This past winter I survived the misery-months by reading all five volumes of Virginia Woolf’s diaries. Many things happen in those diaries but the event that’s seared into my mind involves a new hat. It’s 1926 and the diary entry begins this way: “This is the last day of June & finds me in black despair because Clive laughed at my new hat, Vita pitied me, & I sank to the depths of gloom.” Oh, Virginia, girl—I feel you! The shame of wearing the too-big thing or the overly shiny thing or the thing that’s just wrong in every way for the occasion… We’ve all been there. And yet it had all started so well for Virginia: out on the town, on one of those free-wheeling London summer nights, heading to multiple parties with Vita Sackville-West, picking up friends along the way—and wearing this hat. Interestingly, she doesn’t tell us exactly what kind of a hat. We only learn that she was feeling neither one way or another about it, until she bumped into her sister, Vanessa—wearing a “quiet black hat”—and together everybody headed to the house of an old friend, the art critic Clive Bell. It was there that disaster struck: “Clive suddenly said, or bawled rather, what an astonishing hat you’re wearing! Then he asked where I got it. I pretended a mystery, tried to change the talk, was not allowed, & they pulled me down between them, like a hare; I never felt more humiliated… So I talked & laughed too much. Duncan prim & acid as ever told me it was utterly impossible to do anything with a hat like that… Came away deeply chagrined, as unhappy as I have been these ten years.”
Many of us will recognize this post-fashion-disaster shame spiral. But I’m going to suggest that while none of us enjoy appearing ridiculous, writers tend to be especially anxious about “looking the part.” Maybe because the part is so narrow. Actors and comedians and singers have a certain amount of permitted absurdity built into their job descriptions. Bankers and lawyers and teachers can all put on their silliest glad rags for a Saturday night or a party. But even on weekends writers are meant to look—what? Serious, I suppose. And dressing that part—while still taking pleasure in your clothes—can create a lot of anxiety. We’ll never know what was so terrible about Virginia’s hat, but it’s far from being the only piece of clothing that caused her to experience “frock consciousness,” as she called it. In the 1920s, she was photographed for Vogue wearing a borrowed Edwardian-style dress with puffed sleeves and a voluminous skirt, and you can see the worry on her face. A look of tragi-comic uncertainty, bordering on cringe, as if to say: is this the right sort of thing? All her life poor Virginia was caught between the poles of feeling overdressed and underdressed, equally uncertain at a society party as she was in a town hall lecturing about literature.
Can you be serious and seriously glamorous? I remember having a lot of frock consciousness when I first started teaching in Boston, that self-serious city. It felt impossible to veer very far from black jeans, black shirt, and black blazer if I had any hope of my students accepting me as their professor. A few years later, I moved to New York, which at that time belonged to Carrie Bradshaw, who thought nothing of walking down the street in a leotard and tutu. The Carrie effect was everywhere on the real-life streets of Manhattan and this loosened me up a bit. I bought thrift store dresses off the stalls that would periodically pop up on Third Street, and mixed them with fancy shoes and vintage coats.
And I was in good company. By the 2010s it was impossible not to notice that many of the women writers I knew in New York could give Carrie herself a run for her money. Every time I saw the writers Heidi Julavits, Leanne Shapton and Sheila Heti together, for example, I thought they looked more like three indie-movie actors heading for Sundance than people in my line of work. They weren’t just good dressers—they were great. (And wrote a wonderful book about clothes together.) Leanne in particular is and was a thrift store genius, and would periodically resell her second-hand clothes to the rest of us at all-day shopping parties in her apartment, at which the most expensive garments went for a hundred bucks. Meanwhile, my narrow dark jeans despaired and basically went into permanent retirement once they’d clocked my NYU colleague Katie Kitamura and her various adventures in trouser silhouettes. Why wear black when writers as good as Aminatou Sow, Sloane Crosley, and Ashley C. Ford were in every colour of the rainbow?
