In Eric Rohmer’s Boyfriends and Girlfriends, Blanche is a loner. She lives in the suburbs outside of Paris, in a brand new condominium. Her apartment is under-furnished. She has some sort of pencil pushing bureaucratic job. She’s a bit odd. She sort of doesn’t really have any friends, at least in the beginning. But then she meets Léa, and then she meets Léa’s boyfriend. And then, in typical Rohmer fashion, Blanche and Léa’s boyfriend fall in love. They look good doing it, not because the actors are beautiful (they are), but because of the way they’re dressed. Lived-in cotton button-ups. High-waisted khaki shorts. Long hair bows and bright red cashmere sweaters.
And then there’s this one dress — if you’ll stick with me for a minute — this one dress Blanche wears. It’s a blue sailor dress: navy blue with white trim. It looks like it’s probably cotton. She wears it during a moment of the film when she’s really sad. When she feels like a loser because love isn’t coming her way. To paraphrase the Talking Heads, it’s simply not coming to town. When I saw this in the film, at the end of this past summer, I decided that this was something I wanted: a navy blue sailor dress with a crazy big collar. It had to be vintage. It had to be the right material, ideally cotton. And it had to fit perfectly, hitting every curve of my body in exactly the right way.
This is often how I make decisions about style. There has to be some sort of romance behind it. There has to be a story. And the story can’t just be about how an actress in a movie wore a specific kind of dress; that’s not good enough. It also has to be about what that item of clothing represents. In Blanche’s case: being really miserable in a really specific way. How she looks exquisite in a moment when she feels really sad. Sad in the summer. Sad in a blue sailor dress with a big collar.
I found the Blanche dress on Etsy after searching for a few weeks. I rationalized the purchase by saying I’d wear it to a friend’s wedding. Because of course! Why not wear the misery garment to my friend’s wedding! The Blanche dress is homemade, cotton, slightly sheer, with a huge white organza pilgrim collar and a full skirt. It hits me mid-calf. It fits me perfectly. I like that if you’re looking really closely you can see the outline of my underwear. For as long as I’ve been an adult I have loved wearing anything that is a little bit sheer because it always feels sort of illegal.
When it arrived, a few weeks before the wedding, I was as miserable as Blanche was in that scene in Boyfriends and Girlfriends. I had, overnight, become very unlucky in love. The first time I ever wore my Blanche dress, I was dumped by the person I was dating. I proceeded to wear it for nearly three days straight. I wore it to take a nap. I wore it to wake up at five o’clock in the morning, just to walk around. I wore it to breakfast at Balthazar, to meet my friend and old boss at Vogue, Sally, in the middle of fashion week. Then for a while it felt really cursed. I couldn’t wear it; it held all of this grief. It felt like a poisoned amulet. Here was the cursed dress from the movie in which a beautiful woman is so miserable! Here I was, a beautiful woman, so miserable. I hung the dress up right where I could see it, on the wall across from my bed. I am very confrontational with myself. I like to be reminded of the reality of things.
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When Blanche falls in love with Léa’s boyfriend, she realizes that what she loves about him is that he will have fun with her. And they have fun together. They go windsurfing and swimming, and they have sex in the woods and sex in Blanche’s apartment. And the sex is really hot. They walk around ponds and lakes. They lock arms and kiss beneath trees. As time passed, I realized that fun was sort of what I’d been missing in love. With a few notable exceptions, I tend to go for partners who are too similar to Casaubon from Middlemarch. If you haven’t read that book, basically what I’m talking about is a guy who’s sort of tortured, who takes work too seriously, and who is really mean.
When I started wearing the dress again, I started to think that basically what I was looking for in a partner was someone who cared a lot about joy in a way that was real + brutal + present. I took the dress with me on a roadtrip. I wore the dress while walking through a field in the Texas Hill Country, while drinking a Lone Star beer and wearing these sunglasses that look like the ones Jean-Paul Belmondo wears in Pierrot le Fou (do you see a theme, haha). I wore the dress while pumping gas in rural Arkansas. I didn’t have a partner during any of this. I wasn’t even really seeing anyone. I was sort of seeing someone. But I still felt like Blanche in act 2 of Boyfriends and Girlfriends. I was a happier, looser, weirder version of myself. I was someone who drove with the windows down and walked around with no shoes on. I was someone who had just learned how to shoot a gun.
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I’ve said before that good clothing should make you feel something. That basically the whole point of having personal style is to be referential, to create some sort of swirl of all the things you care about. My base references tend to be from films I’ve seen, from books I’ve read, from trying to translate what I think a song looks like. The second level of reference should be how all of those things make you feel. In the blue dress with the sailor collar I wanted to feel: wayward, tragic.
Lately, I have been looking at this one Wolfgang Tillmans photo, Love (Hands in Hair), and it’s making me want to wear brick-red lipstick and a big starchy swoopy blouse from the ’80s. And I have been listening to Neil Young’s On the Beach all the time, front to back, which makes me want to wear a yellow coat and buy a pair of Lucchese boots. The operating moods these garments are conveying are: the feeling of being uninhibited, and the feeling of being a loner in a dreamy, psychedelic way. They are also about how I want someone to look at me really specifically.
Surely you know what I mean. If you wear clothing for reasons other than utility, I do believe there has to be an earnest impulse underneath it to be seen, to feel the way you do when you listen to your favorite song. When clothing makes us feel this way, it can be really powerful. It can be like living inside a photograph. Like this one photograph I think about all the time of when I was 21, and my boyfriend at the time and I were lying on the grass in front of this weird scary 19th Century shack next to a beach and it was right when they invented live photos on iPhones and you can see me crying, live, because I was happy and in love for the first time in a way that was stupid and amazing.
These associations are the best argument I can think of for why beautiful things aren’t frivolous. Beauty can be so vital for one’s health because it can remind us of things about ourselves that we would like to remember. For me, lately, what I’d like to remember when I wear beautiful things is what I look like when I am in love. What I look like when I’m feeling free.
