‘Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes’

Published on: 15th May 2022

By Suzanne Meyers

Is there a more expedient formula for self awareness than personal taste and style? My own was jump-started by a move. Arriving from Akron, Ohio to my new high school in small town Virginia, I made the egregious error of being enthusiastic about Romeo and Juliet in my first week’s English class. Immediately I was black listed by the cool kids. As it was, their clique sported the preppy look of pink, button-down shirts and tan chino trousers. Though basic, these were then sold at expensive department stores. My working class parents bought my clothes at Sears. I couldn’t fit in anyway.

Soon loneliness sent me to volunteer at the local college’s Shakespeare festival. There student-actors introduced me to the British punk rock playing over their school’s radio airwaves. It was a personal revelation and revolution. Now all my free hours were dedicated to being a punk. Inspired mostly by fellow Akronite, the Pretenders’ Chrissie Hynde, I clad myself in skinny black jeans, tight black t-shirts, smudged black eyeliner and a dark black attitude. Unearthing a heavy black leather jacket from the Salvation Army store was, to a kid with little pocket money, a mammoth blessing from the God of Rejects. My parents were horrified, adding to my joy.

Upon graduation, I traveled to my own university, an hour’s drive but a lifetime away in Richmond. There, in 1985, I found every other punk and weirdo in the state had landed in my dorm. Oddly, I became ill at ease with purple haired girls in filthy trench coats blasting The Cure from their rooms. I recoiled from everything but the music. And for a brief period I bought simple, flowing dresses with fitted waists. Perhaps an antebellum prettiness or Scarlett O’Hara’s fiddle-dee-dee femininity had seeped into my sub consciousness over night.  But alas, like the confederacy, it was not to last.

Prior to punk, my refuge was in the films of Hollywood’s Golden Age. From Hitchcock, to The Thin Man and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, the sublime costumes that kitted out these celluloid stories haunted me. Instantly I recognized their local cousins. Bargain priced and glorious: pieces from 40’s to the 60’s were awash in the city’s thrift stores. I could transform into a Jane Russell sweater girl in a neat pencil skirt or switch easily over to Audrey Hepburn’s gamine style of Funny Face. I was now, once again, joyfully different.

My new persona attracted a trumpet player boyfriend who dressed like a Depression era jazz man. Fifteen years my senior, we created drama that wouldn’t have been far out of place in film noir. Looking back at that time, with its swing and bebop sound track, I feel a little embarrassed. But it was the things I said and did, not the dressing up. That was fabulous.

Next up, I met the man I would later marry: a grunge musician who guided me into a deep study of Tibetan Buddhism. By 1992, we were living in New York’s dicey Alphabet City, where I gave up glamour for flannels shirts and baggy jeans, a look that joined perfectly with meditating on the certainty of death. Of course, even renunciants need to pay rent so I pushed myself into a “real job” as a legal assistant. I knew I couldn’t succeed in mid-town Manhattan dressed as Betty Draper, so I acquired an office uniform of black or gray pants below a white blouse. A look, let’s face it, which says absolutely nothing.

My years pursuing “adulthood” brought its share of woes. Yet, this period gifted me a rich understanding of why philosophers exalt in the principle of “know thyself.” Or, had I lived by Henry David Thoreau’s advice “Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes,” I might have found my niche earlier. At present, older, wiser I am free to slip from vintage to high fashion back to jeans if I want. But whatever I wear, I know now, it had better be inspired.

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Suzanne Meyers is a lover of books, beads and all things British.

Instagram: @iamsuzannem or @3.6.9.magic