I’ve been on this online shopping spree as of late. I’ve been wanting to get rid of a lot of my old clothes and buy a whole new wardrobe, so this week I’ve ordered new shoes, a new skirt, and possibly a new bag. This weekend I’m getting a new pair of jeans, which I hope will be just a little more flattering than the ones I’m wearing now. I might toss off some sort of nonchalant comment here along the lines of “But how could any jeans be less flattering,” but I am too smart to do that. I know the Denim Demons will come after me with a quickness if I mouth off like that. So I’m just hoping, quietly and humbly, to get a nice pair of jeans. That’s all I’m asking for over here.
Well, that and to have some sort of organizational principle in my closet. It’s driving me crazy lately. The poet’s shirts from the mid-nineties? Got to go. Shoes that don’t fit and also leave these weird red welts on the tops of my feet; work pants that bunch up in the thigh; linen shirt from high school that has inexplicably turned gnarled and yellow on the hanger without my touching it, ever; the dress I used to wear swing dancing during the whole ska thing. All of it’s going. I do this sort of purge pretty regularly, about twice a year. Some things are doomed from the beginning, and some things I never get rid of, but a lot of my clothes live in this weird limbo land for years and years because I can’t bear to get rid of something that has some sort of sentimental value or that I think might inexplicably fit me again one day and/or come back into style. I would love to be the type of person who still had her peach jean jacket from 1987, who will in fifty years have an attic full of cool vintage stuff to hand down. It just drives me mad though, and I don’t have a lot of storage space…hence the latest Purge. I might even be getting rid of my 1996 PowerBook, too, this time, if you can imagine. Can you believe I even have such a thing? You want it? For free?
So right now my head is stuffed full of visions of ruthless efficiency and order and cleanliness and wide open spaces. I’m cutting to the bone, is what I’m saying. Except for one thing, and I know you’ll forgive me if I get maudlin for a minute…I’m not chucking the Blue Skirt yet.
The Blue Skirt is one I’ve had, in various permutations, since around 1989. I bought it at Banana Republic before it was the More Expensive Gap, and I know I’m dating myself (and showing myself a pretty good time, ho HO!) when I tell all the kids that BR used to sell fake safari clothes. Does anyone who went to high school in the early nineties remember the animal shirts they used to have, with the iguana or the tiger or whatever, and then a map on the back? I totally had one of those. I was telling a girl I work with about this the other day when I wore The Blue Skirt to work for some unknown reason, and she said, “I don’t think I was shopping at Banana then.” Oh. Okay. Anyway, Banana Republic, 1989, I bought a blue tank dress type thing. Kind of a jersey fabric, like a really think cotton tee shirt. I think it had belt loops, even, although I have no idea why. I thought I looked pretty good in this dress and wore it to my sister’s thirteenth birthday party, which was held, incidentally, at Windows on the World. At the top of the World Trade Center. Yeah. Weird, right?
La la la, high school high school, and two years later we had The Hurricane, right before my senior year, and we lost about three quarters of our stuff. Somehow that dress survived, and I cut off the tank top to make it into a skirt for back to school clothes. I took it on a mission trip or two after that, where My Friend Ashley would sometimes wear it, always looking better than I did in it. I went to college and lent it to Carl’s friend Dave…for some reason that year all the boys were wearing skirts everywhere they went. True to form, Dave looked much better than I did in the skirt. I saw him a couple of weeks ago and I should have offered to let him try it on again. Next time, Dave. (Dave is moving to France for a year. I think he’s about to email me to beg me to bring him the Blue Skirt so he can wear it in France! Never fear, Dave! Always ready to help!)
The Blue Skirt has been washed to a really astounding softness, and so it’s kind of falling apart. The elastic has totally decayed, so I’ve had to knot it a little in what’s left of the waistband. When I cut the tank top part off TEN YEARS AGO I didn’t, like, make it look neat or anything, which is good because of the aforementioned knotting. This skirt has pockets (I said I got it in ’89) and whenever I put my keys or bus pass in one of them it drags the whole skirt down, like literally, with gravity and everything. I wore it to get my last haircut and that was kind of a wash because I don’t really have a good top to wear with it and I felt kind of dorky walking into the salon all with my ugly shirt and my draggy skirt. You would think that maybe the era of The Blue Skirt is justifiably over. Maybe it is.
I think I’ll let it survive this purge. If it can live through the old Banana Republic (I really did like those animal shirts!), Windows On The World, a hurricane, several third world countries, cross-dressing, and several summers’ worth of unemployment, I think it deserves a little more respect…at least until the next time I purge. Organization is one thing, but history is quite another.