On transformation

Everything must go.

It’s a short elevator ride up to my storage unit on the 5th floor of the Extra Space Storage facility. I’m here to pull a dozen or so Spring pieces for my booth at Catnip vintage mall and drop off the unsold stuff from winter, some wool pieces, holiday cocktail dresses, coats and wraps. I take the cart around the corner, past dozens of other white doors on the way to my door, open it up and what’s revealed to me is an archive, almost like a tomb I can plunder. It’s a memorial to the person I was before the pandemic: someone who worked in an office, dressed every day, wore mostly 1940s and 1950s vintage, curled my hair, wore turbans, waist cinchers and high heels, etc, etc. Remote work, pandemic stress and aging deeper into my 40s have transformed me into someone I would have been horrified to see when I was 36: a middle-aged woman wearing thrifted jeans and Birkenstocks, no makeup, hair in a basic messy bun. In the before times, I would have smugly assumed that this person doesn’t care about how they look, about what other people think of them, about taking care of themself at all. 

And I would have been right about one thing: I’m far less inclined now to care about others might perceive me. One of the freeing things about being 45 is that you are generally no longer a sexual object by default. The last several years have shifted my perspective about what it means to be a woman and how we perform gender; I’ve stopped shaving, largely stopped wearing fitted clothing, stopped doing anything with my hair except to pull it up in that bun. I am working toward believing that I do not need to be visually interesting in order to prove my worth to other people. 

In a way, this last is what I was performing with my IG account. I consistently maintained that it was about the research, about the stories I was telling, and in fact that has always been (in addition to sustainability) a deep underlying motivation for buying, researching and wearing vintage. But what I was reluctant to acknowledge was how the personal praise about how I looked wearing the clothing kept me going. Until, that is, I gained so much weight during the pandemic that I could no longer wear any of it. My therapist suggested that I simply use a dress form or get a smaller friend to model for me, if it was really about the clothes and the stories and not about me. This was, of course, anathema but I couldn’t explain why without being faced with some cognitive dissonance. I came to admit that it was absolutely about me and how I looked in the clothes, how I styled them, how I used them as self-expression and how they helped me move through the world. 

Now, without that armor, and without the daily task of dressing to be out in the world, I’ve been forced—or, gently encouraged—to consider who I am if I’m not the person who wears interesting antique clothes. What do I have to offer? What can I possibly contribute if it’s not that? Why can’t I just find bigger clothes and prove that you can be older and fatter and still stylish? Wouldn’t that be inspiring? 

But I’ve been reluctant to do this, and I’m still trying to figure out the answer to these questions. Fashion has always been a large part of how I like to express myself and engage in a creative practice: putting together color, texture, shape is still interesting to me, and digging up the stories is still interesting to me, I just don’t know how to, I guess, come back when I look and feel so different than I did in 2019. There’s such a strange contract that’s formed with followers when you are known for a specific kind of content: you agree to keep posting the same kind of content, you maybe get better at it, but you generally have to keep being engaging and informative in the way you always have been. They, in turn, keep following you. This contract isn’t legally binding, but it can feel binding when you need to transform something fundamental about yourself and you fear disappointing others. If I had never had an audience in the first place, I never would have amassed enough vintage to fill a large storage unit, and my transition into my 40s could possibly have been a bit less emotionally fraught, without having such a prominent visual record of what I looked like and was able to do just a couple years earlier. Selling clothes using images of a me I no longer resembled was incredibly painful, especially with well-meaning comments like “you look fabulous!” I did look fabulous, I would think, but I don’t anymore. 

I wish I could say that I’ve worked through all these feelings, and am totally embracing the person I’m growing into, but as I say, it’s still a work in progress. I don’t know how to be helpful and inspiring without putting myself on display, but I don’t want to be on display, so what am I to do? How can I be of value now? What do I have to contribute? Can I please just research your old house or your favorite place in town or YOUR vintage clothes? And if you’re a dealer and are still buying these days, do you want to help clear out my storage unit? 

Because everything, it turns out, must go.