What Are You Wearing?

 

Homemade and hand-me-downs were the clothes of my youth, with the occasional new item from Sears. I never thought about it much until high school, where other girls (the cool ones, anyway) exulted in Villager dresses and Bobbie Brooks suits. Or was it the other way round? Didn’t matter. We couldn’t afford either one.

       I made my own wedding dress. When my husband started working for a company that staged big fund-raising banquets, I made a slinky blue nylon halter dress that held its own pretty well with the gowns for which the wealthy flew to Atlanta.

       Now a grandmother, having retired all the giant tee shirts and homemade maternity pants and having husbanded our income to a comfortable depth, I could probably afford any clothing that strikes my fancy. But the expensive designer outfits are striking something else.

       The last high-end mall fashion magazine that crept into our mailbox was filled with models who looked like heroin addicts draped in rags. The latest came with a New York newspaper. New York City! World fashion capital! Well—the models look a bit less desiccated, though we suspect a couple of the women might be men.

Facial expressions range from misery to a sort of hostile desperation. Didn’t models used to smile? Like they were happy to wear the lovely clothes? But the desolate faces go with the clothes. “You’d have to pay me to wear that stuff,” was my first thought. On further consideration, “You couldn’t pay me to wear that stuff.” Aside from the realization that many models appear to have forgotten their undershirts, the outfits scream, “I started with tacky and carried it to a new dimension.”

This is from Chanel. Chanel! They've gone from Coco to Coocoo.

I can duplicate these "shoes." I need only sweep up after the dog and scoot through with glue on the soles. Swiffer chic.  

When Mrs. Harris went to Paris, she wound up with a gorgeous, flattering gown. That was close to the year I was born. I'd like to buy something gorgeous, but I guess it's not happening in my lifetime. They may have to bury me in something homemade. I do have some extra fabric somewhere.                                                                                                                       

Choose This Day

     If you chop up the stuff you put in the compost pile, it disintegrates faster. I’m pretty sure this applies to human cultures too. How many ways can we divide people up? Black vs. white? Male vs. female? I guess the barriers are nothing new. Buffalo Springfield sang a long time ago about “battle lines being drawn.” And there’s sure enough been some rapid decay.

     A while back, I saw it pretty vividly in the beating heart of middle America, the package pick-up department at Sears. A man’s T-shirt dug a fetid trench with its picture of two voluptuous blondes in bikinis perched on the sides of a boat. A caption praised the boatmaker’s “twin screws” and opined that “Two screws are better than one.” Next to the man stood his little daughter, about three or four years old.

     Feeling rather sick, I turned my eyes to the lone clerk on duty, who was having a tough time with customers who didn’t quite grasp the system. He asked a woman about her vehicle, and she stared blankly. “Car? Truck?” he said. “Something to carry your purchase in?” Finally, she caught on and led him out the door.

     On his return, he walked around the room and asked the rest of us for our receipts. He got another blank stare from a man standing near the warehouse door. The man finally said he didn’t have a receipt, but he was here to pick something up and that his wife had talked to a lady. Was there a lady in there? The clerk explained that he was the only one around, and he could not bring any goods out without a receipt. The customer was sure he didn’t need one. He wanted to talk to “the lady.” The clerk repeated the necessity of a receipt. Finally, the customer exploded in profanity. “Ah, ____ it!” he shouted. “I tried to get the ____ing thing Thursday,” and on and on. He complained and cursed his way out the door. As the clerk backed through the warehouse door, he looked at me, shook his head, and said, “Some people.”

     Soon he reappeared with my picnic table on a dolly and rolled it out to my waiting van. He was working hard, and drenched with sweat. As he hefted the table, I tried to think of a way to encourage him. Brows crinkled in sympathy, I said, “I’m not mad at you.”

     He burst out laughing and nudged my arm. “That guy sounded like that rapper, that Tupac Shakur.” He was still laughing as he returned to the store. I was left to ponder some facts. The man with the filthy T-shirt was white, maybe late thirties. The man with the nasty mouth was white, probably in his fifties. The clerk was young and black. And even-tempered. And wise. A middle-aged white lady, I admired him for seeming to recognize that the dividing lines here were drawn not between black and white, male and female, young and old, but between decent and indecent, mannerly and crude, considerate and selfish— one might even say human and anti-human. I was happy to think that we both had rejected the foul and degrading and stood on the side of God’s law: Love your neighbor as yourself. Maybe more of us could give it a try.