When the pants arrived, I thought there had to be some kind of mistake. A category error. How could this happen? They were so comically huge on me. They were not flattering, and I mean that in the biblical sense. They were far too long. Loose around my waist, but narrow around my hips. When I sat down in them, it looked like I had swallowed an air bag for a small sedan. It was an unseasonably warm day in May, and the pants were made out of heavy wool. There was nothing redeemable about them. They were ugly, they did not fit me. I imagined jobs where one would wear pants like this, and the only thing I could think of was nursing home attendant. Like: scooping Greek yogurt into an elderly person’s mouth, and then they spit it back up on you. As if they were a baby bird. I took photos of myself in the mirror and sent them to my friends. Different angles, too. Front and back. Sitting down. In a tiny Hane’s tank top. In a big sweater. Topless, with my hands covering my chest. Should I keep these? They are hideous. I asked. Everyone said the same thing: Yes.
I kept the Lemaire pants. A few days later, I took them to the Korean dry cleaner near my apartment and paid roughly $25 to get them hemmed. When I tried them back on, I decided that, in their newly (and barely) altered state, they were perfect. They were doing something to my body that was bad, but in a way that I was sort of obsessed with. It was sexy, I thought, the way they sort of distorted me. A venus fly effect: They swallowed me and then spat me back up again. I had new proportions in these pants, and they weren’t the proportions of any human, woman or man. Did I look like an ass on stilts? Was that it? Maybe. I decided to debut them at dinner with my boyfriend at the time. I asked him what he thought about them, and he said they looked perfect. We were seated at the Odeon. We were at a good table. I drank a martini very quickly. I felt rich.
I have always had a romantic impulse when it comes to spending money on clothing. It’s the reason I bought the hideous pants. They made me feel something. They reminded me of my boyfriend at the time, which, I should add, was this past spring. He had lived above the Lemaire store in Paris, he told me, before we met. He had tried on a similar version of the pants, the men’s version, and hadn’t bought them. This is what I thought about when I wore the pants: my boyfriend. Here’s what else I thought about: the future, and older versions of myself in the same pants. I saw myself riding my bicycle in them with rubber bands around the cuffs so they didn’t get caught. I saw myself wearing them and holding a baby. I could not tell if it was my baby (which does not currently exist), or if it was a baby that belonged to someone else. I saw myself walking around lower Manhattan. I saw myself happy. I saw myself wearing them and continuously falling in love with different people.
I think this is how clothing should make us feel. It should make us project future realities onto ourselves. Ideally, clothing should make you think about a memory, like the white Repetto Zizis I bought in Paris last year. I bought them because they reminded me of where I was (in Paris) and how I felt (miserable). The first time I really took them out for a spin, it was to go on a date with a beautiful Flemish woman at a wine bar in the 11th. When I wear them now, that’s what I think about: Paris in April, in the presence of a beautiful woman, and I’m decadently miserable but in a way that I’ll probably fetishize for the rest of my life.
Good clothing should always feel like this. One should never buy an item of clothing if it does not provoke something in oneself. You should feel squirrely, I think. Or beatific. Or clairvoyant. Worst case scenario is you feeling nothing. I’d also like to posit that good clothing should feel spiritually expensive. I did not pay full retail price for my pants. I bought them on The RealReal for $150. I have spent more than $400 on an item of clothing maybe three times in my entire life; I buy almost everything used or vintage. But when I do buy something, I want it to feel luxurious. I want what I’m wearing to feel exquisite. Like this time I bought a see-through vintage dress from the 1960s with a drop waist while I was waiting for a table at the Four Horseman and changed into it between courses. I want clothing to make me think about my body differently. I want it to make me remember what it feels to be in love or upset or free or crazy. I want to feel like a million bucks. I think clothing has the ability to do this, weirdly.
This has not been a particularly happy time in my life. I am no longer with my boyfriend, the one who took me to the Odeon on my birthday. I have spent most of the fall alone in my apartment writing two different novels. Riding my bike to the Park Slope Food Coop to buy flowers while listening to that Cindy Lee record. Or to a party in Vinegar Hill listening to Beverly Glenn Copeland’s Keyboard Fantasties. This is a period in which I am wearily piecing myself back together again. In which I am running short distances at fast speeds, loops around Prospect Park. Like I am standing behind an artificial waterfall at a buffet restaurant in the suburbs.
But here’s where the pants come back in. I wore them upstate the other week, shortly after my best friend’s wedding. The Hudson Valley in the beginning of November. Hard frost on the ground in the early morning. The perfect season for thick wool pants. They were on my body as I walked through the woods with my friends. The sky was so perfectly clear. The wind made it feel so very cold. At some point I caught my reflection. I looked good. I felt good. Once again, I projected a future onto myself. A sort of alchemy happened: I was going to be happy again soon, I could feel it. I could see it.
