So Here’s the Thing…: Notes on Growing Up, Getting Older, and Trusting Your Gut(11)

I do wish I’d gone. Self-consciousness about your body—even if it comes from the totally legitimate mortification of your important boss seeing you in your underwear—shouldn’t prevent you from living your life. If I’d been there, JK and I might have shared a knowing, mutually embarrassed look and then laughed it off. As it is, I’ll never know how much he saw, and I don’t want to.





The Meow Coat Has Claws



I don’t think I ever looked good before the age of twenty-six. My taste was way off, and there was way too much not wearing a bra for the size and shape of my boobs. Because I am 5 feet 2 inches and dumpling-shaped, I was not ideally suited to trends set almost exclusively by Kate Moss and the Spice Girls, but I always wanted to fit in with everyone else. In high school, that meant I wore a lot of bodysuits. My favorite was from the Gap—three-quarter-sleeved; striped in red, navy, white, and green; and scoop neck—and I wore it with my dad’s navy sweatpants, with the waistband rolled down.1

In college and after, everyone was wearing bebe spaghetti-strap tank tops, and since I was taught that showing a bra strap made you look “trashy,” the obvious solution was to skip the bra altogether. I never tried things on in the store because the lighting always seemed like a personal attack on me and I assumed I could just, in the words of Tim Gunn, “make it work” once I got home. This does not make any sense at all. Using this philosophy, I once bought pleather pants from Century 21 in order to look like a little sexy kitten at the bar, and although I was able to get them on at the beginning of my night out, by the time I got home, I’d swelled up because it was warm outside, so I couldn’t get them off. My roommate had to cut me out of them. Just like Olivia Newton-John on the set of Grease, except I couldn’t sing or dance and I had impressed zero Danny Zukos while out on the town. At least they weren’t expensive. In the professional arena, I would don my faux cashmere periwinkle turtleneck that I was convinced made my boobs look good, regardless of the effect it had on my savage sweating problem. I usually paired it with a black Banana Republic skirt that never fit right.

In other words, my early twenties were a time-lapse BEFORE photo that I prepared for by overenthusiastically putting on clothes and being like, LOOK! Clothes! I also always cut my hair on a whim, if I was feeling depressed or bored, and I often fell into the trap of thinking that, by bringing my hairstylist a photo of a gorgeous celebrity, I would leave the salon looking like the person with the haircut. (Usually Mandy Moore.) It didn’t help that all my haircuts were done by vagabonds who wouldn’t try to reason with you or gently pose the possibility that perhaps your face shape isn’t quite right for “side-swept bangs.” In college I dyed my hair black in an effort to become Janeane Garofalo in Reality Bites. I also wore a lot of scrunchies, which I collected. Hillary Clinton walking off the plane in Vietnam in a giant scrunchie was personally vindicating for me.

Now I know what works on my body and only shop from brands whose sizing I understand, and I also organize my life so that I never have to wear anything one might call “business casual.” Besides a very brief stint with lavender dye at the beginning of my job at Vice—I wanted to let loose!—my hairdresser tells it to me like it is. Although my friend Stacy London (of What Not to Wear) will occasionally comment on one of my selfies with a skeptical emoji—I like to mix patterns!—I know she means it in a loving way.

I know she does.

She definitely does.

But developing this confidence took a long time. It wasn’t that I was unaware that I was dressing inappropriately, exactly. Something always felt off. I would look in the mirror and see that the clothes didn’t look good, but I thought that was my fault, not the clothes’. I think even stereotypically beautiful and thin women feel this way, but I do have photographic evidence (which I refuse to look at) that I looked especially like someone who took her signature look in equal parts from her big sister’s and dad’s closets. Almost all my fashion choices were guided by my desire to look cute up top and cover my booty, but I don’t have the greatest boobs, so this plan was flawed from the get-go. I was trying to dress myself into a body I was never going to have.

My worst outfit ever was my New Year’s Eve 1999 ensemble. I’d saved my overtime check to buy a Betsey Johnson jacket I’d seen at Century 21 called the Meow Coat: a black, crushed-velvet, single-button number with Cookie Monster–looking fur cuffs and lining. I decided that this was to be the centerpiece of my NYE look, so the rest of the outfit was my idea of understated: a bebe tank top (sans bra), a summery black viscose skirt, last-minute Wolford black tights that I had to spend forty dollars on because the ones I had ripped, and black Steve Madden platform Mary Janes that one of my roommates, Amy Volpe, made me keep under the bed because they smelled so bad. Artificial materials retain odors.

The gang was going to Sequoia on the waterfront, a very Wall Street place that had a $125 cover for drinks and meat on a stick. (I couldn’t identify what type of meat—it was a loose interpretation of satay, which was trendy at the time.) It was over my budget, but it was also New Year’s, and my coat needed an occasion worthy of its various fabrics. It was the most adventurous thing I’d ever worn, and in the apartment before we set out I couldn’t stop admiring how “glam” I looked in it.

As soon as we got to Sequoia, the door girls told me I’d have to take it off. And pay ten dollars to check it.