Emily Spivack - Worn in New York: 68 Sartorial Memoirs of the City

It carries on its lapel the unexpungeable odor of the long past, so that no matter where you sit in New York you feel the vibrations of great times and tall deeds, of queer people and events and undertakings.
E. B. WHITE, Here is New York, 1949

In New York City, we wear our clothes hard. We grind the soles of Converse and Manolo Blahniks into the pavement. Over the course of a hot summer, we sweat through crisp white T-shirts until theyre a dingy gray. We hire cobblers and tailors to keep things from falling apart, and we schlep our laundry by hand and cart to laundromats and drycleaners. Our clothes are worn, and they get worn out. Our bodies help them disintegrate into the landscape of the city. The wear-and-tear is proof that we are active participants in city life.

And New York touches our clothes and leaves its own traces, too. The moment we walk out the door our experiences get mapped onto or absorbed into what were wearing. Our jeans get splashed with muck from a passing bus. Fellow passengers trample our shoes in an overcrowded subway car. An air conditioner in a window overhead drips onto our shirts. And, until recently, a night in a smoky bar would live on our clothes for days. Whatever choices weve made about why we put on the clothes we wearfashion, comfort, creative expression, protectionthe city will have its say.

The only thing between our skin and the city is our clothing, simultaneously shielding and exposing us. Our bodies press against our clothes just as the city presses back. As the British cultural theorist Elizabeth Wilson described in her book, Adorned in Dreams, A part of this strangeness of dress is that it links the biological body to the social being, and public to private[The body] is an organism in culture, a cultural artifact even, and its own boundaries are unclear.

Those public-private boundaries blur in New York, a place where you are rarely in isolation, and where you are often seen and watched. The sidewalk is a runwayeven more so than the runways at fashion weekas is the bus stop, the line at the bodega, and Central Park. Unlike in cities that depend on cars, we put ourselves on display in New York. The construction worker in steel toe boots, the tourist in trekking gear, the woman in her suit, the high school kids with backpacks and skinny jeans are all juxtaposed: We absorb the looks of everyone around us, all of us on the D train together. A few flaunt. Some observe. Many disappear in the sheer volume of people.

The flaunters, the observers, the invisibleI watch all of them. I take in and catalog their sartorial cues. I learn a lot from what people wear (and also from what they read, eat, how they look at their phones, how they look at each other). Thats one of the reasons I chose to live in New York. When Im away from the city for long periods of time, I feel depleted. I miss the looking. And the speculatingI always find myself imagining what the people of New York are doing when they are not sitting across from me on the train. What are their stories?

It is that curiosity which drove me to make Worn in New York. I didnt want to merely imagine the lives of strangers, so I asked sixty-eight real people for real New York stories centered on an item of clothing that had meaning for them. I interviewed artists, writers, doctors, musicians, athletes, astronauts, fashion designers, performers, architects, squatters, firefighters, business people, and bodega owners. I began each interview by asking the same question: What piece of clothing reminds you of a significant moment or experience in New York City?

That question had been refined from an early incarnation of this project in 2010. Back then I hosted a series of creative non-fiction writing workshops at places such as Philadelphias Institute of Contemporary Art. I had a suspicion that clothing might be a catalyst to help people tell their stories, so I asked participants to bring something from their closet with special significance. I guided them to explore that significance, steering them through the process of divining stories from their garments.

Story, to me, is the unrealized dimension of our wardrobe. Sometimes, a glance inside a closet is like browsing through a great essay collection. That belief led me to start the Worn Stories website in 2010, in which I curated and published contributions from friends and strangers. This eventually became the basis for my first book, Worn Stories, which gathered clothing-inspired narratives from across the country.

I was confident that a similar premise would flourish in New York City, a densely populated place with people who have come from all over the world to make their mark. For Worn in New York, I set out to capture the citys constantly-evolving identity, temper, and tone, and its irrepressible vitality by paying tribute to well-loved clothes and the people who wore them. Here, Ive assembled a contemporary cultural history of New York City, told through clothing.

Selecting contributors for Worn in New York was both an intentional and organic process. I sought out notable and everyday people who were native New Yorkers, tourists, and anywhere in between, who represented diverse age groups, backgrounds, professions, and all five boroughs. But as I conducted the interviews, those stories organically shaped who I interviewed next. I cast a wide net. I reached out to friends, individuals whose work I admire, and strangers on Craigslist.

I traversed the city to interview the books contributors. I talked to Adam Horovitz on his fire escape in Chelsea and Gay Talese over a scotch on the rocks at his townhouse on the Upper East Side. Michaela Angela Davis showed up at a Clinton Hill caf wearing the piece from her story, and Ariel Churnin slid her stolen garment to me across a caf table in Bushwick. I met Billy Gonzalez at his namesake bodega in the Bronx and Betty Halbreich over tea sandwiches at her office at Bergdorfs. I spoke to contributors over the phone who now live in California, Pennsylvania, Maine, North Carolina, and Texas.

As I heard more and more stories, I watched a multilayered map of New York emerge, linking contributors who likely had never crossed paths. Mirah Zeitlyn told me of her underwear that got ripped while training for the 2015 New York City Marathon, the event that George Hirsch founded nearly forty years before. Both Jenna Lyons and Lisa Bonnani had firsts at The MetJenna described her first time at the Met Gala, and Lisa described her tradition of wearing the same shirt on every first date, including one to The Met. The many unexpected intersections, like these, made the city feel both smaller and less daunting.

The stories within Worn in New York span seven decades, and its contributors range in age from their mid-twenties to mid-nineties. But there are innumerable people I wish I could have spoken to who are no longer alive. I would have loved to ask photographer Bill Cunningham about the blue jacket he wore everyday to photograph New Yorkers or hear James Jarrett Jr., a.k.a. Buster, talk about the uniform he wore for seventy years as Henri Bendels only doorman. Socialite and philanthropist Brooke Astor might have talked about the white gloves she wore to present charitable donations at a public school or gala, and Jack Kreindler, co-owner of the 21 Club, could have told me about the cowboy attire he wore around New York City when he wasnt at his restaurant. And thats just to name a few.

Knowing I couldnt speak to these iconic figures motivated me even more to make this archive of sartorial memoirs of the city before the storytellers and their clotheswhich will inevitably be thrown out, given away, or fall apartare gone. But this book isnt about wistfulness for times past; rather, its about documenting stories that emerge between the quotidian and extraordinary moments that only New York can offer, creating a living history of the city.