Magazine. Over the course of two months—as I read countless books, scholarly articles, and encyclopedia entries—I became convinced that these shoes referenced Birkenstocks and the hippie movement of the sixties. This led me to suggest that the designer harmfully appropriated the culture of black jazz musicians as well as that of poor people in America. A few days before handing in the essay, I showed my roommate a picture of the shoes. To her, they looked like a high-fashion version of Scandinavian clogs.

For a long time, I thought that the power of clothes lay in their ability to speak to the rest of the world on behalf of their wearer. I’ve always told myself that clothing is important to study because it is how we project our personality, heritage, and values to people who meet us. Now, I think that this is a bit naïve, as you can do as much reading and researching as you like and still never guess at what someone is trying to say about themselves based on their outfit. Clothing, like books or art or music, means something different to each person who sees it.

Why does it matter what we wear? I’m no longer satisfied by the answer I used to give—that our clothes help us present our unique identity to the rest of the world. I think it’s a cliché. I’m not even sure if it’s always true. Sometimes, we misunderstand. Sometimes, we’re misunderstood.

Maybe the solution to this problem is simply to understand that it exists, and to heed the advice of Walt Whitman—who said, “Be curious, not judgmental”—when we’re looking at how others are dressed and find ourselves jumping to conclusions. Though clothes certainly have much to say about a person, we must remember that they can never tell all.

Lily K. Calcagnini ’18, a former Crimson Associate Editorial Editor, is a History & Literature concentrator in Dunster House. Her column appears on alternate Mondays. Follow her on Twitter @lilmisscalc.