Thanks “site admin!” You’re a champ. When rampaging robots made my website a nest wherein to spawn their monstrous broods, gnash their slavering jaws, and drip with slime and well, other things that drip (from what I could tell by the incoming links) I was, at first, fairly cool. But after some investigation, I realized that it was more than fifteen minutes of work to fix everything, so I took the whole thing down and contented myself by huffing and flinging myself around in outrage. Let’s just say that the thing might have been back up by July, but maybe not even then if it weren’t for my heroic neighbor. I vow to type things in his honor.

The vintage clothing entry was a little opaque to me, even after all that typing, but I think I’m starting to figure it out: I’m more and more suspicious of the emerging culture of no possessions as a statement against materialism. It sounds like a virtuous rejection of the world in which almost nothing is really real, the objects that surround us are facsimiles of things that no longer exist and are of such poor quality that they are rationally impossible keep or repair. But I suspect that the new culture of owning almost nothing and travelling a lot is not actually a rejection of all that; it’s a step further in the same direction. Just because you can fit all your possessions into a car, doesn’t mean you’ve done away with your need to wear clothing, feed yourself, read books, or recall your own history. So if you aren’t burdened with the basic things you need, you are repeatedly buying and disposing of them. It’s a significant step away from a world where the space one inhabits is filled with the kind of real objects that have their own continuity within the home. Those real objects come into the home or workplace (or are made there) with the marks of their making all over them and they go demanding to be touched and changed. They are worth modification and repair. The jetset-no-posessions-pretend-anti-materialist culture self-righteously popular with the “creative class” calls for stamped out, disposable objects, because of course, who can lug around cast iron or spend hours making hand-stitched repairs. Unless you are a mendicant, getting rid of everything is not minimalism or a statement against materialism. It’s the most direct way to feed a global demand for mass-produced garbage.

I’ve always wanted to live in a house populated with objects made by the people I love, but I’ve only recently realized that the personal connection with the objects around me may be the only thing strong enough to force me to live with them, instead of just banging up against them—acquiring, using, breaking, and dumping them. It’s hard to make time for objects; it’s slightly easier to make time for people.⁰¹ An object containing the physical evidence of someone I love encourages me to find a way to go on living alongside it.

When I was in high school I used to shop at the Salvation Army, even though I would have died before admitting it at school and could not bring myself to wear used clothing into that hostile universe of Louis Vuitton purses, Guess jeans, and expensive class rings. But there were still plenty of fifties, forties, and even thirties clothing to be found in second hand stores at the time, and the foreign colors and textures of those eras fascinated me. I hated the thick, itchy synthetics I grew up with, and although the striped fleeces and puffed miniskirts of the eighties were better, the cottons were still ugly polyester blends and the seams often puckered and wavy compared to the clothing of previous decades. (Were the eighties the start of cheap clothing mass produced abroad?) The fine batistes, charmeuses, woolens, and nubby upholstery cottons from before the second half of the twentieth century satisfied a certain appetite for beauty nothing in the thin sameness of the suburbs could at the time, or really ever can for me; although I notice that suburban world has been ironically appropriated for so long now that the irony has worn gently away and people actually find its images nourishing the way I did those old textiles and my great-grandmother’s Edwardian home, a rambling three storey clapboard structure of a bald plainness the Victorian neighbors reportedly found indecent. In Williamsburg, girls have been wearing the most soul crushing clothing of the eighties for years now and it looks piquant and sweet to me, though I don’t even see those fabrics as I absent-mindedly turn over the racks of frippery at Goodwill.

I’m not a collector though. I wear my ragged old clothing until it falls off me in shreds. The bargain prices have always been part of their worth. I am bourgeois enough that if I pay an arm and a leg for something, I feel compelled to save it for a special occasion, like my Newfoundland Nanny setting aside her best dress to wear for the first time to her own funeral. The bargain prices made it possible for me to trail around campus in a bedraggled Edwardian debutante dress or any of an assortment of bias cut silk nightgowns. Of course the shreds and the stains helped too, the way it’s easier to paint on the back of a utility bill than a thick, pristine sheet of cold pressed paper (which I prefer to save for my funeral). The few times in my life I’ve decided I ought to start dressing like a grown-up in nice tidy new clothes, I ended up looking somehow both bland and affected like one of those poor models in Lucky magazine, tortuously demonstrating how to wear a single article of clothing thirteen ways. I only realized I had any sort of a personal style when it was gone and I found myself dressed like a bank teller.

Other than that, I’ve never shopped with anyone else in mind, except for one mad moment during my pregnancy when I was seized with a panic that my baby might not like me and thought that, just in case, a lot of colorful jewelry might bring it round. I bought a strange and ancient necklace of cracked pink and ivory lucite beads from a woman in Argentina (which Aure has wrenched into pieces more times than I can count), a jingling brass charm bracelet, a heavy string of Deco era imitation amber beads, and a bewitching but poor quality Victorian bracelet with clumpy green paper mache blobs that left stains on my wrists and around the baby’s mouth until most of them were lost in the grass one day when I wore it to a picnic in the park.

I have, in place of the ability to remember number addresses or street names, I suppose, the inadvertent ability to recall details of what I was wearing at isolated moments in the past. So when I put on an article of clothing I am putting on all the moments that go with it, and when it’s used clothing, all the unknowable moments in the past belonging to the other women (and sometimes men) who wore it before me. At times I go about my business trailing bits of Vienna—my own from the nineties and someone else’s from the seventies, along with a story I don’t know involving someone in rural Texas and a lawn blouse or a flannel jacket in Philadelphia more than a hundred years ago. It pleases me to leaves the house wrapped in other places and other people’s stories. I started writing this to try to figure out why, but after all, I still don’t know. It just does.

Sometimes I get rid of something because it’s out of fashion or I decide I am not thin enough for it anymore, and afterward I am seized with regret and feel as though I’ve thrown away all of the memories and ghosts that have caught and stuck to it along with the accumulated mends, rips, and stains. But despite that, clothing is not a story or an idea. It’s a real, rippable, useful thing in a use continuous and yet infrequent enough to collect dozens of intimate memories. And unlike a book, the other intimate souvenir object I possess an awful lot of, it is, for the moment, in no danger of being conceptualized or digitized away.