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Today is the first day of the fall 2013 semester. Anxiety taps me on the shoulder, waking me up, and excitement propels me out of bed as I slip into my role of teacher. As a professor of social work and law, I know that every class I teach brings new students and new perspectives. The students and I will leave as different people than the ones who entered the room. It's that potential that excites me. Still, I know I'll have to wait through the first few classes to understand who is in the room and where we might go together. I've learned to be patient, comfortable with not knowing, because that's part of the class's process of becoming. I am dressed in black from head to toe. I wear a suit designed by the Japanese fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto. I found it in a consignment store in Brooklyn. So today, while first-day-of-school anxiety beats its wings in my stomach, my black-and-white oxfords fly toward the subway that will take me downtown. My layered white hair blows in the wind. My statement earrings chime with each step, announcing I am on the way.
Before the first day of classes, I search the internet for an activity that will introduce the students and me to each other in a way that is not boring and repetitive. What I decide to wear is how I will make myself known. In the professional school where I teach, the dress code is formal: suits, tailored trousers, skirts, and blouses. Social work has always preoccupied itself with status. Like other care-oriented careers, fields historically considered to be women’s work, social work emerged as a way for middle-class women to get out of the house and into the world. It has never achieved the status or the pay reserved for male-dominated careers. Our professional garb self-consciously mimics that of professors in the school of law and the business school. I may not wear jeans, not even on Friday, when we sit in meandering committee meetings I am mandated to attend as part of my service requirement. I must devote a certain amount of my time to be used for the benefit of my school, independent of my own scholarship. These days, service feels more like penance than something I will be rewarded for. We argue over master syllabi I must use but rarely agree with because they teach students about what is, rather than engage them to think about what could be. This approach to learning makes me feel constrained, restless, and bored. My Catholic education compels me to confess that I close my classroom door, ignore the syllabus, and do what I want. While that’s a partial solution to the dilemma I face as an academic in an increasingly corporatized institution, it does not offer the challenge I feel I must have to grow.
It was during the late 1990s that I was introduced to the designs of Yohji Yamamoto. What first intrigued me was how he pushed the boundaries on suits. He works in black with touches of white, calling forth a somber seriousness. I fell in love with Yohji when I first read what he said about black: "Black is modest and arrogant at the same time. Black is lazy and easy-but mysterious. But above all black says this: 'I don't bother you-don't bother me.'" His designs blur the distinction between womenswear and menswear, using theatrical drapes that create space between the body and the garment, erasing symmetry and proportion.
I think what Yamamoto knows about everyone is that as humans we are never perfect. In fact, we are quite flawed, and when we are aware of this, we feel vulnerable. When I put on Yamamoto's garments-irregular, with ripped and ragged fabrics and hems-perfection becomes mundane. I have permission to be messy, defiant, imperfect, and unfinished. At the same time I feel feminine, beautiful, and sensual in the space between my body and the drape of the clothes. The word trickster comes to mind when I think of Yohji.
The draping of the garments Yohji creates triggers memories of the nuns who taught me from kindergarten through college, and of the Jesuits who populate the university where I now teach. In these spaces, there are many rules about what a woman can or cannot do with her body and what rooms she can enter. Black is the color not only of religious attire but also of judges' robes and academic gowns. When I wear this color, it suggests to my students that what we do here in the classroom is of great importance, as are they. When I present at a conference, I make sure that my outfit demands that I receive attention, so that my words might receive attention too. While my clothes from Yohji Yamamoto make me look utterly singular in the academic room, no one can make the claim that I am dressed "inappropriately" for the occasion. Standing on this edge, sometimes in danger of falling off, fills me with glee. The right outfit can really make a statement.
Today is the first day of the fall 2013 semester. As the subway rumbles downtown and I head toward the first day of class, this time I am not a professor in a social work school. My photo ID shows that today I am a continuing education student in a fashion school. The class Building a Vintage Business begins at 6:20 p.m., and is in room SR7. It is twilight. I have taken classes at this fashion school before, most recently Jewelry Fabrication and Tailoring. Since entering this space, I have come into contact with fashion in a different way than what they show in glossy magazines under the control of editors. I become more and more excited by the potential of finding a way to do something involving fashion. I am anxious because I can’t imagine how I might be part of that world. On this day, there is something about the subway ride that makes me feel like it’s Cinderella’s coach and I am headed to a ball I have not received an invitation to.
New York City is one of the fashion capitals of the world, and when I moved there, the epicenter was Manhattan. Unobtrusively, Brooklyn was encroaching on the territory. My partner Calvin and I recently moved to Manhattan, something that we could check off the bucket list. We both work in Manhattan. There is a garment district there. We found a small but light-filled modern condo on the Upper East Side, right where it turns into East Harlem. Our new neighborhood was developing or, to be transparent, gentrifying. What it would be was as of yet undetermined. Best of all, this apartment provided easy access to the campus where I teach, just a block away from Lincoln Center, a stylish gateway between Broadway and the Upper West Side that until 2015 was the home of New York Fashion Week.
When wandering the streets of Manhattan, one can always find style inspiration. As Bill Cunningham, the well-known New York Times street photographer, asserted, "The best fashion show is on the street. Always has been, and always will be." Living here, I admit to being influenced by the overabundance of black clothes that Manhattan artists and other intellectuals seem to favor. Black flatters any figure, and looks lovely with my hair, which is turning white. But I am also inspired by the vision of young people in Brooklyn who are styling thrift and vintage clothing in interesting ways and dyeing their hair gray. It seems this is a playful experimentation with the notion of "old." These same young people stop me on the street to ask if I work in "fashion."
In fashion-school classes I had taken previously, I had innovative ideas but often fell short on execution. I realized that it would take time, money, and practice to become a skilled fashion or jewelry designer and craftsperson. I felt as if there was someone breathing down my neck to do something different, and to make it happen now. In hindsight, I don't think I was looking to start something completely new; rather, I wanted to make something new with what I already had. As I look back at this time, I think the hot breath I felt was coming from my age. Although I couldn't yet name this anxiety, it was dawning on me that I did not have all the time in the world. If I wanted to do something adventurous in my life, the time was now.
There is a kind of aching sweetness to the outfit I choose for the first day of this fashion-school class, a counterbalance to the black edge I wore for the first day as a professor. I feel rather angelic. The long dress is white cotton, illuminating the encroaching darkness that comes with twilight. There is a hood I can wear if I need protection. The black in my oxfords is a wink to the coming night. The color white can reflect all the visible light of the spectrum and thus offers unlimited possibilities. It symbolizes new beginnings, wholeness, and completion. You cannot hide behind white because it easily becomes translucent. It offers a sense of calmness and protection. White is a blank page.
In spring 2013, not long before my sixtieth birthday in June, Yohji sent a woman with white hair like mine down the runway in an off-the-shoulder white cotton dress with a long, billowing skirt. The image was unexpected; I was not used to seeing an older woman in runway shows or in top fashion magazines. Titled Cutting Age, Yohji's show was a play on the idea of a garment's shelf life, the passing of seasons and, with them, of trends. Set in an architecturally important church in Berlin, it consisted of iconic pieces from the last thirty years of the designer's career, and told the story not only through the clothes but through the presence of older as well as young women models. Digging into the show's backstory, I discovered that the women were "real people," cast from the street the day before in an open call. I screenshot the image, printed it out, and pasted it into my journal.
Now I enter the classroom, spread my long, flowing white skirt, and take my seat. In the classroom at the professional school where I teach, desks are arranged in rows that face a podium at the front of the room. In fashion school, there are long tables arranged in a square. We can spread out our notebooks, scatter our pens, empty our tote bags, and face each other. I open my journal, ready to take notes. Like the woman in Yohji's Berlin show, I am the oldest person in the room. Nobody here seems to care. They are way more interested in what I decide to wear.
The professor of the class, Bridgett Artise, is the author of a book called Born Again Vintage: 25 Ways to Deconstruct, Reinvent, and Recycle Your Wardrobe. An early pioneer in sustainable fashion, she sports a short Afro and favors very large retro-style glasses, turbans, head wraps, newsboy caps, and the designer Emilio Pucci. Her smile and her passion for what she sells in her store are infectious. In her case it is upcycled vintage clothes. Upcycled clothing takes an existing garment and improves it, whether by combining it with other garments and materials or adding ornamental flair, like using embroidery and patchwork to mend holes. Her opening line for class that first day: “There are several routes to a destination.”
We start the class with a quick tour of fashion history, focused on the popular silhouettes. While the class covers the commercial aspects of what anyone would need to know to build a vintage business, what kind of vintage clothes each person decides to sell is a choice among unlimited possibilities. You can specialize in particular designers, focus your collecting on a particular era, or even sell just one product, like T-shirts or denim. We learn about the pros and cons of where to sell: brick and mortar or on-line. We study the merits of Etsy versus eBay. We are called upon to share our visions about what we would sell and how we might sell it. I am obsessed with the idea of upcycling vintage clothes. You don't have to be a perfect sewer to do this. The professor asks what we have done before that can inform our new venture. She encourages us to elaborate on our personalities, to transform them into a persona with a story. "This is a personality-driven business," she says.
As class progresses session by session and I appear in all my different Yohji-inspired outfits, the students who sit with me around the square in the room and those I pass in the hall tap my shoulder and say, "Wow, I really love your style." My professor tells me I have an as-yet-unidentified "talent" and an "eye." Two of my classmates find their way to seats on either side of me. They already have popular blogs about vintage fashion; a store will be their next evolution. One night one of them turns to me and says, "You should start a blog."
"You really think so?" I ask. I'm intrigued. That somehow feels more immediate and doable than starting a business. I could do a blog about upcycling. From that moment on, in between the notes I take about the care of vintage clothing and determining how to evaluate and name the condition of the clothes, I doodle and daydream a blog. I even have a working title: Wardrobe Surgery.
In order to upcycle, you need to seam rip. Seam ripping is when you take apart a piece of clothing, undoing all the seams that hold it together. Seam ripping can show you how to assemble clothes and how they are constructed. The second function of seam ripping is that it can "undo" mistakes and help you correct them. When you are working with vintage, upcycling inspires you to come up with a way to put whatever you're working on back together so that it becomes something modern and new. Our professor is an expert seam ripper and upcycler.
Adapting this lesson from sewing, I decide to lay out my past experiences like different pattern pieces of cloth that eventually become a garment. Scattered all over the table, they wait ready for me to see which can construct this project of starting a blog. Once I have inventoried the materials I have at my disposal, I will know what new notions I might need to pick up to make this come together.
The important pieces stand out like swatches of embellished textiles in a fabric store. We have decided that while I am a "vintage piece," I can put outfits together in a modern and cool way. Technology has fascinated me since 1975, when I punched cards for a computer the size of my Upper East Side living room. In 1991 I was the owner of the first clunky gray Apple laptop. I snagged a first-generation Blackberry. While other professors banned the laptops that appeared in classrooms in the mid-1990s, I allowed them in mine. I learned how to use web design platforms. In 2007 I designed a Ning site for my students in a club called the Social Work and Art Collective. I found and posted interesting content on it, and it grew to be the largest club in the school.
My area of research and expertise is interdisciplinary education, which means I know how to collaborate and talk with people in a field other than my own. I know how to find our commonalities. I love being around young people—probably because I am the oldest of six siblings—and as a professor I teach young people every day. I've worked with adolescents and young women for most of my career. I've conducted thousands of interviews. I've taken improv classes and can pivot on a dime. I can research and write, my two favorite pastimes. Because of my training and skill as a social worker and professor, I know how to engage people who are ready for a change or to learn something new, and those who are not. Oh, and might I mention that my partner Calvin is a physics lab inhabitant by day, ponytailed street photographer by night?
I already have what it takes to start a blog, I realize. Suddenly I am less anxious, and the beating wings in my stomach quiet down.
