Clothing I Wouldn't Be Caught Dead In

And yet, there it is, in my closet

with Lorinda Birdwhistle

Not going to lie, friends. I am really struggling with fashion. Sadly, this problem of mine seems to go hand-in-hand with another major shortcoming: shopping. And then there’s that trying things on before buying them schtick, which, as a rule, I don’t do. Méthode à moi: I eyeball the item to assess its visual appeal, try to envision how it will look on me (does it cover my big tummy and fat ass), and then I gauge whether there is enough bust ease. I am not going to fucking hold my breath all day for the sake of a fitted look. Life is too short for that shit. If we’re talking a skirt, shorts, or pants, anything other than an elastic waistband is a non-starter. No exceptions. And finally, if the item is in a pastel color, it doesn’t go in the cart.

Great look, Lauren! What an idiot. Corsets displace internal organs like your stomach, intestines, and liver, and they severely restrict lung expansion. What kind of sick fuck finds this a turn on? Oh yeah. Jeff Bezos.

And while we’re on the subject of carts, I think we can all agree there are a limited number of brick-and-mortar stores that sell clothes and that also offer carts, and they are either mass merchandisers, off-price retailers, or non-profit thrift stores. Not in these categories: Bergdorf Goodman, Neiman Marcus, and Saks Fifth Avenue. We’re looking at Ross Dress for Less, T.J. Maxx, Marshall’s, Target, Walmart, Costco, the Salvation Army, and Goodwill. The vast discount retail ecosystem works like this: most of the shit you buy at the first six stores ends up at the last two stores, often with the original price tags intact.

These retail giants cover the fashion needs of approximately 70% of the United States population, that being the lower class, and lower middle class, with a few stragglers from the higher escalations of the middle class — i.e., those folks for whom old habits die hard and who still love their Dickies from Walmart.

Eh, come to think of it, there are now numerous online clothing retailers with digital carts, and they offer the same filling-your-cart serotonin buzz many of us are striving for. In all fairness, we can’t leave these out, so add Amazon to the pile-up.

Grab a cart (or your keyboard), wipe it down with anti-bacterial sanitizer, and get to work. Maybe pop in your Bose QuietComfort Ultra Earbuds and crank up some 70s Muzak to enhance the experience.

Here’s how putting together a wardrobe works at these retailers: you will need a cart because, in order to find 2, or, if you’re having a really good day, 3 items you can actually wear, you have to gather up at least 7-11 items total. There is a scientifically proven ratio of 3.5:1 (not unlike the Fibonacci sequence, I’m told) between all the clothes you’ll be purchasing and those worth keeping after you subtract the unwearable ones, which is most. It’s so easy to remember this ratio, as it is exactly the same as your ideal total-cholesterol-to-HDL ratio, per the Cleveland Clinic. These numbers are worth committing to memory.

All of this good stuff is the same price as one shirt from Eileen Fisher.

After snapping up all these fashion treasures, you may find, like many before you, that your sense of euphoria is short-lived, especially when you get home and discover you have absolutely NOTHING whatsoever in your closet, in the way of pants, a skirt, or shorts, to complete the ensemble.

And, it goes without saying that you will not have shoes to match. Or if, perchance, you do happen to own a pair of shoes in the right style and color, guaranteed you will be limping within one hour of putting on said shoes. This phenomenon falls under Newton’s Third Law of Motion — you know, the one that defines the relationship between a body and the forces acting upon it, and then its motion in response to those forces. In layman’s terms, there are your feet and the attractive, but ill-fitting shoes (which come into contact with one another), and then there is your feet’s response to the ill-fitting shoes. It’s physics, plain and simple, girls. The scientific term: “Your Dogs Are Barking.”

All of this is what I call The Fashion Clusterfuck. It’s like The Rapture, except you’re one of those people who get left on earth. Turns out there’s a dress code for getting into heaven, and the invite clearly stated “white tie,” and it didn’t mention “optional.” And it most certainly didn’t mention clothing-optional. Yep, your birthday suit is not good enough for god. Bummer.

According to The Heritage Foundation, these folks will have no problem getting through the pearly gates. Please, god, take them now.

And then, there’s that going back to the store thing and waiting in line for 45 minutes to return the twenty items that didn’t work out for you. This is where you queue up with 17 other shoppers in a narrow corridor filled with shelves of snacks from gourmet food companies you’ve never heard of. Hundreds and hundreds of exotic snacks.

Savory crunchy things. Chocolate-enrobed pretzels and nuts. Gummy legless invertebrates. Cookies. Cheesy stuff. Mushroom jerky. Kettle chips in ten flavors. Trail mix for people on acid. Be sure you’ve eaten before you get in line. You’ll gain weight just looking at this stuff.

Hey, you idiots! I’m looking for clothes. WTAF. Perhaps put support socks, white cotton undies, and 6-packs of wife-beaters on this aisle instead of food.

Then there’s the experience of trying to get dressed for the day or an evening event. Here’s how that usually plays out for me: I am desperately in need of an outfit for a special gathering, and I’m down to the wire. The event is tomorrow. Oops! It’s tonight!! Jesse gave me the wrong date. That means it’s too late to order something online and too far into the season to find something off-the-rack that’s appropriate for the weather, in my size, and not in some horrible pastel color. “Pastels,” by the way, are a recurring theme in my psychotherapy sessions.

So, I’m fucked, unless I can find some self-tanning mousse in my cosmetic bin, which means I could then pull off an outfit in pink or powder blue.

Sadly, no bronzer.

And so, I dive into my closet, looking for just one outfit (dear god) that will do the trick. Voila! There it is! An outfit I’d forgotten about that I bought during the pandemic — the one I wore for the online Heart concert back when all of us in California had to stay sheltered in or risk death by firing squad. This ensemble has a bit of a lesbian vibe, which was intentional, not gonna lie. I was just trying to fit in with the other Heart concertgoers. And Jesse… he’s always been down for that sort of thing — you know, my hooking up with lesbians. That’s a universal guy fantasy, I’m pretty sure. I could never wrap my head around a threesome, which in Jesse’s fantasy means two women and himself. What a fucker.

As I discovered at a retreat many moons ago, these menage à trois thingamabobs don’t always go according to plan, especially when the women involved are vying for the same dude and have no interest whatsoever in going down on each other. Then, there’s that part where the guy has to service two women. Believe you me when I say most guys are not up to the task of servicing even one. OMG, two?! And then, after all is said and done, and things have not gone according to plan, there is the inevitable post-coidal upset, because at least one of the women did not get off at all, and she is the best friend of the other woman, who she imagines has gotten off, but who, in reality, was just faking an orgasm.

Let’s just say this: the guy involved snuck off in the middle of the night, never to be seen again. Word has it he’s been living off the grid in Lincoln, Montana.

OK, OK… back to the situation at hand: my upcoming night out with Jesse and his friends from the office.

Excitedly, I pulled the aforementioned ensemble out of the closet, only to realize I was still fucked. The last time I had washed the pants (which appear to be made of burlap), they had shrunk to half their original size. Pretty weird-looking — cargo pants that are cinched at the bottom but which stop mid-calf. This is not a look. And those elasticated pant cuffs were cutting off the circulation to my feet and ankles. Also, not a look I was going for: EDEMA.

Admittedly, the tag, in several languages, including English, clearly stated not to wash the pants, and underneath it was a second tag that stated: “Dry Clean Only.”

Now hold on a minute. How is it that a $15 pair of pants requires dry cleaning? It costs $15 to dry-clean any type of women’s pants at my local cleaners, even cheap shit pants from Old Navy. So I thought, WTH, I’m just going to wash them. If that doesn’t work, I’ll only have lost $15, right? If I take them to a dry cleaner, I lose $15. Same difference, except that part about being able to wear them again.

So now my cool cargo pants are half their original size. Why, you may ask, are they still in my closet? Well, you never really know when you might lose 80 lbs., in which case, they’ll be right there, ready to go. There’s some comfort in that.

Hiding behind this sweater is my friend, Ruth, who’s been rummaging through a bag of clothes I passed on to her at the market. The sweater she’s holding, which looks to be for a child, was originally a women’s XL — one of many XLs I have washed in hot water over the years. And yes, I am aware that mustard is a color that makes everyone look like they have pancreatic cancer.

And then there’s the blouse I’d paired with those cargo pants way back when. Turns out it has a huge stain, smack over my left boob, like some lactation mishap. Ay yai yai, at age 64, lactating? No one, especially my son, Daniel, wants that image in their head as they try to enjoy a delicious dinner of butter chicken and garlic naan at Sudipta’s Tandoori Kitchen.

The thought of this brought back some funny memories for me from when Daniel was a baby. For two years, he nursed at the same time every afternoon: 3:30 p.m., right at the start of my favorite Law & Order reruns. We all know that theme, am I right? Well, whenever I heard it, my milk would let down — right at the “boom, boom” of the timpani. Like clockwork.

Imagine, if you will, what happened one day as I was walking through Best Buy and that Law & Order theme came blaring through 10 synchronized large-screen TVs at once. Holy fuck! I ended up with two HUGE wet spots on the front of my T-shirt, and of course, I had nothing to cover them up. I could not get out of that damn store fast enough.

Now I’m reliving the heroic effort I’d made trying to get that stain out. I used every cleaning product known to man, including Miss Mouth’s Messy Eater Treater. The stain: it didn’t budge. It remained the same saturated color it had been when the $258 Eileen Fisher Belgian linen shirt first came into contact with a spoonful of dal tadka. One spoonful of food misses my mouth, and a beautiful shirt is ruined forever.

Damn, this shit is good. Well worth staining a tie-dyed T-shirt from the Haight, but maybe not an Eileen Fisher blouse.

And yet, though the shirt was now unwearable (like the cargo pants), I had kept it, right there in my closet, as if it were part of my wardrobe. Why? Partly as punishment for my stupidity, partly so I could respectfully mourn the loss of the equivalent of a week’s worth of groceries ($258), and just in case there was ever a scientific breakthrough in the treatment for turmeric stains.

I might have donned that mustard colored sweater the next time I had a hankering for Indian food, had I not shrunk it. A curry stain would have blended beautifully into that merino wool.

Woulda, shoulda.

So now, here’s where I’m at: I cannot attend the event with Jessie. I have nothing to wear. 😭

RECTIFYING THE SITUATION

How, exactly, does one go about fixing a catastrophic wardrobe situation like mine — one resulting from twin fuckups: not having had a mother’s guidance during my formative years, and not giving a flying fuck about fashion trends?

What exactly did I want out of my wardrobe? What was I going for?

This, thank you very much. 👇🏼👇🏼👇🏼👇🏼👇🏼

Frances McDormand: totally dialed in to my style. This I have ascertained after examining every last photo of her I could find online. She is a rockstar. Her vibe: “I don’t give a fuck what you think.”

My needs and desires are pretty simple. I want clothes and shoes that are BASIC, comfortable, and durable, and that can stand up to my less-than-stellar laundering skills. And if I feel like it, I want to transition from breakfast and my morning physical therapy exercises, to doing house chores, feeding the horses, and weeding the garden, then to sitting down to dinner with Jesse and watching an episode of the first season of Star Trek, then rounding out my day with meticulous oral hygiene and the putting on of my CPAP headgear, after which I would be going straight to sleep. Note: there are no wardrobe changes on a day like this. Same outfit all day and night. Also, NO BRA, and NO UNDERWEAR. Call me crazy. Whatever.

I want to put the clothing on, and then I don’t want to think about it for the remainder of the day. If it looks a bit sassy and irreverent, great, that would be the icing on the cake. And no fucking pastels (or flowers) for me, thank you very much.

Frances McDormand’s take-no-prisoners style, or prison chic, as I like to call it.

I have really been dreading the task of rectifying my wardrobe, but I decided that if I tackled it slowly and methodically, while binge-watching all six seasons of The Handmaid’s Tale, I could get it done.

And so, I started pulling everything out of my closet and drawers, and I made four piles:

PILE #1: the stuff I hate

PILE #2: the stuff I like that has missing components

PILE #3: full ensembles I love

THE INVISIBLE PILE: things needed for special occasions

Creating these piles was very enlightening. Pile #1 was huge, like 90% of my wardrobe, while Pile #3 was comprised of just three outfits, all of which, thankfully, could be worn with my Keen Newport Sandals in “bison.” Yes, these are men’s sandals. The Keen women’s options were awful and shoddy, by comparison. Is this not always the case with men's vs. women’s apparel — this disparity in quality? Boy, does that piss me off.

I think that exclamation mark is for the benefit of the scorpions that thrive in my gardening shed. Watch out, you fuckers!

In the wearable pile, all the components were either from Eileen Fisher or Old Navy. In the pile of shit I hate, nearly half the items were nasty, pilled shirts and sweaters from Target. A quarter of the rejects were tags-still-on fashion disasters from Marshall’s that I’d waited too long to return, and the rest were overly fru-fru tops from the Lucky Brand outlet store — feminine blouses that looked absolutely stupid on me, what with my quasi-butch haircut.

The free-floating components in Pile #2, which just needed to be hooked up with an appropriate top or a pair of linen pants, were from Lululemon and Quince. Yes, I had been shopping outside of my usual retail ecosystem since holing up with Jesse. These clothes were of a much better quality than my pre-Jesse togs, yet the items from Quince were still within my normal, chintzy price range. That was good, right?

Apparently, I needed to explore options outside my comfort zone to find great tops to pair with the pants and leggings I already loved. If I could get brave, perhaps I would be able to scrounge together ensembles for every day of the week (omg), including one outfit appropriate for socializing with friends at a nice restaurant. Yes! 💪🏻 Pretty sure I could do this.

Melania’s Nazi couture. Someone needs to clean out her closet before the inevitable military tribunals.

It was time to pocket my pride and chuck all of the cheap shit that was clogging up my closet, life, and psyche. I needed to get the fuck over myself and quit being so miserly — it was time to jump off the fast fashion treadmill. The answer to my fashion conundrum was clear: I was better off getting a few high-quality items I loved and wearing them to death than pawing through all that ugly shit in my closet day in and day out and feeling sad.

So, I swallowed hard and bundled up about 85% of my clothes and chucked them into the back of my Subaru. I was off to Goodwill. And this time, not to shop.

NEXT TIME… Lorinda finds every cool spot for rounding out her wardrobe.

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