Big Shirts, Little Comfort
(a new/old sartorial love hurls me back in time with a start)
(a new/old sartorial love hurls me back in time with a start)
Every look I find myself drawn to this season revolves around a shirt. A shirt you’re drowning in. The sleeves dropping far below your actual fingertips. Like most things I’m drawn to in fashion, there’s some sort of nostalgia in it.
My earliest memory comes from a photograph. I’m 7 or 8 in my favorite outfit. A red corduroy skirt and crisp red and white striped shirt, and my dad is teaching me how to roll the sleeves. Someone, he or my mom, says: “This is how the girls at Smith do it.” (My grandmother who had died when I was three had gone to Smith. I liked this idea, having something of her. ) Later, I repeated this proudly to my great grandmother, who said “Nevermind what the girls at Smith do,” with a twinkle and a sigh.
Prep school, seventh grade, was all about the oxford cloth shirt. We called them oxfords, or “button downs”; later, writing about fashion I learned the true moniker is “button ups.” They were the icing on the layer cake of my look: whale-print turtleneck, then two Lacoste polos with popped collars, then the Oxford. All tucked in and secured with a shell belt. But some time around high school, I discovered The Closet (today reincarnated as the amazing Castanet) and its then-selection of men’s consigned oxfords. Paradise. I loved the oversizedness of these shirts, the embedded story-ness, this idea that some person had lived in them and done mysterious, maybe swashbuckling things, the imperfections, the-borrowed-from-my-imaginary boyfriendness of it all. I remember this beach party at night on the Cape one summer; I wore a pink Ralph Lauren oxford with another find from The Closet, a faded madras blazer, and rolled-cuff jeans and bare feet. The whole thing gave me a certain comfort, at this drinking party where I knew only 2 people; I pushed up my sleeves like playing with worry beads.
I gave little thought to these shirting moments for years, even decades, until a single purchase propelled me back into them, as viscerally as if I’d never left. On Netaporter or maybe Matches, shopping the sale, where I sometimes venture into uncharted purchases, things that just speak to me. It was a Raf Simons shirt, in the women’s section, but with a notation that “This shirt is part of the men’s collection and as such the sizes are approximate, adjusted from the men’s sizing that will be on the label.” Even that little note enhanced the appeal (like the loafers I wear from M.Gemi that came about because women wanted to buy the brand’s unlined men’s suede loafers). In another echo to prep school nostalgia (specifically, my friend Kimbell and her mom’s monogramming machine), it had this monogram-effect navy embroidery on the sleeve that read: Antwerp is Burning. That little badass note. Like the Parliaments we snuck on illicit runs off campus. I ordered it, forgot about it and then, opening it … felt transformed.
It’s an Oxford cloth shirt, like those RL ones of old. It’s so oversized. It’s not soft, but crisp and cottony and stiff in the best way. Substantive. It’s so borrowed in feel. And it makes everything look fresher and more modern. I wore it first open with a tank under, denim shorts, and a pair of JW Anderson slouchy shoes with a giant gold ornament. I let the sleeves droop past my fingertips and burrowed into it. I also liked it with kneecap bike shorts and a chunky sneaker. I liked it for a car ride with high rise leggings and fur lined loafers and a sweater knotted around me like a crossbody. I’ll try it with a knitted skirt next. Combat boots. Turtleneck bodysuit under.
Beyond this element of freshening things up with so much ease, I know this piece and this moment in fashion has a deeper appeal, and I realized this with a start: The state of our country right now takes me back to the insecure girl and teen I sometimes was so long ago. I feel that same need to burrow, to be comfortable, to hide sometimes, to find fortification in the idea of this big shirt, its armor- effect. And to comfort myself in those draped sleeves, like sucking a thumb or nesting into a childhood blanket. It hit me like those waves my dad taught me to body surf. It hit me as I tugged those sleeves. I’m shaky. The world seems more precarious than it has ever before. And much more so for others less privileged than for me. At 50, I feel hurled back in time. And into the arms of the same comforts that comforted me then.