Friday, September 05, 2014

This Is How Women Really Feel About Their Clothes


By - NY Magazine



Photo: Courtesy of Blue Rider Press
Why do we need a book about clothes? Writer Sheila Heti has a simple answer: “You can’t get around it. You have to get dressed in the morning.”

She’s right. Maybe you don’t consider yourself stylish, or you don’t care at all about fashion; maybe you’re obsessed with clothes, or you think of every piece of clothing as a time machine. Regardless, everyone has some kind of relationship with what they wear every day.

“I was literally looking for a book about how women think about their clothes, how they shop, how they dress, how they choose things,” Heti says. “But there wasn’t any book like that.” So she wrote a list of her questions and sent them to one friend — novelist Heidi Julavits — who sent them to another — illustrator Leanne Shapton — and together the three embarked on a grassroots exploration. First, they enlisted strangers by passing out business cards that said "I like how you dress" with a link to an online survey; then they passed the questionnaire on to friends and fellow journalists. Eventually, the 83-question survey they developed and shared online grew into Women in Clothes, a collection of essays, impressions, and illustrations from women both well-known and not. There’s a little bit of everything, but that’s deliberate — they wanted the book to have “the tone of an art project and this curious, spaghetti-on-the-wall feel,” Shapton explains.

The Cut talked to all three editors about clothes, feminism, and avoiding fashion-speak.


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