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Recently in Salon Mothers Who Think

Column
Dog day
The death of a beloved friend makes plain the beauty of this world.
By Anne Lamott
[06/24/99]

Kickin' it
Mia Hamm's soccer prowess has finally launched women's sports into the mainstream. But is she ready for icon status?
By Ethan Zindler
[06/23/99]

Wild Thing
Oracles of history
At the turn of the millennium, Kathleen Krull's "They Saw the Future" gives kids a look at futures past.
By Polly Shulman
[06/22/99]

Emotional insurance
Pictures of polliwogs, first baths and birthdays preserve my children in time, but I am always standing just out of the frame.
By Allison Hoover Bartlett
[06/21/99]

A dad called Mama
Showing his children the wonder of Florida's shaded lakes and curious insects, my father taught me the nature of unconditional love.
By Lu Vickers
[06/18/99]

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Clothes, once my best of friends, have become polite strangers; not inherently threatening, but unknown. The gap between breakfast and shower has bloated up with so much clothing indecision that I make J. Alfred Prufrock seem like a man of heroic action. Each day, as the minutes tick toward 11 a.m. and the morning is in danger of disappearing altogether, my bedroom floor is littered with shirts, shoes, skirts, more shirts, tried on and discarded in fits of dissatisfaction. The clothes I used to rely on to look attractive, if not stellar -- white t-shirts, turtlenecks -- have faded into a chasm of fashion uncertainty. I am unable to distinguish anything except maybe a pair of Nike running shoes and only because I know exactly how and when to wear them. But a suit? A blazer? Who knows? Could I get away with wearing it with the Nikes? Do people even use the word "blazer" anymore?

Thinking about possible outfits during breakfast makes me break into a light sweat; a good half of the anxiety is over the fact that I feel anxious at all about something so completely trivial. I understand that many things in the '90s have grown needlessly complicated or have been deconstructed beyond recognition: the shape of racism, political intent, soul music, communications technology. But why render incomprehensible something so socially insignificant as choosing my shoes?

My problem is that I don't know how I want to look. Part of this concern is a function of age. I'm 36 and wonder, a little uneasily, how many more good miniskirt years I have left. Part of it is the utter devaluation of clothes as a measure of years, or taste, or style, or individuality. What, after all, does a 36-year-old woman dress like? More to the point, what does it mean to be 36, or any age, as far as a suit's concerned? As markers of meaning vanish almost daily, it is perfectly ironic, and perfectly befitting this age of Orwellian logic, that we expect the slightest of things to provide us with a connection to the deepest. Not that it's impossible -- but fashion has been recycled and fragmented so many times over the seasons it's lost its sense of adventure. Once the signifiers of everything from social status to political ideology, clothes are now side players to our overwhelming postmodern, pre-millennium angst; they make us nothing anymore except dressed. We have more retail options than ever now -- from Gap to Barney's to Gucci outlets -- but that only seems to have diffused the power of fashion and further sapped it of its meaning. A million channels on TV and nothing's on.

I don't admit this to too many people, but I once set my fashion compass point to Madonna (the older, cheeky one, not the inner-peace guru of late). No offense to baby Lourdes, but I've been Madonna's child for the last 10 years or so. The high priestess of presto-chango appealed to a lot of things in me: a lifelong theatrical bent and love of costumery; a spiritual wanderlust that seemed to be losing out to homing-pigeon tendencies, which grew stronger as 30 loomed. I wanted to be the divine Miss M as she appeared in "Desperately Seeking Susan": coolly hip but humane; sporting dark glasses that acted as a one-way mirror, through which she saw the world perfectly while no one could see in; rolling around on an unmade bed snapping Polaroids of herself with a mixture of bemusement and solipsistic glee that I found engaging, and on point.

Madonna was trademarked with those rubber bangles and head ties but never married to them, inhabiting fashion moments fully and then slipping out of them like a snake out of old skin. Of course, the Material Girl could afford different outfits every day, and I could not; but that didn't stem my desire to be, on a fairly fixed budget, as chameleonic as possible. I became a mall-troller, hitting the stores a minimum of once a week to hunt for those elusive wardrobe items that were current but not ridiculously so, eye-catching but not garish, substantial but cheap. In short, among the countless hangers I shoved apart over the years I was really searching for an equipoise in myself, which I believed needed only the right outfit to leap into definition. I figured I'd know that balance when I struck it, and so spent many hours in dressing rooms with my head twisted over one shoulder and eyes squinting, closed almost to a slit, willing the plaid to harmonize with stripes but clash enough to make a statement, hoping the elastic at the waist would hug, but not too much.

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