The Thoughtful Dresser by Linda Grant

Author:Linda Grant
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner

When it had been duly impressed upon her that she was a young lady . . . she suddenly developed a lively taste for dress. . . . [H]er judgement in this matter was by no means infallible; it was liable to confusions and embarrassments. Her great indulgence of it was really the desire of a rather inarticulate nature to manifest itself; she sought to be eloquent in her garments, and to make up for her diffidence of speech by a fine frankness of costume.

HENRY JAMES

MAKING A SELF: THE CREATION OF I

In Vogue, I read an account of how author Elizabeth Kendall arrived at Radcliffe from the Midwest in 1965 wearing an outfit she describes as “a wrap-around skirt and a shirt.” Quickly she realized she was dressed all wrong, behaving all wrong, actually breathing all wrong. By the end of the academic year she was enunciating her speech in a bored wispy way, ascending the steps of the library in sling-backs, and tucking her tweed skirt into an elasticated girdle, a garment which was considered essential in the 1950s and early 1960s.

Wearing a girdle was a sign that you were an adult, whether your flesh needed tamping down or not. It was armor and constraint. It was womanhood, not girlhood. It drew your attention to your eating and childbearing places, and kept sexual urges squeezed in check. I remember this because very briefly, in my early teens, I wore one myself, at my mother’s suggestion. A girdle came soon after the first training bra.

At the beginning of her second year Elizabeth Kendall met a girl from California. She was wearing a sky blue coat and a straw boater hat when, Kendall writes, coats were supposed to be gray, black, or brown; in other words, utilitarian colors (but that is possibly because, marooned in Missouri, she had not seen what Givenchy, Balenciaga, and Dior had been up to in Paris throughout the 1950s, let alone Schiaparelli before the war). To Kendall, the whole outfit resembled a costume, and she was startled and impressed. But it was what lay underneath the sky blue coat that so entranced her: a tent-shaped dress made out of stiff canvas, “imprinted with huge red strawberries on a field of yellow.” Kendall writes of this encounter:

There are moments in one’s life when a vast structure of assumptions shifts, opens, tumbles. [She] wasn’t trying to look like an adornment to a Harvard man. She was a young woman whose every move proclaimed originality. And it wasn’t just a pose. . . . The most potent of [her] traits, to a dazzled me, was the boldness that had led to that dress. Actually, she had several such dresses, all with different patterns. “You don’t know about Marimekko?” she said.

Marimekko is a small Finnish fabric and clothing design company established in 1951 which had been featured in a 1965 issue of Vogue the year before this encounter. There was a pop art quality to the print they had chosen,

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