Sheila Heti - Women in Clothes

LUISE STAUSSs over-the-knee socks

Skype meeting. Leanne and Heidi are in Leannes studio in New York. Sheila is in her apartment in Toronto. Leanne has recently cut her hair.

SHEILA: Oh my god, look at your hair!

LEANNE: I know. (laughs)

SHEILA: I love it, I love it! Its so good.

LEANNE: Are you wearing fur?

SHEILA: No, Im wearing a throw.

HEIDI: I have no new hair to share, no new hair. Sheila, are you growing your bangs out?

SHEILA: Not intentionally.

LEANNE: This is how our book should start: Hi, are you growing your bangs out? What are you wearing, are you wearing fur? Were like a bunch of chickens squawking at each other!

SHEILA: You look like Peter Pan.

HEIDI: Have you ever had short hair like this before?

LEANNE: Not this short. Well, when I was ten.

HEIDI: Yeah, thats the last time I had short hair, too. Sheila, have you ever had short-short, pixie-short, boy-short, hair?

SHEILA: Yeah, in high school I had like concentration-camp short. Thats what my mother called it.

HEIDI: Oh my god.

LEANNE: So wait, in terms of how we want to write the introduction, I like the essays we wrote a year ago when we first started thinking about the book. I think we should just rewrite those to some degree. And I also like your idea, Sheila, of talking about whats happened to us since we began the project.

HEIDI: So why dont we, right now, ask each other questions that we can use as connective tissue in the intro? So I might say, Sheila, how did you get dressed this morning, what did you think about thats different from what you might have thought about eight months ago?

SHEILA: Well, I didnt really get dressed.

SHEILAUntil this year, I never put much thought into clothes. I bought my silk 1930s ivory-colored wedding dress in about half an hour, made impatient by the task. I wore black shoes that hardly matched, but which were in my closet already.

What changed to make me more interested in dressing? I suppose it was that (a few years after my divorce) I began living with a man who cares a lot about dressing and clothes. I had never, up close, seen what that looks like. Id always assumed the well-dressed just happened to be that waynot that it was an area of life that people excelled in because they applied thought, attention, and care to it. Living with my boyfriend, I began to see that dressing was like everything else: those who dress well do so because they spend some time thinking about it.

Clothes and style became more interesting to me. For someone who is fascinated by how people relate to one another, its hard to overlook personal style as a way we speak to the world. One day I just decided, Today is the day Im going to figure out how to dress. I biked to a bookstoreone of those very big bookstoresand went to the section where there were fashion and style books, looking for one that would tell me what women thought about as they shopped and dressed. But there was nothing like that. There were books about Audrey Hepburn and books filled with pictures from Vogue, but nothing that felt useful to me at all. I thought, Ill have to make this a project. I decided to begin by asking some of the women I knew the very questions Id hoped to find answered in a book.

FROM : Sheila Heti

DATE: Sun, Apr 8, 2012, AT 1:00 PM

SUBJECT: fashion survey

TO: Heidi Julavits

Hey Heidi, I might write a little piece about womens fashion and I was wondering if I could bug you (as a fashionable lady!) to fill out my survey. Please answer as many times and in as much detail as possible to each question listed (if youre interested!). xo Sheila
ps: I was partly inspired to think about dressing after reading your latest novel. Also, Im not sure if the qs are exactly right.

QUESTION 1 What are some dressing rules that you have for yourself, that you wouldnt recommend to other people necessarily, but which you follow?

QUESTION 2 What are some dressing or clothing rules that you think every woman should follow?