Clearance, 12.8.23 (Sights and Sounds)
Bits and pieces I noticed in my travels.
Coats I saw on the train this week:
Waist-length black synthetic puffer with horizontal panels
Three-quarter length black synthetic puffer with horizontal panels
Full-length black synthetic puffer with horizontal panels
Black synthetic puffer with chevron panels
Black synthetic puffer with diamond quilting
Black embossed leathery cropped parka
Kelly green shaggy woolen wrap
Robin-egg blue shaggy woolen with black-ringed orange leopard spots
Brown teddy
Pink puffer
Loafers I saw on the train this week:
Black leather with gold horsebit and round toe
Black leather with silver horsebit and sharp toe
Black leather lugged with gold horsebit and red-and-green grosgrain
Black full-strap leather penny
Brown full-strap leather penny
Black lugged embossed snakeskin penny
Black lugged with gold horsebit and shaggy rainbow tweed apron
Some writing that struck me.
Summer on the Bluffs (Sunny Hostin with Veronica Chambers)
A little scene-setting outfittery for Billie, a climate researcher living across the water from her godmother’s house on Martha’s Vineyard:
Provincetown was a full two hours away, but the parties were always worth the drive. When Akari, one of her friends from the UN, invited her to a New Year’s Eve party in P-town, Billie decided to book an Airbnb and make a weekend of it.
She decided to dress sexy but casual in a cashmere cardigan and cashmere bralette, which peeked out from underneath, her favorite flared jeans, and black heeled booties.
I read this and immediately thought, Oh, I’ve seen this outfit before. Katie Holmes, August 2019. The Khaite combo that launched a thousand Pinterest saves. (“We were school shopping, and I was just trying to hail a cab on Sixth Avenue,” she told InStyle a year later. “It looked way more glamorous than it was.”) Is the audience this book is written for familiar with the Holmes look? Maybe. Is it possible that the differences between Billie’s look and Katie's—flared jeans instead of a cigarette, booties instead of low-heeled mules—mean that this is just a flicker of recognition? Possible. Is it a testament to the way that a powerful reference will center itself in every adjacent description? Absolutely.
Letter from Gaza (Ghassan Kanafani)
Here’s a tragically familiar moment that I heard during the NTS radio program “As I Was Moving Ahead: Sounds for Palestine.” The narrator, a Palestinian teacher looking to escape Gaza for California after a stint teaching abroad, goes to visit the daughter of his dead brother in the hospital. Israel has been bombarding her city, and she was injured in the attack:
Together with her slight smile I heard her voice. "Uncle! Have you just come from Kuwait?"
Her voice broke in her throat, and she raised herself with the help of her hands and stretched out her neck towards me. I patted her back and sat down near her.
"Nadia! I've brought you presents from Kuwait, lots of presents. I'll wait till you can leave your bed, completely well and healed, and you'll come to my house and I'll give them to you. I've bought you the red trousers you wrote and asked me for. Yes, I've bought them."
It was a lie, born of the tense situation, but as I uttered it I felt that I was speaking the truth for the first time. Nadia trembled as though she had an electric shock and lowered her head in a terrible silence. I felt her tears wetting the back of my hand.
"Say something, Nadia! Don't you want the red trousers?" She lifted her gaze to me and made as if to speak, but then she stopped, gritted her teeth and I heard her voice again, coming from faraway.
"Uncle!"
She stretched out her hand, lifted the white coverlet with her fingers and pointed to her leg, amputated from the top of the thigh.
My friend ... Never shall I forget Nadia's leg, amputated from the top of the thigh. No! Nor shall I forget the grief which had moulded her face and merged into its traits forever. I went out of the hospital in Gaza that day, my hand clutched in silent derision on the two pounds I had brought with me to give Nadia. The blazing sun filled the streets with the colour of blood. And Gaza was brand new, Mustafa! You and I never saw it like this. The stone piled up at the beginning of the Shajiya quarter where we lived had a meaning, and they seemed to have been put there for no other reason but to explain it. This Gaza in which we had lived and with whose good people we had spent seven years of defeat was something new. It seemed to me just a beginning.
Nadia lost her leg “when she threw herself on top of her little brothers and sisters to protect them from the bombs and flames that had fastened their claws into the house.” The narrator had reached for what he thought he was good for, what he thought might be of comfort to his suffering niece. Even if it was a placebo. Who doesn’t love an imported garment? Kalafani wrote the story in 1956. Before the narrator goes to visit Nadia, he stops to pick up some apples to share with her, a tangible gift. Had the story been written today, given that it is so difficult and dangerous to get food into Gaza that World Food Programme says it can’t doing there, one wonders whether he would have even been able to afford her that nicety.
A Runner’s Relapse into Online Shopping (Erin Evans)
An injury slots a bad habit in for a good one, a bad habit with diminishing returns:
Typing in the first letters of the Urban Outfitters web address, my laptop fills in the rest. The pathways from mental distress to online shopping are still as paved in my internet history as in my mind. I also open Free People, Princess Polly and Pacsun. I start scrolling. I don’t plan to buy anything anyway. That isn’t the point. I just want to dig through options, create the perfect selection of clothing, imagine buying it but decide against it and close all tabs feeling calmer. But Urban disappoints me. The clothes that once looked like a possibility now just look like fabric; they can’t make up for the fact that I can’t run the next morning and they can’t heal my foot. I can’t find a piece of clothing that would bring me enough joy to make up for the devastation of not running.
“Clothes that once looked like a possibility now just look like fabric.” A word! Sometimes fashion is an escape, a fantasy. But sometimes the weight of the world is too heavy to get out from under. If the Jaqcuemus Spring ‘22 runway says anything, it’s that fashion will push through any number of compounding crises—climate change, pandemics, water shortages—to keep the fantasy going. But that’s their job. On the other side of the cash register, you don't have to do that.
Tell me about a small moment of fashion divestment and diversion you had this week.