Love, Loss, and What I Wore

In 1995, 60-year-old Ilene “Gingy” Beckerman wrote and illustrated a slim autobiography called Love, Loss, and What I Wore [2], a scrapbook she assembled for her family so they’d understand she “had a life” before she became a mother of five. Then a friend secretly mailed pages to publishers, and you know what happened next. I think probably every woman has owned a copy of Love, Loss, and What I Wore or has at least read a copy while perched on a divan inside Anthropologie or splayed on prickly Barnes & Noble carpet at some point over the last 14 years. It makes clear what so many women’s magazines leave out—and what so many memoirs and autobiographies omit, too: what clothes mean to women going about the mundane business of day-to-day living.

Nora Ephron was instantly smitten by the book when she read it in manuscript form. Then, a few years ago, she and her sister Delia began collaborating on a stage adaptation of Gingy’s story, which begins in 1930s New York. To mark the occasion, I met Nora and Delia Ephron for lunch to talk about—what else?—clothes. Of course, Nora talked about her black turtleneck sweaters. You can eavesdrop here [3]. Meanwhile, DoubleX contributors got busy jotting down their own What I Wores, and you can read the collection below. Please, feel free to add your own in the comments section.
—Erika Kawalek

The first time I picked out my own outfit was in 1986, when I was 2 years old. The occasion was my successful completion of potty-training, and I went alone with my mother to a fancy children’s clothing boutique in the suburbs of Cleveland. My siblings and I had a Gerber-baby look—all rosy skin and blue eyes—when we were young, and my mother liked to dress us in the sort of classical children’s ensembles of the American century (eyelet lace, soft florals, sailor dresses, fisherman sandals) that completed the effect. The boutique was full of such offerings, but so was my closet—hand-me-downs from my two older sisters, mostly. As my mother tells it—for this is one of those select “when you were little” stories that’s made it into family lore—I made a beeline for the only black dress in the store. And insisted on having it. My bemused mother, who’d never bought “dour” black for a child before, tells me that the effect against my red hair was striking, and that I looked oddly chic for a little kid. Remember, this was long before the days of Suri Cruise and the rest of the fashionable celebrity toddler army. She bought it for me, along with the matching beret. I strutted around all year in my little black dress, which, every time I put it on, made my mother jokingly refer to me as her little New Yorker.

I’m not quite sure in what offhand remarks and by what infinitesimal degrees we form our identity, but recently, I hung up a new black dress, a birthday present from my mother, alongside a dozen others in my tiny New York closet.
—Noreen Malone

I was almost 3 on that Sunday morning, dressed at my insistence in the exact same outfit I had worn for days, maybe weeks, by then: a T-shirt and a perfect pair of red-striped seersucker shorts, overalls-style with a zipper up the front. Suddenly I was informed it was time to change my clothes. It had something to do with my big fat baby sister. (She was, I know now, being baptized in the church across the street.) I evidently balked; this, I don’t remember. Time, I guess, was short, and so I got left behind in my beloved shorts. Did anyone stay to guard me? Surely, but I don’t remember that either. All that sticks with me is standing at the third-floor window of our Brooklyn, N.Y., house, in the sunlight, craning to see some familiar figures on the sidewalk below. The panic—along with the red stripes and the zipper—is seared into my memory.
—Ann Hulbert

It was the day before Halloween, and I was about 5 years old. I had just gotten a princess costume. It was shiny, baby-blue polyester with sparkles and a high bodice, and it came with a crown and scepter. It was perfect, and I loved it so much that I put it on as soon as we got home from the store. My mother warned me not to wear it until Halloween night because I might spill something on it. But I wanted to spend the whole day as a princess. So off I went in my costume to play tag with my brother in the yard. We had a large German Shepherd who ran unattended all day long, and about five minutes into the game of tag my foot found one of Brandy's large offerings. I went down, and when I got back up my costume was smeared from the waist down with dog waste. I ran sobbing to the house. My mother told me to stay on the porch and strip down, and she stuffed the offending costume into a garbage bag. We drove back to the store, but there were no princess costumes left. That year, I was a witch.
—Emily Yoffe

I got glasses when I was 3—big pink plastic ones with a Minnie Mouse face where the Gucci “G” might be. In elementary school, I graduated to a sophisticated tortoise-shell frame, then the wire-rims I paired with baggy knee-length T-shirts, often bearing soccer-ball iconography. In fifth grade, the year my crush, Eitan, and I shared a Sprite at the movies and maybe touched hands while going for the straw, I started staring at myself without glasses in the bathroom mirror, wondering if contacts might be a step toward becoming, in some way, pretty. It was a school day when my mother and I took the metro to D.C. to make the switch. After the appointment, we stopped at a clothing store, where she bought me my very first tight shirt—short-sleeved, with blue and white stripes—through which hints of breasts were starting to show. We also bought two pairs of overall shorts, since I was not about to wear an actual tight shirt without covering the bulk of it with denim. I wore the white overall shorts, cuffed, with the new striped shirt—and no glasses!—to school the next day, and remember gliding into class thinking, “This must be what it feels like to be a glamorous grown-up woman.”
—Samantha Henig

I spent most of my childhood wearing a page-boy haircut, oversized sweats, and XXL Chicago Bulls gear, feeling exhilarated when bus drivers and lunch ladies called me young man. It wasn’t until I was 14 that puberty set in and I found myself grappling with the desire to be feminine. In honor of my new self, my older sister brought me back a pretty top from a trip to London: blue, sleeveless, V-necked, and stretchy. On the morning of Rosh Hashanah, I paired it with a new long nylon skirt I had bought with my allowance. The high holy days at Temple Shalom were a hot-ticket event, but my family made a practice of running 45 minutes behind. Arriving late meant doing a long shameful walk from the back of the sanctuary to the empty seats in the front row. We promenaded down the aisle and rows of temple-goers turned to watch us in astonishment. I felt proud of my family: We were defiant! Lateness was our thing! Then I realized that the congregation wasn’t staring at all of us. As it turned out, my skirt was slit up either side to the upper thigh, and the point of the aforementioned V-neck had found its natural resting place well south of my sternum. There’s a pretty good chance that I wasn’t wearing a bra. Jaws dropped in horror. The rabbi lost his train of thought. Even now, people who were there ask my mother what she was thinking. I think she was just happy I wanted to look like a girl.
—Julia Felsenthal

My late grandmother was visiting us from Israel right before prom night. I was a sophomore at Stuyvesant High School, dating a senior, and very nervous about what to wear. My grandmother was absolutely magical to me. I didn't get to see her enough, and as far as I was concerned, everything she touched was fairy dust. She'd been a seamstress by trade and offered to sew me a dress. She chose ivory silk and lace. They were the two most sophisticated fabrics I'd ever seen. She sewed me a floor-length gown with short cap sleeves and a high neck. It fit me beautifully, and I loved it. Until I got to prom itself. In a sea of short black dresses, I looked absolutely 19th-century. Not in a fetching Jane Austen way, either. I was miserable the whole night. As the seniors stood around on the beach, smoking, I remember wanting to jump into the ocean and disappear. The next day, when my mom was out, I crumpled the dress up and threw it down the garbage chute.
—Hanna Rosin

The first piece of clothing I bought after my father's suicide was an antique white linen blouse. It was just a wisp of a shirtwaist, but I was drawn to the fussy back: nine pea-sized mother-of-pearl buttons, two steel hooks-and-eyes, and one string bough. Obstinate and self-protective, I would attend my classes in a mostly-buttoned blouse with a lopsided bough. There was the odd day, however, when I'd grab a student from the hallway of my freshman dorm. "Do me up!" I'd command, or "Undo me?" I'd ask, stealthily soliciting a familiar stranger to fuss over me—at my back, of course, away from my weary, wet eyes. I could receive five minutes worth of tenderness if I asked a clumsy nerd, or the maladroit boy in room 317. Aren't zippers overrated?
—Erika Kawalek

In the spring of my sophomore year of college, we got word that there would be a march on campus to protest our school’s complicity in the military-industrial complex. And it was to end dramatically, in the takeover of a building. It was 1972, and the big anti-war student demonstrations were already behind us. This was the kind of political action I thought I'd never get to be part of. But what do you wear to a takeover? Purple suede high-heeled shoes, of course. In my overheated logic, I believed that if I were seen wearing those shoes, along with my favorite purple minidress with the smocked waist and gathered peasant top, no one would ever guess how the march was going to end. I was somehow using my purple outfit to keep a secret, to make the storming of the building seem totally spontaneous even though it was, of course, methodically planned.

About 200 of us took over that building and didn’t leave for five days. Well, I left sometimes. I snuck in and out a back window every day to work for a few hours on my final papers—I didn’t want to fail my classes just because I was against the war. I also had used that back window the first day. I needed to change into clothes more appropriate for sleeping on the floor.
—Robin Marantz-Henig

There are a lot of goofy traditions in college, and a lot of goofy outfits that go along with those traditions. One of the most ridiculous rituals I ever participated in was called Finals Fairies-a semi-annual sprint through the library, during which participants toss candy and encouragements to frantically cramming students. While totally nude.

Now, I'm an exhibitionist, but I'm no hippie. I've never so much as worn a bikini on the beach, and I have an irrational fear of exposed stomach pudge. But my friend Myles promised to hold my hand, and Fairies seemed like the kind of inconsequentially daring thing one should do while in college. (Plus, this was before Facebook.) So one night, I joined the 30 or so students disrobing and giggling in a top-floor bathroom. I carefully stepped out of my clothes, checked to see that my hair looked OK, and took a deep breath. The next 20 minutes or so are a blur—maybe my subconscious is being kind to me? But I do remember feeling scared, exhilarated, and strangely weightless. The nudity was like a costume I'd put on: I felt big and shiny, like a vaudeville star. For the next few days, even when I was sitting in an exam room, I constantly wanted to laugh my head off.
—Nina Shen Rastogi

By the time I was a junior in college, my transformation from prep to hipster was complete. I don't know exactly when it happened, but slowly the khakis and J. Crew pea coats were replaced with a wardrobe of consignment store Miu Miu boots and ironic thrift store T-shirts. My favorite piece of clothing the year I was 21 was a vintage shearling lambskin coat I bought for $90. It was in reasonable condition, but had a fine layer of grime on it that couldn't be cleaned. I thought this was daring, and I referred to it my Russian hooker coat. That year I only dated artists, and I was in unrequited love with a photographer. The first time I wore that coat was the first night I spent with him. I remember waking up the next morning and looking over at the coat, slumped in a chair at his apartment like a slightly dirty sleeping animal. I felt both remarkably grown up and incredibly foolish. I tried wearing the coat again the next winter, but the left arm fell off.
—Jessica Grose

The plan went like this: Nikolas and I would both work for the United Nations, hop countries every few years, and live picaresque lives of daring, third-world adventure. We were in Myanmar, and he already worked for a U.N. agency. All that was needed was a similar job for me, and we had found one through our connections—an opening at the local office of the United Nations Children’s Fund. I wasn’t much into kids, but well-paying jobs for unskilled 22-year-olds are hard to come by in military dictatorships, and, presumably, the office was not actually staffed by children. A friend explained that I was pretty much guaranteed the position; all that was needed was a formal interview with the head of the agency, a genteel American Southerner. Before UNICEF called to schedule the interview, Nik and I packed some old T-shirts and shorts—Salvation Armyish rags we’d never wear in the stuffy Burmese capital—and headed for a weekend vacation on a remote Burmese island. To our surprise, we encountered another Westerner on the beach: the American head of the agency. Nikolas introduced me proudly. She was silent for a moment. Then: “What are you wearing?” I looked down at my neon pink, off-the-shoulder top. It read: "Babies Are Evil." I never did hear from UNICEF.
—Kerry Howley

My first “real” job was as summer associate at a major New York firm in 1992. New York City felt impossible to a girl from Texas and Kansas, and you could not possibly overestimate how completely outclassed I felt. I needed suits, so my parents—both of them—took me to the outlet mall near our house. I staunchly resisted masses of navy knee-length skirts. (If I knew nothing else, I knew I'd never remember to sit properly in a skirt all day long—plus, I couldn't walk in heels.) Finally, at Harve Benard, we struck gold—suits that met somewhere between my idea of professional and theirs. My favorite had avocado green pants, a woven, collarless green jacket and big buttons. I remember my dad watching me as I looked at myself in the mirror, in that tiny outlet store, sun coming through the windows, surrounded by the round racks of—let's face it—polyester. I felt strong, sharp. I wore it as often as I could, and didn’t find out until years later that pants weren't acceptable in that office, at that time, and that several young women associates had gathered together to discuss whether or not to tell me that the partnership wasn't pleased—and had decided instead to start wearing more pants.
—KJ Dell’Antonia

I got married in my grandmother's wedding dress. When we took it down from a shelf in her closet, where it had been sitting for 60 years, wrapped in tissue paper in a box, the dress was wrinkled but otherwise intact. It had turned from white to ivory, but that seemed all the better. The dress was heavy silk, with an endless row of buttons down the front that had loop fasteners, like an opera glove. It also had angle-length sleeves. The wedding was in the afternoon, on a humid, 90-degree day in Philadelphia. I was hot and sweaty—in the pictures, you can't miss the shine on my forehead. I didn't care. I felt elegant, like my grandmother.
—Emily Bazelon

And I got married in my mother's wedding dress. It had also been worn by her two sisters, my aunts. After the third wedding, my grandmother carefully put it away in a vacuum-packed box, which we opened with great fanfare several weeks before the wedding. To describe it as ivory is kind; in fact, it was a yellowish off-white. Originally made for an early-1960s wedding in Houston, Texas, it had a very high waist, a prom-queen wide skirt, short sleeves, and space for false bosoms, which we not entirely successfully got a seamstress to reduce. I admit that my motives for wearing it were mixed: Among other things, I wanted to avoid the horrors of shopping for a new one. But it also helped me see the point of the wedding ceremony itself, putting the whole somewhat odd event into a pattern (from generation to generation, etc). Neither of my sisters wanted to wear it— they demanded a really white white dress—nor did my cousins. So it has gone back into the vacuum-packed box, where it awaits daughters-in-law, or perhaps a niece.
—Anne Applebaum