DOWN AN UNASSUMING BLOCK in Chelsea, beside a Staples office supply chain store, sits Kleinfeld: a glamorous, multi-floor mecca for brides-to-be in the heart of Manhattan. The sixty-two-year-old salon, once a fixture in Brooklyn for more than fifty years, moved into its current sprawling space in 2005; that same year it became the feature of TLC’s hit reality show, ‘Say Yes to the Dress,’ bringing international exposure to the salon.

What sets Kleinfeld apart from its high-end competitors – beside their claim to housing the largest selection of wedding gowns in the world – is the fact that every step of the process occurs in house: from the initial fitting to the final steam before the gown is fluffed and zipped into a garment bag to walk down the aisle. The bridal consultants, dedicated to realising each bride’s sartorial vision, guide their first encounter with Kleinfeld. Senior bridal consultant at Kleinfeld, and cast member on ‘Say Yes to the Dress,’ Debbie Asprea’s role in the wedding planning process is akin to a savvy matchmaker, introducing the women to the dresses. After twenty-three years in the business, and countless brides, not much surprises Debbie anymore – except the dress her daughter chose for her own wedding day.

***

My father had a dress factory, and since I was a little girl I was always involved in clothing and sewing. My first job was in my father’s factory, pulling patterns apart and assisting on the little jobs around the place. After that I went into retail, ready-to-wear. But then I heard about the opportunity at Kleinfeld and went for it. There is something very special about working in the bridal industry; it’s the most important garment anybody could ever purchase in their lifetime.

At Kleinfeld, we meet people from all over the world every day, but after so many years, nothing surprises me anymore. I’ve seen it all: I’ve even had brides come back to me for a second marriage. It’s happened to me a few times in the past couple of years. That’s a little bit of a surprise to me. Or when you get a bride that’s pregnant. And with same-sex marriage… we also see that type of a situation where you’re dealing with a family’s acceptance.

For a bride-to-be coming into Kleinfeld, I’ll typically begin by looking over her pictures and discussing her likes and dislikes. We usually start with three dresses. If she’s shopped at another store before our appointment, sometimes she’ll have pictures of herself in other dresses – that’s a really helpful tool for me. In that case, I’ll try to get a sense of her style by asking her questions like ‘Why didn’t you buy the dress in the other store?’

We generally have five appointments a day that happen every ninety minutes. Before each appointment we begin with a brief discussion with the bride: her style, her venue, number of guests at the wedding and her budget. We breeze through this in a few minutes because, most of the time, once the bride comes in everything turns upside down anyway.

When a bride walks in, they’re very nervous. I try to connect with them and make them feel comfortable. We’re in a very small room: she’s getting undressed and I’m putting a dress on her and within minutes I have to become her friend. Every bride is treated like she’s the only bride for the day, like she’s my first bride.

When a woman comes to Kleinfeld her expectations are extremely high. We are the largest bridal house in the world and with the television show they have a particular idea of what goes on [behind-the-scenes]. They expect us to have everything that they ask for, and within their price points. Sometimes that can be a little bit challenging.

You have to remember there’s a lot of emotions involved in a purchase of this nature. You not only have to please the bride, but you have to look at her mom and all the other people important to her that she brought with her to the appointment. Their opinions matter; a bride is not going to buy a dress unless her mother approves. In my experience, no bride has ever purchased a dress that her mom didn’t like.

With this job, you have to really have a passion for it. If your heart isn’t open to it, you could never help a bride. It’s so personal; you really have to connect with that bride, it’s not just about the sale. It’s about matching up the bride with the garment that’s going to make her feel the most beautiful on her wedding day. The most gratifying aspect of the work that I do is when I zip that dress up and see the bride’s face in the mirror. It’s the most amazing thing to watch her reflection when you close that dress. You see the tears, or the smile, and you just know that’s it.

One time I had a bride come in after her groom-to-be had made an appointment for her. She didn’t have an engagement ring because they didn’t have much money, but her dream was to come to Kleinfeld for the dress. She had no idea that all along her fiancé had been saving for an engagement ring in secret. When the bride put on the right dress, he dropped on his knees and proposed to her – this time with the ring. Seeing her shock and happiness was incredible.

When the right dress goes on, it’s beyond amazing. It’s the most rewarding part of my job. That’s what keeps me there. I have two daughters and one of my daughters is actually getting married in March. She came to Kleinfeld and I was her consultant; I wouldn’t let anyone else do it. She chose what I consider one of the most beautiful dresses in the store. I felt that way about the dress before my daughter came shopping, but never thought that she would choose it. I was surprised she went with something so traditional. In all my years of experience, I felt like it was my first day at work.

My role is to help a bride make her dreams come true – to find her dress. Of course, you have to please everyone, and this involves a little bit of everything. Each bride and each family has its different needs and expectations.

Olivia Aylmer is a New York-based stylist, writer and graduate of Barnard College at Columbia University.

Anna Skeels is an illustrator based in London.

The primary reason for the uniform was so that we could be identified. We were predominantly patrolling trains at that time, in the late ‘70s. They were very dark and dank. Old GE light bulbs often provided the light on the platforms. Thugs would knock ‘em out or vandals would destroy them. We tried to create an identity where, if you had a problem and you were seeking help, you could see the red beret in the distance and you would run in that immediate direction. Or you would see us running to help you. Unlike the cops; even nowadays they don’t wear the hat. They want to be like John Travolta, styling and profiling, you know, they hold the hat. Does no good. We always wear the red beret, because that’s how people know who you are. It’s not the red satin jacket or the T-shirt — really, it’s the red beret. They say, ‘Oh, it’s the Guardian Angels.’

We don’t ‘own’ the red beret. I appropriated them from the Boy Scouts. I’d go to the Army Navy store and buy them in bulk in different sizes; they had the patch on. It was strange to see these visual advertisements of Gucci with the red beret and their logo, selling them for outrageous amounts of money. I think somebody who created that fashion look was looking at the Guardian Angels patrolling in Italy and thought, ‘Oh, that’d be great.’ Their whole purpose is obviously to churn out more and more fashionista material. Before that, [the beret] was considered ‘counterculture’ — we were being harassed by the police, we were considered outliers. Then all of a sudden, Gucci mainstreams the red beret as a fashion statement.

I came out of the era of the ‘60s and ‘70s. You had the Black Panthers, you had the Young Lords — they were like a paramilitary group. They were at odds with the status quo, with police. But then again, what we were trying to do was to provide public safety, so we were the opposite of gangs. In searching for a name, ultimately I thought that the group that seemed to have the most traction among inner-city young men and young women in the late ‘70s was the Hells Angels. They hated Black and Hispanic people, they were one-percenters. And yet young Black and Hispanic men idolised them. They were watching the B-grade movies, like Hells Angels Forever, in Times Square — you could get three flicks for five dollars — and they would emulate them. And I said, what’s the complete opposite of Hells Angels? Well, Guardian Angels. But still it didn’t matter: People thought we were a gang, thought we were vigilantes, thought we were Hells Angels, thought we were Charlie’s Angels. Everything other than what we were.

The Guardian Angels give a good look into what people can do who decide that they have to protect themselves, protect their communities, protect their quality of life, and more importantly, protect strangers that they don’t even know. This is something that everybody should be doing without a red beret, without a red satin jacket. It was more the norm years ago; people felt you had to be a good Samaritan. But nowadays, everybody’s got the earbuds in, they’re texting, sexting, whatever they’re doing at that moment. They’re oblivious. And the pandemic has made it ten times worse. Now I’m supposed to be afraid of my neighbour? I’m supposed to be afraid of the person on the subway? You don’t engage in conversation, you’re constantly tugging your mask. If anything the pandemic has caused us to isolate more, to think about I and Me, not Us and We. We’re constantly on guard.

The identification of the red beret should be synonymous with self-help. People are too dependent on the government from the cradle to the grave: ‘What’s the government gonna do for me?’ Eh, c’mon. People walk around with an attitude, like, ‘They’re all corrupt.’ Why even waste your time? They do care about you, but a lot of the time they promise to do too much when they’re elected. And the reality hits: They really can’t do all the things they promised they could do. If [we] were less dependent on the government and took more responsibility for what happens day-to-day in [our] neighbourhood, we’d be a lot better off, we’d be happier, we’d feel empowered. And then when politicians are a dollar short and a day late, as they are with most things, we wouldn’t be as disappointed. I say: Channel that anger into doing something constructive. Internationally this red beret is a symbol of, If you’re not satisfied with the way things are, do something about it. Legally, lawfully, within the constraints of what your society permits. Don’t tell me you’re gonna sit on the couch and grow barnacles on your backside. It’s time to get your rear in gear, get out there, and do something.

People want to get involved. But then they realise it’s a regimen, you have to work for this. You don’t just get the red beret, you don’t just get to style and profile. You have to jump through the hoops. That’s how we maintain quality control. You also have to be able to work with a wide range of people: men, women, gay, straight, people who agree with you, who disagree with you. We try to keep religiosity and politics out of it. You’re here for one mission. You’re capable of being the individual that you are, so long as you’re not promoting crime. Other than that, we put you all in the mix, and that’s what makes it a successful group.

I learned the purpose of the uniform early on, in elementary school at St. Matthews in Crown Heights, run by the Josephite Irish nuns. We had to wear grey slacks, a white T-shirt, and a maroon tie; the young ladies had to wear a similar uniform, except pleated skirts that were sort of maroon grey-ish. Now after school, the young boys especially would sometimes go into a store and cause a problem. The store owner would then come to the Mother Superior and say, ‘You know, some of your folks, they came in and took some potato chips and ran out the store.’ The Mother Superior would take the store owner from class to class and she’d say ‘Identify who it is.’ Occasionally he would: ‘That’s the young man there.’ He would leave, and the Mother Superior would say ‘We’ll take care of it.’ Everyone in the class was culpable. It was group guilt. Mother Superior would say, ‘You know, some of you were probably aware of what Johnny did there and you decided not to say anything.’ This would be a group punishment. It might mean having to stay after school for a week; it might mean having some of the privileges you were extended removed. Now you’d be really mad at Johnny.

In society now, news is so instantaneous — it goes viral, it’s all over the world. Let’s say a Guardian Angel did something in Gothenburg, Sweden that tainted us. It would impact every Guardian Angel all over the world. It’s that understanding of when you earn the red beret and that jacket, you — one rotten apple — could taint all of us, after 41 years. It puts on a lot of pressure and responsibility. Our philosophy is: We trust people.

Oftentimes somebody’s joining who may have low self-esteem, who may not think they could ever achieve anything in life. Now all of a sudden, they’ve earned their way into the Guardian Angels. People are patting them so hard on the back they gotta go for a chiropractic adjustment the next day. In their normal life, they’re either a person of no consequence or a person that people fear because of the way they look. We have to have quality control, which means we have to trust the people to follow the rules and regulations. I would much prefer to take risks on people than risks with money, gambling, or the stock market.

My credibility is based in the streets. I can go into any neighbourhood — I’m gonna have my detractors, but I’m gonna know how to deal with them, because I’m gonna debate ‘em right there in the streets. My limousine is the subway and the city buses. You’ll never find [politicians] on the subways and the city buses — occasionally for a photo op. Like Bloomberg, the billionaire, he used to go to 59th and Lexington and he would take the express train two stops to City Hall. And all of a sudden he said he was ‘a man of the people’ — yeah, with eight NYPD armed security officers, and he took the SUV from his townhouse on 79th Street. That was all a mirage. I will take the subway, I will take the buses, I will not have security. Maybe I’ll have an aid or two to handle this technology, because I’m like a luddite. But other than that, I’m gonna have the same means to get around as the people do. Because if elected officials had to use the same public transportation as the people do, you’d watch how fast things would be improved.

People think, ‘He must be a right-wing totalitarian dictator-type.’ I’m not at all happy with the [current] president, but I’m not at all happy with what the Democrats have offered up. I am Curtis Sliwa. A unique individual. In this particular run, I’m gonna run on the Republican line and probably on the Independent line. Right away people say, ‘Oh, you’re nothing more than Donald Trump.’ You look at my quotations about Donald Trump. I said he’s a manic depressive. He is the George Steinbrenner of American politics. And he needs to get off that damn Twitter at 4:30 in the morning. He has helped to polarise this country. But I look at the alternatives, at the Democrats, and, you know, they’re not necessarily upping the standards here. I’m an independent, autonomous person. No matter who gets elected president, we’re gonna have to learn to do more with less.

One of the benefits of always wearing a red beret, the jacket, and the garb — I can be like Zuckerberg. He’s got billions, I’ve got two cents that I rub together, but I get to wear the same thing every day. It doesn’t matter what I wear. It’s so easy to pop the beret on. It doesn’t matter what I have on underneath. So I get a pass on being a fashion statement. Then again, some people out there wear the same freakin’ stuff, day in, day out and they could afford a wardrobe — they just wear the same black T-shirt, black pants. For me, it’s who I am. I’m 24/7-365 Guardian Angel Curtis Sliwa.

Some people will say, ‘Hey, do you sleep in that?’ Yeah, sometimes I do! Boom, I collapse. Beret is on. Coat is on. [Laughs.] And then you get up, and you go right on out. Back to it.

Olivia Aylmer is a New York-based writer, editor and graduate of Barnard College at Columbia University.

ON A RECENT SATURDAY morning, I dream about clothes. On a single rack in a sparse space hang voluminous skirts in heavy, vintage fabrics of vermillion, baby pink, cherry red and monochrome; a jumpsuit in pastel stripes with rows of fringe; an off-the-shoulder dress of the softest silk in a rich, plum hue; and a collared shirt patterned with puzzle pieces. I run my hands over each piece, lovingly, longingly, prepared to buy and wear each one. They are completely within my grasp… Then, just as suddenly as I’d drifted off that evening, the dream ends, leaving me with little more than fragmented images of beautiful garments in a white-walled room. A question lingers, too: What – if anything – might the presence of these clothes in my dreaming mind mean? And why bother paying attention to them at all?

As I learn the following Sunday afternoon, this particular dream actually served as a confirmation of sorts – a sign that my unconscious and conscious minds were in sync. I bring my dream to Sarah Berry-Tschinkel, a New York City-based Jungian psychoanalyst in private practice who earned her M.S.W at Smith College and has worked in the field for over two decades As she explains in her sun-dappled office in downtown Manhattan, clothing and self-presentation have long held a particular fascination where the unconscious is concerned, even when that opinion has proven unpopular and unexplored among her colleagues. An actress by trade (analysing dreams marks her second career), Berry-Tschinkel pays close attention to what she terms the ‘embodied experience’ when she works with her clients. ‘Self-care and really understanding how you feel in your own skin – how you walk around in your own body – that to me is both fascinating and an important part of being a human being,’ she says.

Coming prepared is key to ensuring a productive and insightful session with Berry-Tschinkel. Before a new client arrives to her office, she asks them to choose a dream of late that they recall in relatively great detail (‘It’s the psyche saying, ‘Here I am.’’). She starts with the personal, asking such questions as, ‘What did the hat look like? Did you ever have a hat like that? Did it hold any significance for you? Did your grandmother have a hat like that?’ Then she tackles the symbolic and cultural associations, which naturally differ from client to client. Suffice to say, once you begin breaking down a single dream piece-by-piece – and garment-by-garment, as applicable to my session – you could quickly find yourself in a complex maze of possible interpretations. Berry-Tschinkel works to guide her clients through that maze and toward a sense of greater clarity about what their dreams might be trying to tell them.

When I ask what originally attracted Berry-Tschinkel to study Jung’s approach over Freud’s, she points to the Jungian belief that dreams hold ‘the potential of being prophetic or expansive or deeply creative…’ The distinction between Freudian and Jungian approaches to dream analysis is subtle yet significant. In contrast to a strictly Freudian approach – wherein dreams signify repressed contents and desires that may only be safely accessed via the unconscious, so as not to disturb our waking lives – Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung believed that our individual consciousness existed in intimate relationship to, and arose out of, our unconscious mental state on a daily basis. He theorised that understanding our dreams provided a means for the unconscious to communicate with the conscious mind in our waking lives. As he wrote,

Consciousness does not create itself – it wells up from unknown depths. In childhood it awakens gradually, and all through life it wakes each morning out of the depths of sleep from an unconscious condition. It is like a child that is born daily out of the primordial womb of the unconscious. …It is not only influenced by the unconscious but continually emerges out of it in the form of numberless spontaneous ideas and sudden flashes of thought.¹

Applying the more open-minded, Jungian line of thinking to the visual and sensory contents of dreams ultimately allows for more generous – and generative – interpretations. It’s exactly why I sought out a Jungian analyst to help me unlock the underlying message that my recent dream featuring vibrant clothes at its centre might have been trying to send me.

Berry-Tschinkel was trained to think of the dream life ‘as much bigger territory.’ In short, every detail counts when you’re thinking like a Jungian. In clothing-centric dreams, sensory details ranging from colour, texture or quantity of garments to the feel of fabric on skin to childhood memories associated with the garments often enrich a preliminary interpretation. On occasion, Berry-Tschinkel might even encourage her clients (as she did me) to draw what they saw. This helps them to imagine what it might feel like to wear the clothes in the real world, beyond the dream landscape. Sometimes, the potent mood or feeling that wearing the clothes conjures matters more than the literal presence of the clothes themselves.

I experienced an ‘ego-near’ dream, according to Berry-Tschinkel. This means that the imagery that arose was not too far outside of my usual taste and sense of self, as demonstrated by the fact that I was the only figure present, save for the clothes, which provided me with a potent sense of pleasure and excitement. Berry-Tschinkel’s guess? ‘This in some ways was telling you you’re on the right track. There’s something here that fits you. That it is yours to have. And it’s waiting for you.’ She specifically calls this a ‘confirmation dream,’ in that the clothes, and the emotional significance they held for my psyche – a sense of possibility and joy – were accessible and within reach, even if they were not yet tangibly mine.

When talking about clothing in dreams, persona – a term coined by Jung to mean the personality that one projects to others, in contrast to what they consider to be their ‘authentic self’ – repeatedly arises. Persona constitutes one of Jung’s four central archetypes (the other three being the self, the shadow and the anima or animus).² It’s fitting that he derived the term from the Latin persona, referring to the masks worn by Etruscan mimes.³ (But think of it less as a literal mask than as a social mask.) According to Jung, the persona may also appear in dreams – and that’s where clothing comes in. Just as people utilise clothing as a vehicle for self-expression in their waking lives, clothes often play a similarly expressive role in relation to the personas we assume in our dreams.

At a time where constant image control and maintenance, particularly across social media, is at its cultural height, the persona’s role in dreams has only grown more idiosyncratic. As Berry-Tschinkel explains, ‘it used to be that one had a persona that was both conscious and unconscious, but it stayed pretty consistent. If you were a doctor or a teacher or a minister, you had a role, and your persona was often consistent with your role. Your dress, your manner, the way you conducted yourself, the quality of your voice, was consistent with that. But we have a much more  – interesting and creative, I think – relationship with persona now.’ When she sees persona in dreams, she often thinks of it as ‘a new aspect of persona being tried on.’ Just as a new outfit sometimes allows us to tap into previously unexplored parts of ourselves, trying on clothing in a dream as a tangible expression of persona might signify ‘an opening up of new aspects of identity as yet unknown.’

I wondered whether my dreaming of clothes in such vibrant detail was a rarity. Turns out it’s not, even if some analysts prioritise its meaning more than others. Berry-Tschinkel estimates that at least half of the dreams of people she works with involve clothing in some capacity, whether it’s a garment left behind or something they take on or off. For instance, someone who is not prone to dressing loudly in her day-to-day life might don ‘oranges and turquoises and reds’ in a dream, suggesting that ‘something more colourful needs to be expressed or that they have the possibility of opening up a more dynamic part of who they are, and they’re not there yet.’

Other times, though, the absence of clothing proves equally significant. Nudity constitutes one of the most constantly recurring dream images. According to Berry-Tschinkel, this can signify that ‘something is being revealed too quickly,’ or that someone is ‘not quite comfortable yet with what is being revealed or…how it’s being revealed. There can be a thousand different ways that you interpret that depending on what someone’s issues are and where they are in particular their life.’

For as much as Berry-Tschinkel pays attention both to what clients recall wearing in dreams – and even what they wear to an appointment with her – as a meaningful access point into their psyche, she laments that, in her field, creative expression has not often been written or talked about. This may, in part, come down to the fact that not all clients come bearing ‘creatively expressive’ dream imagery for an analyst to work with in the first place; more creative aspects of their psyche might be blocked or relatively inaccessible, due to the way they were raised or based on the relatively insignificant role they consider clothing to possess in their daily adult lives.

Yet there might also be some gender issues at play. Consider the central role that fairy tales and mythology play in the Jungian psychoanalytic field. Marie-Louise von Franz (1915–1998), the foremost student of Jung, with whom she worked closely from 1934 until his death in 1961, published widely on the intersection of dreams and fairy tales,⁴ often examining their central motifs in relation to Jung’s concepts of shadow, animus and anima. In studying fairy tales through a Jungian lens, von Franz believed they would offer insights into humankind’s shared archetypal experiences. Yet within these archetypically rich tales, Jungians have long privileged what Berry-Tschinkel refers to as the ‘hero’s quest,’ or ‘mythic journey,’ wherein the presence of seemingly insignificant details (e.g. what the protagonist wears whilst overcoming dangerous obstacles) are often relegated to the background. This is further complicated by the fact that many of these same fairy tales and myths are more prone to highlighting women’s appearance and clothing as notable elements (as in Cinderella or Rumpelstiltskin) while not placing equal importance on such elements for male characters.

Early in her career, Berry-Tschinkel observed a notable chasm between the content of such psychoanalytically relevant tales and the content of dreams as her clients presented them to her. ‘I would go back and look at what dreams were analysed and what the books were written about, and they were all about slaying the dragons,‘ she explains. ‘And I was looking at the dreams of my patients, and many of them were like, “Well, I had this blue sweater on and it had these tiny little buttons and they were pearls.” And I think other of my colleagues might miss that. They might not explore what that feels like. You know, what blue is in the client’s life and what it felt like [for them] to button up those tiny little buttons. I found that it took us into really interesting territory that was deeply about an embodied sense of the self, and it was incredibly rich.’

As someone with a demonstrated passion for personal style, I ask Berry-Tschinkel how much of herself she brings into the room when meeting with a client who comes bearing a sartorially rich dream. Does she ever get carried away? ‘What I try to do in my work with anyone is to stick very closely to what they bring me, because it needs to about their experience – not mine. And I can certainly bring insights to that, but I try to skew very closely to their imagery, their interests and what they bring into the room. Because in that way, I’m listening to their psyche.’

After I left Berry-Tschinkel’s office, I thought about how I’d never felt quite as immediately understood by a stranger I had met but an hour ago. In taking my dream clothes seriously – in thoughtfully and imaginatively considering how they connected to the person that was, at that moment, striding down Fifth Avenue toward whatever the future held, in platform boots and a printed dress salvaged from the fifties and a black faux fur coat – Berry-Tschinkel had not only listened to my innermost psyche: she had seen it.

Olivia Aylmer is a New York-based writer, editor and graduate of Barnard College at Columbia University.

Photograph courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art (www.moma.org).

1. ‘The Psychology of Eastern Meditation,’ par. 935, in CG Jung, The Collected Works of C.G. Jung. Ed. Herbert Read and Gerhard Adler. Trans. R. F.C. Hull. 2nd ed. Princeton: Princeton UP; 1975. ↩

2. According to Jung, the self is the sum total of the psyche, with all its potential included. Those traits that we dislike form what Jung called the Shadow, a part of the psyche that is also influenced heavily by the collective unconscious. The anima and animus are the contra-sexual archetypes of the psyche, with the anima being in a man and animus in a woman, which seek to balance out one’s otherwise potentially one-sided experience of gender. See: Journal Psyche, “The Jungian Model of the Psyche,” http://journalpsyche.org/ ↩

3. The Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica. ‘Persona.’ Encyclopædia Britannica, 12 May 2005. ↩

4. For further reading, see von Franz’s The Interpretation of Fairy Tales. Shambhala, 1996. ↩

Following their delayed admittance into the church in a leadership capacity, female priests inherited a relatively masculine-looking uniform – one that offers little variation where body types and sartorial taste are concerned. Upon their ordination, women in Warde’s position must adopt a standard code of dress. When leading services, clergy members don more formal, distinctive garments known as vestments alongside their ankle-length, long-sleeved robes, which oftentimes reflect the liturgical colour of the day or season of the religious celebration. Outside of church services, clergy people wear what they call clericals – essentially, their ‘street clothes.’ Along with a detachable white clerical collar, a black shirt, pants or a conservative pencil skirt for women are generally acceptable; these modest, non-distracting garments turn the focus away from materialism, thereby illustrating the wearer’s commitment to serving God and their communities as selflessly as possible, even in quotidian life.

Twenty-nine-year-old Rev. Warde has chosen to take an active stance against the stuffiness she saw in most clericals on offer. Instead of succumbing to years of dreary, ill-fitting garments for the sake of fitting in, Rev. Warde aims to modernise her wardrobe through a mix of DIY-alterations, thrift store hunting, and subtle – if liturgically appropriate – colour accents. In the process, she’s proved that dressing with a sense of moral responsibility and religious devotion need not imply a lack of style.

Rev. Warde has not been alone in this effort. Across the pond, Rev. Sandra Sykes, her friend Mandy Strevens and their daughters Sarah and Melissa founded what is thought to be Britain’s first retailer for ‘clergy couture.’ Rev. Sykes, an Anglican curate, points out, ‘So often all you can find is badly adapted shirts and women have been in the ministry for over twenty-five years. It almost seems like we are hidden as women rather than being celebrated…There’s a deeper theological thing to this. Women need to be recognised fully as women in ministry.’² 

As Rev. Warde tells it, the decision-making process required of dressing for work and leisure as a woman of faith occasionally feels like a curse – but she’s warming up to the idea that it might just be a daily blessing in disguise.

I love fashion generally – I’ve always loved it. On my Sabbath, I read InStyle sometimes. I mean, I read the Bible as well, but I do love a good InStyle. I follow Project Runway and I love What Not to Wear and all those sorts of things. I already had this teenage interest in fashion. Then I realised I would be given my work uniform, and my work uniform has a lot behind it – it carries a lot of weight when you walk into a room. That can either be a really good thing or it can be a really challenging thing.

I was trying to figure out what it was going to carry when I wore it and what it was going to say when I walked into a room – I think that matters. I kept looking at these [catalogue] pictures, and there was nothing wrong with them, but I just realised that I couldn’t imagine ever putting that [uniform] on and feeling beautiful. I don’t think that the priesthood requires that we trade feeling beautiful in order to serve God. Full disclaimer: I will say that my relationship to my own body has been a rollercoaster of just figuring out how to love the skin I’m in in the first place, much less adding a collar to it. I wanted to figure out how I could do this thing that I feel like God asked me to do with my life and that I want to very joyously do, but also hold up this interior feeling of beauty. I didn’t want to lose that feeling of beauty – a beauty that I believe God gave me – just because no one decided to give the girl in the catalogue a belt. I also saw all these ways that the clerical uniform could have been better. I just thought, it doesn’t have to be this way.

It’s typical to wear a black clerical shirt, some form of pants or a pencil skirt, maybe a blazer over it and heels. That to me would be the expected outfit to wear. And there’s nothing wrong with that – there are some people who make that exact wardrobe look amazing. But my body isn’t such that that actually looks good on me; it looks like I’m dressed up in my mom’s clothes when I wear an outfit like that. I’m 4’11” and curvy, so my figure doesn’t lend itself toward some of those lines that are a little bit more common … It wouldn’t surprise you that the priesthood – a male-dominated workforce – would have a more expected, masculine dress profile. But I don’t fall into that profile, so I’ve had to figure out how to wear clothes that I think flatter my body in an appropriate way, while also wearing this collar.

I’ll go to a boutique and find a black dress with scalloped edges on the bottom and on the sleeve, and I just put that over the collar. They have this thing called a ‘janie’ – it’s basically a ‘dickey,’ but it’s a ‘janie’ for women – and it hooks down right under your bra basically, and you can connect your collar to it. You would typically wear your undergarment, your janie, and something over it as long as it covers the janie. I take dresses from boutiques – like maybe a houndstooth dress, but it’s black-and-white – and I throw that over the janie and go. But that would not necessarily be something that most people have seen with a collar attached to it. The typical colour for clergy wear is black, but if you go to Women Spirit or Almy – companies that make clergy attire – you’ll see that now you can get clericals in myriad colours.

For my first ordination, I went to a Goodwill in Austin, Texas, and found this black, button-up shirt-dress. It was really cute and it was the appropriate length and everything; hitting right at or just above the knee is best. Why do I care about the length? I think when you meet with the priest, the greatest presence you should feel in the room is the presence of God. Sure, I want to teach and preach from a place of confidence that is sometimes enhanced by my clothing: but the thing of the greatest importance to me is that the people I care for feel God’s presence. I don’t want a hemline to distract from that. I’d rather break every fashion rule in the book than challenge that.

One of my seminary classmates was a former tailor and she was about to get ordained as well, and I said, ‘Would you mind tailoring this for me?’ She tailored it, so I wore the black dress, leggings and black wedges. The colour for an ordination is red, so I put on a red scarf; I thought it would be appropriate for the liturgical season, but I also thought it would be fun and offer some colour. I have a red pair of cowboy boots and since I’m a priest in Texas I always wear them on Pentecost. The only reason I can even remember what I was wearing is because I did get some comments, but they were all positive. People were commenting on how they’d never seen such a fashionable priest.

That said, I was serving in a diocese when I was ordained a priest that considered white to be the appropriate colour for the vestments for ordinations, which was new to me, but I went with it. White is how we recognise the majesty of resurrection: it’s how we celebrate All Saints, Easter, baptism Sundays, and funerals, because white celebrates the resurrection of Christ and how we share in that via our own resurrecting acts and our final resurrection in death.  Ordination could also be seen as a resurrecting act, because we take on a new way of life with new vows, new beauties, new challenges and new eternal joys. My colours change based on context.

The ironic thing about the clerical uniform is that one of the early significances of it was to make a clergy person be in the background. It was worn as an act of humility, so they wouldn’t be flamboyant; they wouldn’t be outwardly dressed in a way that would call attention to themselves. It’s ironic in a postmodern world, because I can’t walk into any place in a collar and not have a million people staring at me, like, ‘What on earth? Did a priest just walk into this coffee shop? And she’s also a woman? I don’t know what to do with that right now.’ That’s a whole other layer. The fashion aspect is constantly also being confronted with the reality that there are people who believe that women should not be ordained. And I have a physical manifestation of my ordination that goes with me when I walk into those places – that’s another challenge that just comes with it. Now the joy of it is that you also end up having conversations that you otherwise wouldn’t have had. People can see your collar and sometimes they have needed a sign for years that they could talk to someone, that they could have a prayer – you walk in, and you’re just trying to get your groceries, but they see this opportunity and there’s a really holy moment that is offered to me because of the fact that they can see on my neck an opportunity for a prayer or maybe hope or someone that they can trust. 

As far as negative feedback I’ve received, I think that every good has a shadow side. And the shadow side of adding fashion as a thing that I’m thinking about in my ministry is the idea that it might become self-centred – that putting on this collar might be about me. And to some degree, yes, by adding aspects of my personality to it, it is becoming about me. But my belief around that is that I’m not trying to take God out of it. God is the focus of my life and I want my life to be a ministry to God – I just think that God called me, Erin Jean Warde, to be a priest. And so I’m going to bring who God created me to be into that ministry. I think I want to honour the worry – that it then becomes self-centred and it’s no longer about God, it’s about you and your ego, and all of that Freudian, terrible stuff that we don’t want to show up in our priesthood – but at the same time, I think it’s okay to say, ‘I want to feel good about myself. I want to feel beautiful, because I believe that God desires that I would feel beautiful.’ That’s part of this abundant life that I believe the ministry is calling me into. 

If you know me personally, you know that I am comedic, I am extroverted, and I think that laughter is the best accessory to any outfit. But I’m also outspoken and I like to talk and I’m curious, so for me, I wanted those parts of my personality to be reflected in my fashion, even from before I was a priest. There is a connection for me between when I look my best and I feel like I look my best, in being able to more confidently walk into a room that might otherwise be intimidating. The life of being a priest, at least in my setting, involves standing in front of a lot of people. And it’s not necessarily four hundred people, but it’s a congregation of people. I think for me, it’s not so much appearance for the sake of anyone else, but I want to be able to feel self-confident, because that’s when I believe I do my best – for God and for the church.

My exploration is wrapped up in the fact that I am a very feminine person. I have really long hair, and I like to curl it, and I like red lipstick and I just went to a gala at my church in a black midi-dress with my collar and my red heels and a red lip. And it was fantastic. I loved every minute of it. That’s who I am. If you didn’t put me in a career where I would wear a collar, I would wear the same thing. It just wouldn’t have a collar on it. As I get older, and as I go through this journey of self-exploration, I’m just trying to figure out how to be the same person in every room I stand in.

Rev. Erin Jean Warde is the Associate Rector for Christian Formation at the Episcopal Church of the Transfiguration in Dallas, Texas.

Olivia Aylmer is a New York-based writer, editor and graduate of Barnard College at Columbia University.

1. B Tammeus, ‘Episcopal church celebrates 40 years of women in the priesthood.’ National Catholic Reporter, 28 July 2014 https://www.ncronline.org/news/faith-parish/episcopal-church-celebrates-40-years-women-priesthood ↩

2. J Bingham, ‘“Clergy couture” range launched for fashion-conscious female priests.’ The Telegraph, 21 May 2016 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/05/21/clergy-couture-range-launched-for-fashion-conscious-female-pries/ ↩

As evidenced by one of Menkes’ most recent reviews, ‘#SuzyPFW Balmain: Supermodels, Curves, Super Relevant,’² readers cannot help but recognise Menkes’ efforts to ensure her so-called ‘relevancy’: she designates her digital status via a catchy hashtag, casually namedrops Kanye West and Kris Jenner as backstage guests, tightens her word count to accommodate shortened attention spans and even refers to the ‘hourglass body looks’ that Olivier Rousteing sent down the runway as ‘Instagram friendly.’³ Her critique of the Balmain show and its underlying ideas, however, was shallow at best, overshadowed by mentions of click bait celebrities and superfluous nods to social media platforms.

For a renowned fashion critic who gained a reputation for her bold point of view and often blunt critiques over the course of her twenty-five-year-plus career as chief fashion critic for the International Herald Tribune, Menkes’ new role as international editor across Vogue’s nineteen editions (save for the US) leaves something to be desired, particularly where the relevancy of her ideas is concerned. In the move from the British media platform to Vogue, Menkes’ embrace of digital platforms has not been a smooth one. Menkes clearly cares deeply about how the public perceives her embrace of the digital age, which has irrevocably changed the way we consume fashion media – 24/7, interactively, on smartphones. Yet there is a difference between staying ‘relevant’ via merely acquiring technological fluency, if only on the most basic level (i.e. regularly utilising Instagram), and offering contextualised, challenging critiques that push the industry and its insiders forward.

In this same interview, a then seventy-year-old Menkes explained that she was entering a ‘digital-first’ phase, moving in a new media direction aiming for increased publication speed, a wider international reach, and greater relevancy to the multi-platform millennial generation she now writes for. Menkes, and by extension, her current employer, recognise the necessity to cater to this new audience, for whom the daily consumption of digital media via social platforms – where significant profit lies – has become a natural extension of their lives. This has undoubtedly impacted Menkes’ decision to abandon her Herald Tribune post and migrate to Condé Nast. Now, two years on, and nestled in her new role at Vogue, Menkes has gained greater reach and immediacy with her readers, but the tactic arguably comes at a cost to her integrity as a critic.

The once analytical voice to be reckoned with seems to have lost its sharpness, its probing and considered tone – the very qualities that once made Menkes stand out – only to be replaced by generic, comfortably complacent content: glorified blog posts interspersed with blurry Instagram photos of Menkes smiling beside this or that celebrity or designer. Although the fashion world continues to talk about Menkes as if she is still a critical voice worth respecting above all others, her move to Vogue signifies not only a shift in her priorities, but also a tonal shift. In her golden years as a critic, receiving a compliment from Menkes in a review felt earned, not diluted by empty praise; it was indicative of a collection not just well made, but created with something important to say about the culture at large. Menkes did not simply applaud a designer on the basis of how many Instagram followers he or she had accrued. Her past writing, such as ‘The Bright Continent,’⁴ her February 2009 commentary on fashion’s embrace of both African design and increased diversity among models on the runway, written in the same year that President Barack Obama was elected, found Menkes working and thinking on many levels: she contextualised the current moment in a helpful way, critiqued past iterations of the trend, noting how ‘In previous years, references to Africa have at times seemed awkward, patronising, even insulting,’⁵ and engaged with art, politics and appropriation, all the while staying forthright but not unnecessarily acerbic. It is these qualities which are becoming increasingly difficult to discern in Menkes’ writing today.

Fast forward and consider Menkes’ first blog post for Vogue in June 2014, tellingly titled: ‘Fighting the Bitch Brigade.’⁶ The conceit of the column – that the internet, and particularly Twitter, runs rampant with a ‘stream of catty comments’ – seems to contradict Menkes’ once-discerning voice. ‘Suzy in Vogue,’ she declared, ‘is going to be “anti-bitch.”’ Surely it was never in question of whether Menkes was an industry ‘bitch,’ but as a fashion journalist, her critiques for The International Herald Tribune often challenged designers’ thinking or questioned their concept. Though not explicitly ‘bitchy,’ her critical writing was enough to get her banned, famously, from the Versace shows for several years. Then, in 2001, she was banned from all LVMH shows for a day that season’s week in Paris, a result of her critical comments towards brands in the conglomerate. As Menkes herself explained, ‘I try to offer constructive – not hateful – comments. It is about thoughtfulness as opposed to meanness and analysis rather than knee-jerk reaction.’⁷ For someone like Menkes – and her peers, Cathy Horyn, Vanessa Friedman, Tim Blanks et al – the expectation was that she would always write and think about fashion in the spirit of independent journalism. Now, with a global platform on which to discuss fashion at her disposal, Menkes’ 500 plus words debut, bemoaning fashion-police style criticism, is a telling stance.

For Vogue, the addition of the critic to their staffing is indicative of their desire to be seen not merely as a newsstand-exclusive fashion glossy, but as the premiere arbiter of taste – and relevancy – both online and in print within an increasingly global fashion industry. Hiring Menkes – a critic eager to expand, not diminish, her presence within the rapidly changing fashion world as her audience skews younger and towards the internet, by writing more accessibly for wider appeal – conveniently bolsters Vogue’s credibility as a publisher of respected commentry. The mere mention of Menkes’ name, no matter where her byline appears, calls to mind a certain gravitas, formed through the decades of knowledge and experience and relationships she has acquired within the industry.

If fashion media continues to provide old guard critics like Menkes, whether or not they remain as relevant as they once were, with the most widely read platforms to write and think aloud, it will miss out on marginalised and rarely heard critical voices. Those are the voices that hold the potential to introduce new perspectives and ideas within an industry that relies on constant change, even as it hesitates to embrace structural change. Those are the voices that just might prove themselves not only relevant, but also utterly refreshing.

Olivia Aylmer is a New York-based stylist, writer and graduate of Barnard College at Columbia University.

1. I. Amed, “Inside Suzy Menkes’ New Digital World,” The Business of Fashion, 10 June 2014. ↩

2. S. Menkes, “#SuzyPFW Balmain: Supermodels, Curves, Super Relevant,” Vogue, 3 March 2016. ↩

3. Ibid. ↩

4. S. Menkes, “The Bright Continent,” T Magazine, 19 February 2009. ↩

5. Ibid. ↩

6. S. Menkes, “Fighting the Bitch Brigade,” Vogue, 3 June 2014. ↩

7. Ibid. ↩

It’s tempting to accept the consumer-ready packaging of female writers, musicians, and artists in fashion industry-vetted contexts – whether they appear in ad campaigns, magazine covers or screen-printed on tote bags – at face value. Yet it’s worth questioning whether this packaging serves them and their work as holistically as possible; whether it builds and sustains an audience legitimately interested in the work itself or one that is merely attracted to the glamorous façade.

The daughter of Jewish immigrants born in a highly anti-Semitic climate, Lispector and her family emigrated to Brazil in 1921 when she was only two months old from Tchetchelnik, Ukraine (Russia) to escape the pogroms. Lispector often attributed this early disruption to ‘her sense of not quite belonging, especially to herself.’² While she adopted Brazilian Portuguese as her primary language, her marriage to a Brazilian diplomat took her to temporary homes in Italy, Switzerland, England, and the United States. Beginning in her teens, writing stories allowed her to make sense of her inner conflicts concerning gender roles, class struggles, economic status, and her own complicated cultural background; hers was a metaphysically curious writing style, one that often raised questions about the nature of being human in strange and haunting ways. Lispector led a varied and highly productive career – publishing novels, stories collections, children’s books, and even a weekly column for the national daily newspaper, O Jornal do Brasil – and won various literary awards, eventually becoming an undisputed literary legend in Brazil. Yet it has taken decades since her death in 1977 for her singular voice to reach English readers in translation.

For a writer so strongly invested in mining her complex inner world for material, Lispector’s exterior has received a disproportionate amount of attention. Today, it’s rare to encounter reviews of her work that do not reference her ‘glamour’, an adjective frequently associated with her appearance. As Benjamin Moser, one of Lispector’s biographers, points out in his introduction to the recent reissue of The Complete Stories, ‘The legendarily beautiful Clarice Lispector, tall and blonde, clad in the outspoken sunglasses and chunky jewellery of a grande dame of mid-century Rio de Janeiro, met our current definition of glamour.’³

A simple internet search of images of Lispector reveals a woman who exudes the sort of visual presence that, at least on the surface, appears utterly effortless: she was prone to painting her lips a deep rouge and donning statement necklaces, her hair elegantly swept off her face. In many of these images, she gazes off in the distance while a lit cigarette dangles between her fingers. Lispector’s strong sense of personal style (she even moonlighted as a fashion writer) signifies that she was well aware of the power of her appearance to generate curiosity along with higher book sales.

The conflation between displaying genuine respect for her literary talent and obsessing over her distinct brand of glamour is evident in American translator Gregory Rabassa’s frequently quoted description of Lispector: he ‘recalled being “flabbergasted to meet that rare person who looked like Marlene Dietrich and wrote like Virgina Woolf.”’⁴

Despite the fact that Lispector’s first novel, Near to the Wild Heart (published in December 1943, around her twenty-third birthday) earned her impressive accolades – one critic even called it ‘[…] the greatest novel a woman has ever written in the Portuguese language’⁵ – she maintained a difficult relationship to the press for much of her career. Her hesitation to divulge information about her personal life, along with her distrust toward journalists to tell her story authentically, without layers of projection, led to a mythologising of Lispector that remains tied to the very mention of her name today.

It seems that this impenetrable Lispectorian mystique has only served to add to her appeal. In Brazil, she is a household name, long considered to be one of the country’s most significant writers. Recently, beyond the Brazilian borders, critical interest in her work and translated reissues of her novels and stories have steadily increased over the past decade.

Yet as Moser points out in his biography of Lispector, Why This World, ‘The legend was stronger than she was.’⁶ This legend overshadowed the woman herself, a fact that frustrated Lispector throughout her lifetime. Writing in 1976, the year prior to her untimely death from cancer, she reflected on the increased attention she had steadily gained over the years as her legend grew:

‘This all leaves me a bit perplexed. Could it be that I’m fashionable? And why did people complain they didn’t understand me and now seem to understand me? […] The truth is that some people created a myth around me, which gets in my way […]’⁷

Lispector correctly believed that the press considered her a slate onto which they could project their own assumptions about what went on in her head, rather than portray her as a multifaceted woman: equal parts writer, housewife, and mother. No matter how much widespread praise Lispector’s writing has attained post-mortem, her literary credibility will forever be bound to this glamorised mythology.

Similarly to Lispector’s experience once she found herself in the public limelight, the fashion and literary worlds alike have, in recent months, created their own sorts of mythologies around other artistic women – from Patti Smith and Iris Apfel to Joni Mitchell and Joan Didion – by collaborating with them, casting them in ad campaigns, and bestowing upon them the title of ‘style icon.’ As fashion and publishing houses alike have increasingly promoted, and ultimately profited from, the commercialisation of these independent, sartorially savvy, women, they have attained a new kind of cultural clout since their heyday in bygone eras. A conflict comes into play, however, when we claim to respect a female writer’s work while simultaneously idolising her desirable aesthetic. This dynamic has been further reinforced in the case of writer – and recently crowned ‘style icon’ – Joan Didion, following her role in the spring/summer 2015 Céline campaign shot by fashion photographer Juergen Teller and released last January.

Didion’s blunt reaction to the New York Times reporter who called her to comment (“I don’t have any clue,” and “I have no idea.”)⁸ suggested a reluctant ambiguity toward the fashion world’s embrace of her as a cultural figure worthy of admiration. Yet while Didion claimed an unawareness toward the buzz surrounding her style, there is no denying that both Céline and Didion benefitted from perpetuating the idea that she – and by extension, her work – were worth discussing anew, in part because of what she wore and how she wore it. As a recent New York Times piece by Matthew Schneier exploring the Didion fashion phenomenon confirmed, ‘According to Nielsen BookScan […] sales of her work in 2015 to date are up nearly 55 percent over the comparable period the previous year.’⁹

Designers and editors alike are clearly not blind to the commercial benefits of aligning themselves with these established, powerful muses whose personal style can be whittled down to singular garments and accessories that signify an insouciant cool: a pair of oversized statement shades for Didion; an old black coat and clean white shirt for Smith; dark red lipstick for Lispector. Theirs is an everyday way of dressing defined by distinctive simplicity, something the image-saturated and seasonally-spinning fashion universe so often lacks.

The ways in which women like Lispector and Didion have been marketed more recently for public consumption – attaining the status of both literary and unconventional style icon, respectively – highlights a tendency for such figures to offer the potential for increased cultural capital, specifically when viewed through the lens of nostalgia. Built as it is on maintaining a perpetual longing for times and places past (e.g. Lispector’s glamorous 1940s style; Didion’s 1970s California cool), this sort of iconic, nostalgic branding generates a significant profit. Other women, especially younger women, will inevitably try to emulate this iconic sartorial or writing style to feel closer to the women – by purchasing a pair of Céline sunglasses to look just like Didion or proudly displaying a copy of Lispector’s story collection on their bookshelf, for example. Yet given the logic underlying the very idea of a ‘style icon,’ which requires that they remain peerless, faultless, and perpetually out of reach, it is no coincidence that for the brand or publisher, this unfulfilled longing for closeness to the idol translates into increased accessories and book sales.

As so often occurs to suddenly embraced entities in fashion’s orbit, these writers’ fashionable auras may inevitably begin to lose some of their lustre over time. Still, the question remains as to whether fashion’s stamp of approval ultimately helps or hurts the female artist in question in the long term. If nostalgic branding encourages consumers to stop short at the glamorous image – to purchase the writer’s work solely on the basis of that image – then it risks less serious critical attention being paid to the work itself.

As the sudden, intense resurgence of interest in both Didion’s older works and Lispector’s translated works in the US have shown, the current expectation for female writers to also embrace themselves as profitable brands puts their work in danger of dilution. If the fashion world continues to ghost these women’s significant contributions to the long male-dominated literary canon on the gendered basis of their distinctly ‘feminine glamour,’ then it will perpetuate the idea that their writing is not capable of speaking for itself – that it cannot be divorced from what the woman wore while she wrote her life’s work.

Olivia Aylmer is a New York-based stylist, writer and graduate of Barnard College at Columbia University.

1. C Lispector, trans. Stefan Tobler, Água Viva, New Directions, New York, 2012, p. 39 ↩

2. Vieira, Nelson H., “Clarice Lispector.” Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia. 1 March 2009. Jewish Women’s Archive. ↩

3. B Moser, The Complete Stories of Clarice Lispector, New Directions, New York, 2015, p. ix ↩

4. B Moser, “Introduction: The Sphinx,” Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector, Oxford University Press, New York, 2009, p. 2 ↩

5. Ibid., p. 125 ↩

6. B Moser, “Introduction: The Sphinx,” Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector, Oxford University Press, New York, 2009, p. 4 ↩

7. Ibid., p. 361 ↩

8. Jacobs, Alexandra. “Joan Didion on the Céline Ad.” New York Times, 7 Jan. 2015. ↩

9. Schneier, Matthew. “Fashion’s Gaze Turned to Joan Didion in 2015.” The New York Times, 18 Dec. 2015. ↩