Read Me Like A Book

Summer outfits inspired by favorite characters from literature

Some people remember everything.

Some people remember nothing.

Others remember certain moments with a clarity that is almost breathtaking, and yet have blacked out significant chunks of their lives, blinking like malfunctioning robots when attempting to discuss, say, tenth grade. My information about the range of memory used to come from badgering friends with questions like “can you remember being in your stroller?” and “what did your mother used to smell like in the morning?” At a certain point, it became apparent to me that not everyone gets as giddy as I do over thought exercises like this, but may instead grow suspicious and spiky, as if you’re the police in those YouTube bodycam crime scene compendiums that I’ll mainline 69 of in a row if no one stops me (why the FUCK are they always finding kids in cages!? And why does no one seem to metabolize just how badly a straight throuple ends if you don’t lay down some ground rules first!?)

The fact is, not everybody enjoys remembering. And people may suspect that, if you do, you lived an Anne of Green Gables childhood where your trauma was distant, abstract, and you kept your jugs of fresh milk in the stream to cool. I’ve learned that an adult party is where most people go to make new memories as an orange-wine drinking, subtle lip-stain wearing grownups- not to recount the story of the first time they ever wet their jorts.

But my memories aren’t pleasurable to me because of how they summon trauma. Rather, there is a genuine joy and escape in the scene setting. The way East Canal Street used to smell in August, before certain cleanup efforts began or the emergence of chic bars. The way people used to congregate at the mouth of the Prince Street N/R train midday. The interiors: sickly green and yellow tile arching over the bathtub where I spied as my father, slinking deeper and deeper into the water, called his brother on years of unprocessed shit with a force WASPs usually reserve for the moment right before someone is accidentally struck by a vehicle. The tin rooster-shaped weathervane that spun manically as they loaded my grandmother into an ambulance, just as we pulled into her driveway on a Saturday morning. Even more often, it’s the outfits that pull me back, and what they said about who we were then and who we wanted to be to be. My mother’s plaid capri leggings said stability, a gear shift into maternal predictability. My father wore the Tye-Dye shirts I made him at camp for the whole first summer he was sober. My brother and I had matching gingham spandex outfits that my mother got for a Christmas card but they were cursed when, trying them on in August, he mounted the refrigerator box I was playing “Boxcar Children” in and accidentally went flying. Emergency room.

I remember all the summers when my outfit was designed as either camouflage- girlie drag to hide my sun-blinded rage- or as a slap in the face to the season, an Emily the Strange style revolt. Whole swaths of time were defined by the proportions of a single outfit, the way it disguised or rearranged my form. A look chosen to hide slow-growing boobs or a developing hill of tummy flesh, avoiding my knees even though it was 101 degrees in the shade.

1997, when I decided I was no longer going to wear my cousin’s hand me down Laura Ashley dresses and my mother’s green angora wrap, and instead bought pink flannel boxers patterned with polar bears at Century 21 for $2.99, the “oh, I just threw this on” uniform that the star of the swim team my mother had forced me to join, (a girl with the improbable name of Darcy Liberty) pulled on over her wet standard-issue one piece Navy Speedo. I collected my participation ribbons on the post of my bed.

2001, when my camp bestie Emily came to visit the city and we sliced our bangs short and jagged, applied patchy black CVS dye, pierced our frenulums (aka the membranes under our tongues) on Saint Mark’s, no IDs needed. Once our agitated parents dropped us at Fernwood Cove camp for girls, no doubt regretting the June Rumspringa they had allowed us, we chopped our camp t-shirts into halter tops using a DIY guide from YM Magazine. Whenever we were permitted out of our green and white uniforms, I wore my glow in the dark Boop as Devil baby tee from Hot Topic and a borrowed Limited Too floral mini-skirt. Emily taught me a trick for the inter-camp socials, something like the bend and snap, only it involved dropping and sensually retrieving a boy’s Abercrombie hat.

2002, leaving a post 9/11 New York for poetry camp at Bennington College, where Joana and I were so wowed by the local Walmart (and the fact that we were allowed to walk there alone, something the previous year in Brooklyn had shut right down) that we went wild with our snack money, got matching Roller Girls shorts (which we folded at the waist so that they were roughly the length of granny panties) a bedazzler and a twist-a-braid.

In 2011, in my first studio apartment in Brooklyn, cool girl icons Sophie Buhai and Lisa Mayock asked me to pose for a Vena Cava lookbook (me!? I was so sure I was an ogre who shook the streets with every step, and yet what a sweet little girl I see now.) I’d spent the previous summer haunting a man in his thirties, like a Victorian ghost with access to a series of Urban Outfitters floral babydoll dresses that showed ass but no belly, knee high cowboy boots and shoulder grazing hoops, my hair brushing my tailbone but splitting like straw from the ears down due to an ill-advised dalliance with Sun In. That summer- the first year we shot Girls, with my greasy bob and Nars Jungle Red lips screaming “big kid”- I just alternated the outfits I could not believe the Vena Cava girls had bartered as payment, wearing the blue satin blouse with gingham booty shorts and baby blue clogs (the sort my mother warned me had caused her to roll and break her ankle on Houston in the 70s) while I sat on a stoop trying to secure the attention of … the drummer from Guster? Yes, that seems right.

2017, sick but refusing to really say so, my hair fell out in fat dramatic chunks and my face rounded out rapidly from a steroid injection the doctor swore would have no side effects. At first, I tried to create a distraction with absurdly shaped sunglasses, incorrect geometry. When that failed, I ordered a series of mermaid wigs and wore them first only at home, and then to watch the 4th of July fireworks, to Jacob Riis beach to write a hard-hitting account of public toplessness.

These were all costumes, ideas about the type of woman I was becoming, and usually designed to engage someone un-engageable. And- thank you God, whoever you may be!- it’s been awhile since I felt that way. Now, I dress with the desire to feel easy in my body, equally at home in the world or in my bed, and inspiration comes in the form of my other favorite thing- books.

Body Weather is a BIG recommend for chronic illness girlies, their partners and anyone grappling with the lawlessness of the human form!

I have more fun getting dressed now than I have in all the years since I first figured out social hierarchies- that was maybe second grade? It’s a place to unite deep-dive interests (forgotten women: Gale Benson and her death on the journey toward revolution, what she thought you wore to get there. Music’s main characters who were treated as supporting players: Marsha Hunt who mothered Mick Jagger’s first child on pennies, because a rock star’s attention and 10 cents will buy you a cup of coffee. Cathy Smith, the groupie who shot John Belushi up with the speedball that killed him, but not before Gordon Lightfoot wrote this song about her. Tentpoles of decade-specific chicness, Holly Harp and Hope Atherton’s early 2010’s hair.)

A costume means something different now- and this summer, it’s been outfits inspired by some of my favorite women (and select, queerish men!) from the fiction in my ultimate library. If you’re feeling style-stuck, might I suggest you use *your* classics as inspiration?

Camilla aka Camilla Dickinson (by Madeleine L’engle, 1951):

Camilla is a mid-century YA story novel, L’Engle’s rare foray into realism, in which an uptown girl finds tentative love, just as her parents divorce causes her to question all she’s ever known (real “my life has been a lie!” energy- what I yelled when, at fifteen, I found my father’s store of ‘shrooms while attempting to curate a vegan shelf in the freezer.) It’s the most innocent loss of innocence available to us, which is why she’s so fun to play-act.

It’s a wintry book, but channeling Camilla for summer felt like it required half-formed prep, a naive hint of clavicle. It involved (from left to right):

-A dove purple The Anteros blouse, classic Wayfarers in grey, and tone on tone Mais x Frida fat tears earrings.

-An eBay score of a perfectly over-washed Thierry Mugler blouse with unnecessary snaps, worn with a Skims tube top and 5 dollar Depop slip skirt over La Ligne black Colby pants. The Lisa Eisner custom lapis pendant that was my book tour amulet (appropriate and affordable alternatives here and here) with a reusable bag from the Livingston, Montana airport (they were so nice there, I cannot get over it- the man who pushed my courtesy wheelchair refused a tip, saying “I do this because I love it”!?

-The Thierry blouse (find your own vintage, cheap but with provenance or size inclusive Western with Juliette Lewis’s blessing) and Belle Du Jour sexual awakening slip (this works- Yves Klein blue!- as does this red rager- underwear optional.)

-The Cos brushed cashmere sweater my mother got me on sale and encouraged me to tie around my shoulders (this does the trick, cuz that sale was as brief as your average Hollywood marriage) and a Chunks red scalloped claw from their oopsies section of imperfect goods- a nod to Camilla’s signature red beret.

B.Z. Mendenhall Play it As It Lays (by Joan Didion, 1970):

I first read this sun-drenched Hollywood gothic on the deck of a collapsing home in West Hollywood, and of course identified with the tortured Maria Wyeth, a woman making dissociation look like a chic lifestyle choice.

But as I age, I gravitate more toward B.Z. Mendenhall- lost, rage-filled, closeted and unable to live with how far his work in moving pictures has taken him from the artist and man he once dreamed of being. Despite it all, he’s a cozy friend.

He is portrayed by Anthony Perkins in the 1972 film, and- as heartbreaking as his demise is- I cannot get enough of his layered shirts and shaggy “it’s the 70s now, kids” hair. “She wants to know… if you think God answered.”

Channeling B.Z. in: a Donni buttondown, Cou Cou Intimates three-quarter sleeve tee that somehow reinvents the waist with a half-moon swoop detail, itsy bitsy teeny weeny polka-dot taffeta Donni shirts, Fruit of the Loom for Hommegirls socks, and Wax Apple plaid Mary Janes (the ones I have, now caked in barn juices, are long gone but this tartan kitten heel is a dream for sitting OUT a fox hunt for ethical reasons.)

The bag is LL Bean, a wrap gift from Mister Tucker aka Role Model who calls me Miss Lena and I LIKE it! For a twist, I wouldn’t kick a Beachkin or a jelly Firkin out of bed for eating crackers…

Replacing B.Z.’s neckerchief with a Sophie Buhai onyx egg and vintage Lanvin red tulle wrapped faux-pearls care of The RealReal. This tweed take is classic Alber Elbaz winsome craftmania, but I’m also quite charmed by a modern bandanna variation. And, to paraphrase Miss Piggy’s inner monologue, some pink mohair never killed anybody.

Pookie Adams in The Sterile Cuckoo (John Nichols, 1965):

The Sterile Cuckoo is about two opposites-attract East Coast college students who meet on a bus, jammed between two nuns, and proceed to fall in and out of love in a season. Liza was nominated for her first ever Oscar for playing Pookie Adams, a girl who is very honest about being a pathological liar and loooves a trench coat. Watching her, you understand that Manic Pixie Dream Girl isn’t a millennial invention, just a millennial term, and that behind every “quirky” fun-times gal is someone ready to flip the fuck out.

My days of pixie cuts are so far behind me. I have too much chinxiety, so it’s hard to relate to the girl who used to get her trims trimmed (“shorter!” she’d cry) but there’s still a lot of fun to be had play-acting Pookie (what. a. name.) in an Hommegirls silk polka-dotted swing coat (vintage iterations galore) and Hommegirls boxers (though if you want a little more length and shine, try these.)

Amanda Lee Burkett expertly explained the appeal of Dario Vitale’s single Versace Collection, which inspired me to do something buck wild, as if possessed, and purchase new luxury. It’s the same part of me that loves noble failure Ishtar and bands that stayed together for a single album. It’s history you want to touch.

The shoes are Tory Burch pierced mules, which you can find new or in resale heaven (these work too) and eBay is where I located this beat to shit Tom Ford era Jackie bag. The second treasured Lanvin necklace, which is the kind of art we made in the rehab-crafting room, is some more RealReal realness- they still have an under 100 variation, which is, to me, invaluable (as a child, I thought that meant free! It should!)

Pip in Great Expectations (Charles Dickens, 1861):

Miss Havisham gets all the fashion love and why the fuck wouldn’t she? A 40 year old spinster who refuses to remove her dusty-ass wedding dress, she’s the over-powdered cluster B personality queen we all either fear or are- often both! But it’s Pip, the orphan on a collision course with fate, who gets to wear all the knickers one could ever dream of.

So how do you channel a freezing foundling in high summer? I went with Ratboi polka-dot capris with ruffly knee bits, the Christopher Esber silk bandanna top I bought to celebrate… something (still having pretty reasonable tits!?) and my favorite Puppets and Puppets sample sale brocade pumps, which are giving short king (like, actual an actual royal king who wants to seem taller- these John Fluevog tapestry muppets also very good, although we really do sleep on the amazing range of historical reenactment shoes.)

Sula Peace in Sula (Toni Morrison, 1973):

Toni Morrison describes Sula Peace, a mysterious force of both chaos and evolution, as a rebel with a birthmark shaped like a thorny long-stemmed rose. “In a way, her strangeness, her naiveté, her craving for the other half of her equation was the consequence of an idle imagination. Had she paints, or clay, or knew the discipline of the dance, or strings, had she anything to engage her tremendous curiosity and her gift for metaphor, she might have exchanged the restlessness and preoccupation with whim for an activity that provided her with all she yearned for. And like an artist with no art form, she became dangerous.”

Sula’s style is just as finely wrought as her turmoil, and she dresses like a woman who is telling the world she isn’t going to follow the plan without question, isn’t going to accept the unacceptable. She’s going to keep moving. “The real hell of Hell is that it is forever.’ Sula said that. She said doing anything forever and ever was hell.” No book changed me more than when I located this paperback in the high school library.

The Sula look consists of an abstract Prada silk shift located by the mother Laurie Simmons at a sale to benefit Lebanon launched by our dear friend Saam Emme. The baby blue bed jacket is the floaty top layer of an Unselfish Lover blouse, and the shoes are Pretty Ballerinas from Depop (similar styles here and here.)

For a patterned dress that says “I’m back in town, but who knows for how long”: hello, it’s me you’re looking for! Or perhaps a Jean Paul Gaultier loose unit, a Moschino madamoiselle, or this pleasantly aged DVF for Target (size 22, cuz vintage is a cruel mistress for us curve queens and I won’t let you dangle.)

For variations on the 1970s bed jacket energy, take a gander over here. This is also quite fetching and a little less risky, but risk is also FUN at the right price.

This was my first chance to bust out my vintage Cardin collar, and there are a range waiting for their new mommies.

The muscle shell danglers were thieved from my mother over a decade ago, and while you can go fancy should the spirit move you, these real shells are just as pleasing and far less of a $commitment. Sterling, beaded and a husky-boi stud for $20.

Stephanie in Bad Behavior (Mary Gaitskill, 1988):

Bad Behavior became, at one point, as essential to my personality development as the Cheap Monday jeans we were all wearing. The wayward women of Mary Gaitskill’s short stories- especially Stephanie, a sex worker as confused by the role she’s playing as she is by trying to make a manageable life in the East Village of yore, pops into my head unbidden a few times a month (I also wrote a book of Gaitskill influenced short stories in 2015 that NO ONE can ever see, and you know I like to show so that’s really saying something.)

I don’t know if that’s Stephanie on the cover, or some other woman doing a shame-yoga pose in her infinitely stainable whites, but I matched her limb for limb in my Aknvas chaos-frill separates.

For increased drama, try a Victorian mullet top. For casual revirginization, this works. Avoid staining this with blood- or don’t!

And if you haven’t read this book yet, I’m so fucking jealous of you.

Ruth Anne “Bone” Boatwright in Bastard Out of Carolina (Dorothy Allison, 1992):

There’s something so absurdly and pathetically internet about plotting an outfit around the cover of a book this packed with pain. But Bone Boatwright endures and rises with the voracious hope of a child- and Dorothy Allison, a feminist/queer legend whose prose is so alive it feels like collected oral histories, died not long ago and I want to remember her all time time, even if just via a house dress on a boiling day.

Bone is a character who refuses to sit placidly in her dress or in her life. She is unbeatable even as she is beaten down, imaginative even as the world gives her nothing to dream of.

This cover image- a vintage documentary photo of the rural South- has often left me wondering who this real girl was, whether she was sad or shy or just unused to the pop of the camera. Is that her mother behind her? Judgmental or proud? Protective or maddened? Afraid or defiant?

Bone was channeled in a Damsen Madder floral dress (sold out, but try this or this or this clearly-storied piece of vintage) and Chunks acid-green orchid claw with a tinkly little pearl charm that reminds me I’m alive every time I tilt my head.

Tied around the waste, a long-ago inherited Row button-down, but just throw on one of these men’s yellow Oxfords (XL or XXL) and call it a day.

Upon calculation, Dorothy would be 77 now. Bone would be about the same age. I hope, in some literary multiverse, she’s lived to tell the rest of her tale.

Ester Nilsson in Willful Disregard- A Novel About Love (Lena Anderson, 2013):

A deluded academic in a doomed non-love affair, Ester Nilsson is the perfect example of a protagonist who clearly sees everything but her own behavior. If you’ve ever been in limerence, or accepted romance omens from a universal power you didn’t previously believe in, this book will make you sick with recognition.

Still, it’s fun to imagine the heretofore practical Ester dressing for her assignations, completely misunderstanding what that requires. She’s not quiet luxury, or loud luxury, or any luxury- she’s hard-edged and self aggrandizing, obsessed and unmoored.

This was channeled via scuba-thick body suit and office-mami pants from The Park, but the hopeful romantic added a lucite heart from a gift store in Kent, CT (this one, once belonging to a seaman’s pining lover, is perfect, as is this Carrie Bradshaw approved cherry cartoon.) The Julietta shell pendant says “I’ve been places that aren’t your bedroom, sir!” but he doesn’t have to know we’ve avoided the beach and instead gone to Zara or Etsy for our nature collectibles.

The Dalmatian bag is more RealReal from Clare Waight Keller era Chloe (underrated and under priced!) but try these Poshmarked Brandon Blackwoods. Or is official Cruella merch more your vibe?

The white Manolo ballet flats were eBay destiny, priced like microplastics, but the same energy- assumed innocence, the demure yet absurdly impractical nature of white shoes- can be located all over TRR. There’s something quite punitive yet purifying about scrubbing the shit out of your little shoesies.

Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom from Rabbit Run (by John Updike, 1960)

Rabbit is a bad boy. In this entire book, all he does is bad boy stuff, justified almost exclusively because he doesn’t get to play basketball at a professional level. Of course I wanted to know what that felt like!

So there’s more Dario for Versace in kicky pink and pukey green (blame Laurel Pantin, she’s too good at influencing!) with Donni linen track pants, Eileen Fisher meets Sporty Spice.

The internet is rife with vintage polos of absurd origins- Izod, Escada, Celine- just as you can locate a resale track pant that makes you feel like you’re smoking up on the way to cheer practice. For a fresh pair, consider how compelling these might be with neon lace bike shorts emerging.

For a femme-ier take on masculine callousness, I layered a black Cleo Camp tee (it’s my duty to report that they’re as perfect as we’ve been told) over a split-pea colored tank, the same Donni pants in red, plus a Damsen Madder harlequin bandanna (on sale!)

Machete French hair pin is chatting with the tank about what an asshole Rabbit is being, and the Zara flats sold out in an instant but there are plenty of ways to see your own toes through a wash of Cerulean mesh. Or, go off piece and try a historic robin’s egg satin Tabi (from a family owned factory in Undine, Italy!)

Miraballe Buttersfield from Shopgirl (by Steve Martin, 2000):

Reading Shopgirl as a teen, a novella about the dangers of fixating on a woman whose frontal cortex has not formed, I thought “yeah, I see where this is going.” It’s fun to read books that shock you, and it’s also fun to read books that remind you that you aren’t a totally impracticable basket case (my lack of true interest in much older men has been one of my only life flexes, although now I don’t really understand why I thought that made me sooo cool. Like, sure, fuck an old guy if you feel like it! Consenting adults be consenting! I just always thought the gift of being young was never having to hear a man complain about his back. There’s only room for one aging, heaving entity around here!)

Claire Danes portrayed Mirabelle in the 2005 film, and there are multiple Pinterest pages devoted to her buttoned up but flirtatious outfit game, her upwardly mobile necklines.

To channel her “ready to sell you gloves OR become a kept woman” energy, I wore, left to right…

Look one: a Gil Rodriguez lace cardigan, gone now, with a Gil lapis t-shirt (perfect, hides stains) and La Ligne olive satin pants. The necklace is Sophie Buhai (another blessed wrap gift, from the best man ever to man Mark Ruffalo) and the bag is a Phoebe for Chloe bracelet bag bought with TRR credit (there are a few hanging around, but these create the same wrist hammock for far less.)

The second look is all about character development! She’s started dating Steve Martin’s lost businessman, and they’re going out to niiice dinners. So the Gil tee made another appearance under an oversized putty blazer from the Entire Studios Black Friday sale and a Cou Cou pointelle slip skirt (teen Julia Stiles chic! Formal pajamas!) Finished it off with Kenneth Cole vinyl lady mules and my treasured TRR Galliano for Dior saddle bag.

My most loyal friend, low maintenance and high impact!

If the vibe moves you, there’s a whole generation of embroidered coach bags that do exactly this. Arguably cooler to avoid all those florid D’s. This brown on brown Prada is also priced to move, with an “wartime nurse” thing that’s sexy to me.

Look #3 is “sorry, Steve, I’m dating Jason Schwartzman now- he’s fun and he never talks about doing taxes!” The striped Zara mini-dress is gone gone gone, but this feels spiritually connected, as does she.

Donni red poplin cargoes, because when you find your pants you find your pants. They’re sold out, but these Point Break flares from Tyler McGillivary have me all hot and bothered...

Everything very special in my life- besides my pets, family, friends and coworkers- comes from The RealReal (not sure about my mother- she might!) This tangerine Prada nylon with a beaded logo, likely part of some ill-conceived resort wear moment, is sunshine in my hands. She has sisters.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this deep dive into the crockpot that is my mind and closet. Let me know what you’re reading, what you’re wearing, and the Venn diagram crossover between the two?

A new day, a new character- in literature we dress!

Lena