Something about it felt like a game. Like I was playing MASH. Kids: O. Car: 2010 Specialized Vita ladies’ road bike. Occupation: magazine assistant. Salary: $27,000 a year, no benefits. Pets: 0. Husband: a boyfriend who hated me.
In MASH, you win when you have the best life. I did not have the best life. I was 22. I smelled bad all the time. My friends all had rom-com jobs like working at the farmer’s market or being a production assistant. I had a rom-com job, too: I worked at Vogue assisting Sally Singer, the magazine’s creative director. I sat in the equivalent of a secretarial typing pool on the 25th floor of the World Trade Center. Most of what I did involved staring at a Google Calendar or reading a New Yorker article from 1993. One time I had to buy a gold chain in Chinatown. Sometimes when I came to work there would be 9/11 truthers standing outside saying that the Jews did it. I might not have the best life, I thought, but my life did have a sense of intrigue.
When you’re young, a lot of what you do is create a narrative about yourself. For me, this meant that I had escaped my rough suburban upbringing (my parents loved me, and the small upstate suburb where I grew up is beautiful). It meant I told people I went to a lot of punk shows as a teenager (I didn’t, but I did listen to a lot of punk music on the family desktop computer, this being the early 2010s). Now, I was a girl who lived in Brooklyn. I did interesting things on the weekend. No one I worked with could’ve possibly imagined all of the interesting things I did on the weekend (hanging out in a shitty bar, or an even shittier punk venue).
The way I conveyed all of this was in how I dressed. Meaning, I played the game by showing up to work looking crazy to match my insides, which felt crazy. I was aware that I had a reputation. I’d arrive wearing see-through Victorian bed jackets with no bra underneath. A long red school teacher’s dress and a pair of stripper heels. A Laura Ashley dress that made me look like I was from a fundamentalist cult about two years before anyone else did that. My literal prom dress. Boys’-sized blue high-waisted trousers from the garbage. A sweatshirt, hot pants, and then three dresses. An orange-and-pink nail technician’s jacket over a gingham house dress.
I was under the impression that my colleagues thought I looked crazy, but in a benevolent way. Like I was auditioning every single day. And I was, come to think of it, auditioning every single day. I was performing a role — being the kind of girl I thought other people wanted me to be. Above all else, I never wanted my outfits to seem sexy. When I was wearing a prom dress or a very long skirt with two more skirts on top of it, I was trying to be brutal. I was trying to be a freak.
I lasted 10 months at Vogue. Around the time I left my job, my boyfriend broke up with me. I started treatment for my previously unchecked obsessive-compulsive disorder; I was no longer tapping a doorknob in numbers divisible by eight to prevent my family from dying in a shipwreck. I was having enriching and meaningful sexual experiences with married couples who I met online — couples whose names I forgot as soon as I wrote about those enriching and meaningful sexual experiences in my journal.
I went to work at another fashion magazine. One time I had to wake up at 3 a.m. because my boss was in Europe for fashion week, and for some reason it was my responsibility to give him a wake-up call (he was 32 and owned an iPhone). Another time I had to sit in his apartment and supervise a team of window washers — a skill I had not learned at liberal arts school. He would always tell me that I’d done a bad job. Eventually, I got laid off and decided that was it. It wasn’t one thing in particular that led me to quitting magazines. I just knew I had a second act, and it wasn’t going to involve Photoshopping boots onto white squares.
**
I’m now 29 and feel confident for the first time. And while for some people confidence in style means trying something crazy, for me it means something totally different: looking kind of normal, and finding it unnerving but also finding it to be a relief.
I don’t wear three skirts stacked on top of each other anymore. I care about how clothing looks on me, how it feels, how it affects my mood. This isn’t to say that the way I approach personal style isn’t exciting or that I’ve embraced minimalism. I’m still someone who will wear three different patterns in an outfit. I wear many of the same sheer Victorian items as I did seven years ago. I’m just wearing them in a more considered way. I’m wearing them because they make me happy.
Sophie KempI was trying to be a freak.
I stayed in touch with my old boss, Sally Singer, after I left media, and I asked her why she thought I stopped dressing the way I did when I worked for her.
SOPHIE KEMP: I am writing a piece about my personal style and how it has changed since I was like 22 and working for vogue and wearing big puffy victorian bed jackets to work every day/many skirts stacked on top of each other/a blouse from the garbage.
SALLY SINGER: Hmmm well i think you are an eclectic and romantic dresser by nature and that those impulses can take many forms. I think when you went to columbia you constructed a slightly different sartorial persona for yourself, also one at a right angle to the norms of the place you found yourself in (as you had at vogue). You simultaneously dress to disappear and stand out…or stand apart. Perhaps you are less ironic now…
Does growing up make us less ironic in our approach to style? I’d wager yes. Irony, performativity, they’re all the same thing. Shortly after I left fashion, I sat down and wrote a novel about a girl who was alienated by everyone she knew. I spent my whole life, basically up until I finished that book, feeling alienated by everyone I knew. I had exorcised something while writing my novel. When I finished, I no longer felt so alienated all the time. My relationship to style followed.
I no longer felt an impulse to dress in a way that pissed people off because I was no longer so pissed off. Instead, I entered my beautiful period. I wanted to dress like I lived on a boat. I wanted to dress like a porcelain doll. I wanted to dress like someone who rode her bike across the Manhattan Bridge while listening to Prefab Sprout who was not concerned with how other people thought about her and who was okay being alone and who knew what made her happy and who had an art practice and she was fine she was fine she was fine.
What I’m trying to say by talking about myself is that I don’t think I’m alone in this. I’ve watched my friends grow up, and we’ve all become less rough around the edges. More whole, more assured. I’ve watched my friends come beautifully into their own styles. And most of the time, it’s without the internet. When you get a little older, a little less crazy, it starts to all become more intuitive.
I’m not going to tell you about a brand that made me feel good. I’m not going to tell you that I made these three fashion changes to feel enlightened. I didn’t spend $1,000 on anything. I don’t think any of that is real, that if you buy a specific thing by a specific designer it will automatically make you feel different. I’m a little too old to be native to TikTok, and I didn’t have Instagram for five years so I don’t fully understand how the algorithm works when it comes to clothes.
I do know that if you zoomed out — if you turned New York City into the Men in Black marble and trained your magnifying glass on it — you would see a lot of people who aren’t comfortable in their own skin. You’d see 22-year-olds sitting in the kitchens of their tenement apartments while their friends shaved their heads. You’d see 23-year-olds buying clothing by the pound in the part of Bushwick that’s basically Maspeth. You’d see young people who know how to try something but don’t know how to be. And that, I think, is what I’ve learned now that I’m all grown up. I’ve learned that good style, feeling good in clothes, is all about understanding how you ought to be. Not because someone told you, gave you instructions. But because it feels right. It needs to feel right. I feel certain about that.
