Dress: When I was a sophomore in high school, first semester of my first year of boarding school, I got this idea of how I wanted to look. I needed a black wool skirt, A-line. I would wear it with beautiful sweaters in brilliant shades—bright coral orange, peacock blue, rich green. Perhaps with a menswear style blouse underneath (hem strategically untucked when the Dean wasn’t paying attention), black tights, clunky Oxfords or Mary janes.[1] I might tie my hair back into a French-girl ponytail with an abstract scarf or a headband. I would be tall and lithe, with skin like unmarred porcelain.
I marked up a J. Crew catalog with ideas for how to achieve this look and took it to my mother, then single, working for a non-profit, who nixed the plan on the basis of money, which was fair. And it was nice of her, really, to harp on the money bit, instead of saying, these clothes do not come fat enough[2] for you. Or like, it might be helpful for you to stop imagining yourself as auburn-haired Francoise Hardy before you look in the mirror and reality disappoints you again.
Reality is an asshole, I don’t mind saying. Even now, after all my attempts at self-care and (god help me) self-love and decades of accepting (with theatrical pride) that I will never look like either auburn-haired Francoise Hardy or Cate Blanchett or even a person euphemistically described as even “ maybe interesting looking” by 99.9% of the human population. This is not, however, about feeling sorry for oneself because we are not classically beautiful. It is about imagining outfits, and possibly even acquiring the pieces for said outfits that will not work in this version of reality.
Consider this dress. It is a black t-shirt dress with a low back, purchased as part of a richly imagined, completely planned outfit I believed I would wear to Oxford, back in fall of 2022, when we went to visit my most successful academic friend (his office alone is the stuff dreams are made of). I had this dress. I had this adorable oversized houndstooth jacket. I had my tights and my boots (nod back to high school). I might have even had a scarf. I had a picture in my head. I procured the components. I put the whole thing together. I posed in my mirror and, well-before I realized the houndstooth jacket would take up literally half of my suitcase and that the day we were to visit Oxford was forecast to be sunny and somewhere in the neighborhood of 70 degree Fahrenheit, I thought, sweet jesus, I look like I’m cosplaying. What was I cosplaying exactly? Kinks fan? Dark Academia? Too-Smart-For-Her-Own-Good student in 80s movie about an English University? You pick. I was wearing exactly the thing that 19-year-old Alison Fields would have packed to wear on her first day at on a semester abroad in the UK, had I ever been on a semester abroad in the UK, before she walked into class a realized she might have overthought the assignment.
Anyway, I dressed like a normal person at Oxford, or at least as close to a normal person as I’m capable of, but I packed the dress for the trip. I quickly realized it was close to indispensable an object as a black t-shirt dress can be. You can wear this with anything. Dress it up dress it down. Heels. Boots. Sweaters. Blazers. Eighteen months later, I am literally about to wear out this dress and I will be sad when I do. I think I wear it once a week in the winter months (less in the summer because it is quite short, and my bare upper thighs are quite shy).
Moral of the story: sometimes the collection of ingredients is far more useful and delicious than the recipe you bought them for and failed to reproduce.
Sweater: A few months after I failed to replicate my boarding school “look” and a couple of days before Christmas, my dad dropped me off at the mall with a couple hundred dollars in cash and instructed me to buy Christmas presents for everyone in his family, including myself and my sister, and some friends, and said he’d pick me up in 4-6 hours. This was a practical solution for my father on a number of levels. 1) It gave him a way to avoid having to Christmas shop and 2) It was a great way to deal with me on parental custodial weekends. Dad didn’t exactly know what to do with a teenager, and I didn’t think I could spend any more time at his house, bickering with my little sister about the indignity of our shared bedroom and watching “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” (inexplicably the only VHS, along with perhaps “Mindwalk” and/or “My Dinner with Andre,” that my dad owned at the time) again.
Christmas shopping for Dad’s family wasn’t much of a burden, even for a know-nothing fifteen-year-old like myself. Save my Aunt Molly, who was and is a masterful giver of finely-honed and well-considered gifts, the rest of them were an astonishing display of not given a figgy pudding. Like presents so thoughtless it would have been less insulting to receive nothing at all. Especially my paternal grandparents who turned the whole Christmas gift into a kind of conceptual race to the bottom, despite the fact that they no longer spoke in real life. Like my paternal grandfather would send me a crumpled, expired coupon for 15% off a McDonalds Happy Meal. And my maternal grandmother would send an orange velour turtleneck sweater three sizes two small with an appliqued pheasant on the front and a clearance tag still attached from an outlet in Hilton Head. Or my grandfather would send a letter indicating that he was donating all of his money to nuns who were praying for him to find his literary muse again (or something to that effect) and my grandmother would send me a check made out to Allyson (no last name) for $12, unsigned and written in pencil. My grandfather had the excuse of being a bit of an eccentric disaster, having squandered a fortune or two already. My grandmother, however, was a rich lady, who (I think I can say this) just wasn’t particularly interested in thinking about her grandchildren at all.
Dad, himself, was a lovable delight, but clearly product of his heritage. He was a huge fan of the regift, which meant we could anticipate stockings filled with used ink pens, paint brushes, and snacks his neighbors had made for him, as well as what he called “the ultimate regift,” which were things that already belonged to us, just wrapped up and addressed to us. Some of these things were gifts previously given to us by members of his family, including one baby blue Ralph Lauren turtleneck, size Medium (courtesy of maternal grandmother) which was gleefully regifted between my sister, father, and me for some span of years.
The shoes in the wild. No pun intended. 1992. And I do apologize for the hat.
Anyway. Fifteen-year-old me at the mall bought some doo dads and hard back books. I think I may have picked up something for my then-ten-year-old sister at the Limited Too. And for myself, I bought a pair of bright purple high-top Chuck Taylors, which at the time felt like the most thing I ever wanted. They were also part of an outfit I probably couldn’t really pull off, but I was undaunted. It was the 1990s. What other sneaker would I wear? Where else was I supposed to write boys’ initials, Nirvana lyrics or wholly predictable Oscar Wilde quotes (gutter, stars, yadda, yadda) but on the toe caps or on the white rubber sole sides? There wasn’t much chance a member of my family would have given me those shoes as a Christmas present. It would have felt weird even asking for them and then trying to explain why I wanted them.
Which is a roundabout way of saying that the best presents are generally the ones you give yourself. They don’t require explanation or excuse, or hints dropped or hoping that anyone will actually understand that you like what you like, even if they don’t understand why. So every holiday season since the purple chucks, I’ve make a point of buying something I want that I know no one else in their right mind would ever buy me for me. This ridiculous cardigan was one of those things.
Outfit: One of my best friend’s other best friends, a talented dancer and choreographer I met at least a million years ago at women’s college, asked me about a month ago if I would like to provide text to her company’s new production. I was thrilled. Being asked to collaborate on any sort of dance-related endeavor is both a dream come true and vindication for all of those that ever told me that I would never be a dancer (Note: I am really, really not a dancer).
Anyway, I wore this to a rehearsal at a temporary studio space in a church fellowship hall. I mostly just watched, but every now and then I would try to stand around with my feet in fifth position to see if anyone was like oh yeah, she’s obviously a natural. The ballet world truly lost out on one of the greats.
You guys. I am forty-eight years old.
No fooling.
Dress: Rag&Bone, Nordstrom, 2022
Sweater: Urban Outfitters, 2022
Earrings: Maybe Topshop? H&M? 2018
Boots: Dr. Marten, 2022
[1] If this outfit sounds familiar to you, it’s because you’ve probably seen me wearing some version of it for the better part of the last thirty years.
[2] In retrospect, I wasn’t significantly overweight in high school, but it is easy to feel like fattest girl in the world if you happened to be just “not skinny” at peak-Winona era boarding school in the early 90s. And even then, I (mostly) didn’t fit into J Crew in 1991.
Tiny Commotions 