Racked: All Posts by Helena FitzgeraldThe National Shopping, Stores, and Retail Scene Bloghttps://cdn.vox-cdn.com/community_logos/52809/32x32.0..png2017-06-05T14:02:00-04:00https://www.racked.com/authors/helena-fitzgerald/rss2017-06-05T14:02:00-04:002017-06-05T14:02:00-04:00 The White Wedding Dress Industrial Complex
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<img alt="Row of wedding dresses" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/vmcOIJqkBuF6kJfJnRAZ_2SkJy0=/0x1:1999x1500/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/55064243/GettyImages_91299068.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>Photo: Michael Blann/Getty Images</figcaption>
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<p>And how to navigate it if you’re not sure it’s what you really want.</p> <p class="p--has-dropcap p-large-text" id="Xe6jLC">On a very cold afternoon in January, I was visiting my mom. We walked past a wedding dress store, where a mannequin stood posed with rhinestones dangling down its back and a long train pooling elegantly out behind it. </p>
<p id="HlIFIO">I had just gotten engaged in December and had already said I wasn’t planning to get a traditional wedding dress. But my mom and I both lingered near the window display. ”Well, we could just go in and look...” one of us said. </p>
<p id="g2gMHL">The wedding dress try-on experience is frequently depicted in popular culture, enough so that it’s familiar even to people like me, who never intended to enact it ourselves. The bride and her loved ones — a group of friends or her mom or all of these — go into a beautiful, serene store and are served champagne while the bride disappears. When she reappears, she looks transcendently beautiful and everybody cries, even the salesperson. Music plays, love is celebrated, and the wedding dress joyfully marks a grand occasion. </p>
<p id="AxwqYo">This is not what happened. </p>
<p id="2BM0iP">When my mom and I arrived for my appointment, the sales associate, rather than letting me browse dresses, asked me what my wedding was going to be like. I had no idea at the time — it was nine months away! — and no idea that I was supposed to know. I haltingly attempted to describe it, and what kind of dress I wanted (I also had no idea about this) to the long-suffering salesperson, who then disappeared to pick out dresses for me based on my description. </p>
<p id="dsESK4">She returned with three or four overwhelming gigantic dresses, each of which seemed to be about the size and weight of four to six regular dresses. These were samples, and she explained that while a sample might not be my size, that was normal — I was just supposed to “get the idea of what it would look like when it’s fitted for you.” In practice, this meant I was wearing a dress that wouldn’t zip all the way over my butt and being asked to imagine how beautiful it would look in the correct size. Could I actually try it on in my size before spending thousands of dollars, though? Haha, of course not. </p>
<p id="CYplcB">Understandably, because these dresses are both extremely valuable and extremely delicate, I learned that the salesperson comes into the fitting room to help you when you try on wedding dresses. <a href="https://www.racked.com/2017/6/5/15709254/wedding-dress-shopping-advice-tips">I should have anticipated this</a>, but was totally unprepared to be almost entirely naked with a well-meaning stranger. It was a very cold day and I was wearing mismatched dark-colored cotton underwear under two layers of Heattech under three layers of clothing. The salesgirl patiently stood and watched me struggle out of, and then into, five layers of winter clothes. I awkwardly emerged from the fitting room in two or three different dresses, but each was more embarrassing than the last. My mom and I left as quickly as possible, and I resolved not to buy a fancy wedding dress. </p>
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<p id="yS8CVC">The global wedding market is <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andre-bourque/technology-profit-and-piv_b_7193112.html">a $300 billion industry</a>, $55 billion of which accounts for the US wedding industry. The average US bride <a href="http://www.allure.com/story/average-wedding-dress-cost">spends more than $1,000 dollars on her dress</a>, while the average groom spends only a little over $300. The lavish “white wedding,” complete with all of these seemingly required outfits and aspects, is <a href="http://www.randomhistory.com/1-50/009wedding.html">a decidedly modern and extremely recent invention</a>, as is the wedding dress itself. Pre-1950s, the wedding was mostly still a religious affair and not expected to be a huge celebration, party, or expenditure. The bride's wedding dress was not supposed to be the most beautiful or expensive thing she would ever wear, and the party was not supposed to be the greatest party this couple would ever throw or attend. What many of us think of as the ubiquitous wedding today was in fact developed only over the second half of the 20th century, fanned to life by the sort of advertising campaigns depicted on <em>Mad Men</em>.</p>
<p id="nBPvtI">Wedding traditions, of course, are nearly endlessly varied across cultures, nations, communities, and religions worldwide. Huge wedding parties and lavish ceremonies, celebrations, and expenditures have been part of numerous non-Western and non-white cultures since before America was even a country. But in this country, even within our comparatively short history, weddings are still a relatively recent invention. In the 19th century, the American wedding was, even among wealthy families, mostly a small and private affair. For the middle- and upper-middle-class American Christian families whose future generations would be the central target demographic of the wedding industry, the wedding was far less a celebratory or central ritual than it was in many other religious traditions. Ceremonies were held in churches during Sunday service and followed by a small celebration at the bride’s home. </p>
<div class="c-float-right c-float-hang"><aside id="xb8kmJ"><q>Women are meant to have dreamed of their wedding dress their whole lives, and to define themselves by what kind of wedding dress they want to wear.</q></aside></div>
<p id="FJsFPg">For the most part, the white wedding dress didn’t exist — a woman would be married in the best dress she owned. The wedding dress was frequently black or another somber color, as women generally only owned one formal dress that needed to be appropriate for multiple occasions, including funerals. The white wedding dress was planted in the American imagination during World War II, when gown manufacturers and jewelers <a href="http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/14234.html">sought exemptions from wartime rationing by essentially inventing the modern wedding industry</a>. These businesses claimed the wedding dress and engagement ring not only as items crucial to a sacred religious ceremony, but also as symbolic of American prosperity, democracy, and freedom. The grand white wedding — so the line went — represented everything we were fighting to protect. </p>
<p id="M3DbDb">Of all the rituals bound up with weddings and money, the wedding dress is perhaps elevated above the rest, the pinnacle of a very expensive fantasy. Women are meant to have dreamed of their wedding dress their whole lives, and to define themselves by what kind of wedding dress they want to wear. A whole subsection of reality television centers not just on weddings but on wedding dresses, specifically; the emotional ritual of dress choice on <em>Say Yes to the Dress</em> is so heavily entrenched as to have the feeling of a religious ceremony, as though one is watching a woman meet, court, and marry an expensive piece of clothing. As soon as I got engaged, people started asking me about my dress. I began to search wedding dresses online, to try to figure out what I wanted from this supposedly paramount aspect of getting married. </p>
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<p id="uGLqm9">A few months after my torturous first experience, my fiancé, Thomas, and I went to formally tour our venue, a gorgeous museum in Philadelphia (where my parents live), for the first time. The space was vast and beautiful, and I could imagine trailing up and down its various staircases in some kind of princess-like gown. I wasn’t necessarily planning to actually purchase a dress, but the more people talked to me about my wedding dress, the more I became insatiably curious about this one item of clothing and how it encompassed a whole category of experience. As far as I could tell, all wedding dresses pretty much looked the same, and brides looked happy because they were in love. I had never seen a wedding dress that I remembered for more than 10 minutes after I left the reception. But maybe I was missing something. Maybe now that this was happening to me, some grand and electric secret would be revealed.</p>
<p id="KPT6xh">And so over the course of a month I’ve gone to four wedding salons in New York, and I’ve learned that there’s a whole interior language to wedding dresses, a rich and ultimately useless vocabulary to talk about this one purchase. The language also comes with a system of money that feels like a completely different currency. An “inexpensive” wedding dress costs around $1,000; a mid-range one costs anywhere from $3,000 to $5,000. In the endless scroll of clothing websites open on my phone while I’m half-occupied with other things, when I filter to “bridal” or “gowns,” five-figure price tags are not an infrequent sight. </p>
<p id="FyJYwH">The first time I came out in a dress and all my friends oooh’ed and aaah’ed and exclaimed, I got it. I briefly understood the longing and the arrival baked into this experience. Over the course of a few weeks, I tried on a figurative handful of shockingly expensive dresses, many of which were beautiful. I got used to the experience of trying on samples, and there was a dreamy, costume-like quality to the dramatic designs and luxe materials. I would never wear this dress again but that was the point; this wasn’t for me, but for the version of myself that was The Bride, who would live a day within the literal version of a Snapchat filter, all the volume and glamour cranked up high. </p>
<div class="c-float-left c-float-hang"><aside id="2xPaTi"><q>I had never seen a wedding dress that I remembered for more than 10 minutes after I left the reception.</q></aside></div>
<p id="WUuUjs">A part of me was grateful to let go of my worries about being perceived as frivolous or materialistic and saturate myself in the kind of hyper-femininity so widely derided throughout a culture that at the same time requires it of women. There was a way in which bridal culture was so over the top, so stacked with glittering objects that it felt like a kind of hysterical drag, the relief of stepping out of myself and into a character who only had to care about being pretty. This kind of femininity is always an act, whether one tries it on for a night or wears it for a lifetime, and it can function simultaneously as escapism and armor. My previous worst experiences with trying on clothes were turned on their head: It wasn’t that I had to be beautiful enough for the clothes, and frequently failed to do so. Rather, the dress itself, the very fact of trying on such these dresses, turned me beautiful, transforming me, or anyone else trying on the same gown, into something to be exclaimed over. Weddings without question objectify the bride, a fact by which I’ve been frequently horrified since I got engaged. But at the same time that was what appealed to me, what made the experience of standing in a store in an enormous white gown one of longing. Sometimes that’s exactly what many of us crave: Being a beautiful thing, being a precious object. </p>
<p id="zwa5iV">One thing that became shockingly apparent during these experiences is that the bridal industry is set up for women who are two things: rich and thin. I am decidedly "sort of" both. I wear a standard size and rarely have trouble finding clothes that fit at mainstream retailers, but I'm about a size 8, and roughly half of the samples I tried on at bridal stores wouldn't zip over my ass. While this brought up some less-than-enjoyable feelings for me, it's ultimately a minor issue: I can, if I choose to, find an utterly traditional wedding dress from a major designer that fits without much difficulty. But the fact that I'm right at the top of the size range this industry includes made me horrified thinking of the overwhelmingly vast majority of women to whom these experiences are simply not available. </p>
<p id="RdUmjM">I'm equally "sort of" rich. I have enough money that I <em>could</em> buy one of the impossibly expensive dresses I tried on, which is to say I have the raw capability of spending a few thousand dollars all at once if I really wanted to. On the other hand, the fact that I <em>could</em> spend a few thousand dollars at once if I really wanted to makes me feel like I’m rich, and the fact that it makes me feel that way simultaneously shows that I don’t actually have enough money to spend this much of it on a dress.</p>
<p id="AED6ma">The barriers to entry here are once again so high, so narrowly selective, that it made me wonder who this industry, so ubiquitously present in our culture, is actually for. I suppose the answer to that question, like far too many things, is “the people who can afford it.” As with so much in America, that population is a shrinking minority. The way wedding culture sells itself to the American populace at large and then makes itself available to so little of that populace seems a cruel joke — you have to have this to prove your love, to access this ritual that has been drilled into your fantasies by every piece of culture you've encountered since you were a child, but also you can by no reasonable means afford it.</p>
<p id="aMVmoz">This fantasy of wealth beyond reality or responsibility is built into the details of these dresses, all the way down to the tiny rows of covered buttons. It’s not a dress as much as an escape from everyday life. The fantasy of the wedding is that the event itself, but the dress especially, will be lifted up beyond the everyday, vaulted into the world of fairy tale, where royalty and celebrities and the very wealthy live, a place where no one ever worries about paying bills. Mostly when we spend too much money, we do it in order to pretend that money isn’t real. This is why part of the point of the dress is that you can’t wear it again — it becomes a perfect object, distilled and frozen in time, lifted out of the ordinary cycles of use and value and repetition. </p>
<div><aside id="VSXhHb"><q>Mostly when we spend too much money, we do it in order to pretend that money isn’t real.</q></aside></div>
<p id="IYD3cd">Each time I left each of these stores, I walked back onto the street feeling like perhaps I could rationalize it. Those feelings usually lasted about a block and a half, after which I started feeling nauseous and shaky and regretful, like when you eat candy all day, like when you ignore a phone call you’re dreading. I thought how the most expensive thing I have ever bought is the couch in my living room, which I use constantly, every day of my life, and how I had just tried on a dress that cost more than that couch. I started making a list of things that cost less than the dresses I had tried: every pair of plane tickets I had ever bought for Thomas and I to travel together, the entire cost of most vacations I had ever taken, a vintage 1970s gold Firebird that had been for sale in a neighbor’s yard the last time Thomas and I had gone to visit his parents in Chattanooga. A year of a gym membership. How much money I made from freelance writing in 2014 and 2015 combined. I plummeted back to reality. Twice I tried to cancel the entire wedding a couple hours after trying on dresses. </p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="2zMjFK">That’s the thing about fantasies; they have a comedown, they carry with them a hangover. I still haven’t bought a dress. My mom found her wedding dress for $30 in a store window a few days before her wedding, but I also know people who spent thousands of dollars on their dresses and looked beautiful and gained from that purchase a value that seemed, to them, to justify it, the grand marker of a grand event. But I haven’t yet figured out how to want something that much, to believe in a fantasy that justifies its own invention, to long toward the priceless. </p>
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https://www.racked.com/2017/6/5/15726356/white-wedding-dress-history-ambivalenceHelena Fitzgerald2017-05-24T09:32:01-04:002017-05-24T09:32:01-04:00Short Shorts Look Best on Someone Who Loves Summer
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<img alt="" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/eNSFiH5yh_I8j4yZIFe1O8m84GE=/1133x1184:4162x3456/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/54803837/GettyImages_669049546.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>Photo: Christian Vierig/Getty Images</figcaption>
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<p class="c-entry-disclaimer"><i>Racked is no longer publishing. Thank you to everyone who read our work over the years. The archives will remain available here; for new stories, head over to Vox.com, where our staff is covering consumer culture for <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-goods">The Goods by Vox</a>. You can also see what we’re up to by <a href="https://vox.com/goods-newsletter">signing up here</a>.</i></p>
<p>There’s no cut-off for cut-offs.</p> <p class="p--has-dropcap" id="CRdk9S">For me, the real first day of summer is the first day you can wear tiny shorts. It’s a defiant and democratic fashion holiday, the day when it’s at last warm enough to go outside with the maximum possible amount of your body exposed, when clothes become something to escape from rather than to hide in or display. Shorts are, to me, as much a part of the joy of summer as air conditioners and sprinklers, a symbol of a carefree season, the way summer always feels like the freedom of being let out of school, even when one hasn’t been a student in years.</p>
<p id="Kz5JEd">As a kid and a teen, I never wore shorts even when everybody else did. I was tall and pale and weird-looking, and shorts were for attractive, small people with a tan. Finally, in my late 20s, I started wearing them just in time for people to tell me that I was about to have to stop wearing them — that shorts, this clothing item I’d only just discovered as an adult, were only for kids, and not for adults. </p>
<div class="c-float-right c-float-hang"><aside id="1MDV0J"><q>The “bikini body”... posit[s] that meeting a certain standard of physical smallness is the exam you have to pass in order to get to summer.</q></aside></div>
<p id="FxEMH4">Short shorts and cut-off shorts are always on the list of things that <a href="http://www.shefinds.com/2014/30-things-you-just-shouldnt-own-if-youre-over-30/">women over 30</a> or women over a certain weight are not supposed to wear. Like <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2355711/Women-stop-wearing-clothes-stomach-age-34-according-survey-women.html">crop tops</a> and colorful makeup and mini skirts, they are an embattled item of clothing, <a href="http://www.vogue.com/article/too-old-for-denim-cutoff-shorts">perpetually categorized as belonging to only the young and the conventionally beautiful</a>, those privileged enough to have a body that the world would be willing to look at, a body that is familiar from mainstream representation and therefore inoffensive, a body that requires neither explanation nor negotiation. </p>
<p id="Vvg2Ag">The idea that only certain people can wear shorts is akin to the concept of the <a href="http://observer.com/2017/04/habits-get-summer-body-of-your-dreams/">“summer body”</a> and the <a href="http://www.vogue.com/slideshow/best-fitness-vacations-destinations-better-bikini-body">“bikini body.”</a> All these posit that meeting a certain standard of physical smallness is the exam you have to pass in order to get to summer. Too often, people are made to believe that the careless joy of summer is only for the thin and the familiarly beautiful, that the hot-weather celebration of sweaty bare flesh only includes certain bodies. </p>
<p id="FUqeJw">In the 19th and early 20th centuries, shorts were only worn by male children and adolescent boys — school uniforms from these eras, for instance, comprised a suit jacket and usually knee-length shorts until the wearer was in his late teens. Being “out of short pants” was a euphemism for adulthood; wearing pants that covered the whole leg meant that a man had grown up and become serious, putting aside childish things. Shorts were the uniform of play; pants the uniform of work. It’s also worth noting that this distinction was made mainly by upper-class individuals; being able to distinguish clearly and sentimentally between childhood and adulthood, to have a uniform for play and a time in life without the obligation to work, was expressly an upper-class luxury. </p>
<aside id="3aBctK"><div data-anthem-component="actionbox" data-anthem-component-data='{"title":"Like what you’re reading?","description":"Get the Racked newsletter for even more great stories, every day.","label":"SIGN UP","url":"http://newsletters.racked.com/h/d/C4595F1D5E0088D6?_ga=1.36581730.373041903.1487623315"}'></div></aside><p id="uHZE26">Even as short pants for men passed out of mainstream fashion, shorts retained their status as a permanent symbol of youth and a refusal of adult convention, of the world of work and good manners. Starting in the 1950s and persisting through the ’70s and ’80s, shorts were the clothing choice in youth culture, worn by kids refusing to conform to their parents’ standards and choosing not to declare seriousness and maturity via appropriate fashion choices. In the 1970s and ’80s, and even up into the outfits of 1990s metal bands, shorts were a symbol of dissent; the point was to take a piece of clothing and destroy it. Patti Smith and Debbie Harry on stage in cut-offs are deliberately messy, deliberately distressed, demonstrating a small violence against normal and appropriate clothing.</p>
<div class="c-float-left c-float-hang"><aside id="L9rRb4"><q>The people who don’t want you to wear shorts also believe that anyone who is not very young and very physically small should be shut out from these particular types of joy.</q></aside></div>
<p id="JbYmfb">If one item is the opposite of office-appropriate clothing, it’s the short short. Mainstream brands like J.Crew have tried to sell “formal shorts” as summery work attire, but it never quite works. Wearing shorts can’t help but be at least a little rebellious, a little against the rules. Shorts are are the clothing version of the feeling you get on a Friday afternoon when you still feel like you just got let out of school. They are the same emotion as a whole day off from work, as deleting your inbox, as turning off your phone. These qualities are also why certain people believe shorts are meant only for the very young and very conventionally attractive — the people who don’t want you to wear shorts also believe that anyone who is not very young and very physically small should be shut out from these particular types of joy. This is the idea that as one ages one must present proof of one’s seriousness, act like an adult, give up childish things.</p>
<p id="doZ55Y">There used to always be a day in summer when it was very hot and I’d had a very bad day and I’d cut an old pair of jeans up into a spontaneous pair of shorts. They were never flattering — making shorts with a pair of kitchen scissors and a random whim isn’t exactly a recipe for a well-fitting or elegant piece of clothing — the hems were uneven and jagged; one was inevitably longer than the other. But that was the point — it was a piece of clothing that defied the conventions of adulthood, which demand we wear what is flattering. </p>
<p id="28iaxh">Shorts on any body are an aggressive choice to display and promote that body; shorts are never an accident. There is a perverse and persistent way in which fashion choices originally intended to be anti-beauty and anti-convention become the sole provenance of the conventionally beautiful. The whole point of Patti Smith destroying her jeans was for her to look like she was breaking the rules, up to and including the rule that clothes are meant to make the wearer look good. If you want to look good, wear a sundress (honestly, this applies to every body type: If you just want to look nice, you should always just wear a sundress). Shorts are aggressively unflattering on just about everyone, which reaches back to their origins in youth culture. </p>
<div class="c-float-right c-float-hang"><aside id="IzsfR5"><q>While adulthood comes with many horrible restrictions and responsibilities, one of its small mercies is that, outside of whatever professional environments you have to enter in order to make money, you don’t have to listen to anyone telling you what to wear.</q></aside></div>
<p id="bphbRz">While adulthood comes with many horrible restrictions and responsibilities, one of its small mercies is that, outside of whatever professional environments you have to enter in order to make money, you don’t have to listen to anyone telling you what to wear. No one who says that shorts are for certain ages or certain bodies actually has any real authority. The full control over one’s life that adulthood signifies is objectively terrible: It means taxes and jobs and bills, the responsibility to treat others well, and the acceptance that you cannot control the behavior or reactions of others. But it does mean that you have no obligation to listen to anyone saying that you have to throw out your tiny shorts because you turned 30 or gained 15 pounds. The choice to show one’s body as one gets older is a refusal to let an idea of age-appropriate clothing sap the joys of living in a human body. Shorts are a refusal to privilege what is appropriate over what is joyful. Saying that we should refuse youthful joys when they are readily available and hurting no one, simply because our bodies might not visibly fit an arbitrary standard, is both unnecessary and cruel. </p>
<p id="NkM1j9">Summer is a season about being impolite, about acknowledging the fact of your body rather than hiding from it. Summer is a time for <em>being </em>a body rather than <em>presenting</em> a body, running around out in the world like a kid in a sprinkler. Summer clothing choices like shorts offer one small way to reach back to the things that were good about childhood — or even just good about the idea of it. For me, shorts in summer are about living beyond self-consciousness, making choices for myself and my own comfort rather than for the reactions of others. No one can stop me from walking outside, wearing very small shorts, and holding the consequences of my actions in my own two hands.</p>
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https://www.racked.com/2017/5/24/15646440/short-shorts-cut-offsHelena Fitzgerald2017-05-01T12:32:01-04:002017-05-01T12:32:01-04:00The Best Perfumes to Buy This Spring
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<img alt="Four amber perfume bottles on a table" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/d6MW2AtrPC9vzMresVrHDuT0pUo=/120x0:1881x1321/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/54559485/perfume.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>Photo: Kristina Strasunske/Getty Images</figcaption>
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<p class="c-entry-disclaimer"><i>Racked is no longer publishing. Thank you to everyone who read our work over the years. The archives will remain available here; for new stories, head over to Vox.com, where our staff is covering consumer culture for <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-goods">The Goods by Vox</a>. You can also see what we’re up to by <a href="https://vox.com/goods-newsletter">signing up here</a>.</i></p>
<p>The creators of the perfume newsletter The Dry Down on what you should be buying right now, and how each will make you feel.</p> <p id="Za5mf5"><em>To suss out the best spring perfumes, we asked writers </em><a href="https://twitter.com/rachsyme"><em>Rachel Syme</em></a><em> and </em><a href="https://twitter.com/helfitzgerald"><em>Helena Fitzgerald</em></a><em> — the founders of the fragrance newsletter </em><a href="https://www.hellodrydown.com/"><em>The Dry Down</em></a><em> — for their most beloved seasonal opinions. Here, six of their favorite scents, and the feelings, memories, and specific spring days each of them brings to mind. You can </em><a href="https://tinyletter.com/thedrydown"><em>subscribe to their newsletter here</em></a><em>.</em></p>
<p id="KUTC5A"><em>Want to try them out? You can </em><a href="https://go.redirectingat.com?id=66960X1514733&xs=1&url=http%3A%2F%2Ftwistedlily.com%2Fshop%2Fsamples-fragrance%2Fracked-x-the-dry-down-sample-pack%2F&referrer=racked.com&sref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.racked.com%2F2017%2F5%2F1%2F15475146%2Fspring-perfumes-best-scents-fragrances" rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><em>purchase a sample pack of their recommendations</em></a><em> from the Brooklyn-based fragrance store Twisted Lily for $20 (and get a bonus $20 gift card that can be used toward a future full bottle, should you find one you fall in love with</em><em>,</em><em> too).</em></p>
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<h3 id="t0yZEk"><a href="https://go.redirectingat.com?id=66960X1514733&xs=1&url=http%3A%2F%2Ftwistedlily.com%2Fshop%2Fcitrus%2Fno-12-edp%2F&referrer=racked.com&sref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.racked.com%2F2017%2F5%2F1%2F15475146%2Fspring-perfumes-best-scents-fragrances" rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" target="_blank">No. 12 EDP, William Eadon</a></h3>
<p id="nTgVLT"><em>Rachel Syme</em></p>
<div class="c-float-left c-float-hang"> <figure class="e-image">
<img alt="A bottle of William Eadon No. 12 perfume sitting inside some flowers" data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/1V3ZNo8HW7NPw_RqtJAz4i_TTno=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/8428179/no_12_william_eadon.jpg">
<cite>William Eadon No. 12 EDP</cite>
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<p id="EcBvqG">If you live in New York City long enough, you’ll begin to mark the seasons not by the calendar but by a set of very specific urban solstices, ceremonial days in the city when time begins to shift. </p>
<p id="cCIcfa">Sometime around September comes Hot Liquids Day, the first day of the fall when cold brew feels crass, or at least the idea of drinking scalding coffee outdoors doesn’t make your sweaty summer stomach do flips. In the summer, there’s Rooftop Vodka Soda Day, Bikini Tops With Jean Shorts Day, and Bodega Popsicle Day. In winter, we get Ugly Puffer Acceptance Day and Buying Fancy Cheese You Can’t Afford for a Blizzard Day. </p>
<p id="6YwDPs">But my favorite unofficial New York holiday comes in the early spring, and I’ve started longing for it every year. This is Forced Al Fresco Day — the first weekend morning that everyone in the city seems to agree that dining outside is a viable option and all of the sidewalk cafés put out cheery bistro tables, even though it’s far too cold for anyone to really enjoy the experience of slurping down oysters while the wind whips at your face. </p>
<p id="ZpLXrW">Forced Al Fresco Day never gets above 50 degrees; sometimes it’s even technically freezing outside. It’s just that at some point, around the end of March, everyone seems to decide en masse that they’ve had quite enough of hibernating, and they’re willing to participate in a collective delusion that the spring thaw has arrived. </p>
<p id="LvWZrn">I love walking around on Forced Al Fresco Day and seeing groups of friends huddled together, teeth chattering over a bottle of rosé, trying to warm their icicle fingers over a single votive candle placed on the table. There’s a hopefulness to this activity — willing the next season to <em>get here already</em> — but there’s also a wash of melancholy over the whole day; no one is having that much fun, and no one wants to admit that they miscalculated. It’s a day of prideful shivering, of wearing the wrong coat and saying “No, I’m fine, really” if anyone offers you their scarf.</p>
<p id="XZg7cP">William Eadon’s <a href="https://go.redirectingat.com?id=66960X1514733&xs=1&url=http%3A%2F%2Ftwistedlily.com%2Fshop%2Fcitrus%2Fno-12-edp%2F&referrer=racked.com&sref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.racked.com%2F2017%2F5%2F1%2F15475146%2Fspring-perfumes-best-scents-fragrances" rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" target="_blank">No. 12 EDP</a> is Forced Al Fresco Day turned into a scent. It’s a spring perfume that isn’t quite ripe yet; a cozy, dank, syrupy winter affair with lemons shoved into the bottle in a desperate effort to strong-arm brightness into the world. I love it precisely because it feels like two seasons smashed together into one slightly awkward but eternally optimistic elixir. It’s both sunny and swaddled, mixing mulling spices with fresh lavender, delicate neroli with muscular, gooey benzoin. It starts out with fresh cracked pepper and becomes a brunch mimosa, then dies down to an almost feral ending, all salt and amber. In its final moments, No. 12 smells like the secret angles of someone you love: the buttery scalp, the cumin scent that lingers on a sweaty T-shirt, that powdered scoop between the shoulder blades.</p>
<p id="dsnau9">It smells exactly like leaving the house without a sweater when you really should take a sweater, and then drinking enough champagne to temporarily forget that your hands are numb. It smells like sitting down at a sidewalk café and faking your way through a good time, because you know that the golden days are coming. They’re <em>so close. </em></p>
<p id="tAXoNY">William Eadon, it should be noted, is not really a traditional perfumer. He is sometimes a fashion designer and sometimes a photographer, and sometimes, he films <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSbLvs5aKKA">crystal cleansing</a> videos in his apartment. In an interview about how perfume came into the equation, he said: “I’m not sure where I discovered fragrance… maybe for want of coloring myself in a hue that I am not, so for a moment, I might play a role of someone better than who I thought I was.” And I love that idea. It resonates with me and with how I first stumbled into fragrance. I was intrigued by stepping into roles — much like how New Yorkers trudge out into the brisk to try on their spring personalities.</p>
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<h3 id="3SzJS3"><a href="https://go.redirectingat.com?id=66960X1514733&xs=1&url=http%3A%2F%2Ftwistedlily.com%2Fshop%2Fcb-i-hate-perfume%2Fto-see-a-flower-perfume%2F&referrer=racked.com&sref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.racked.com%2F2017%2F5%2F1%2F15475146%2Fspring-perfumes-best-scents-fragrances" rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" target="_blank">To See A Flower, CB I Hate Perfume</a></h3>
<p id="wZHJVR"><em>Helena Fitzgerald </em></p>
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<img alt="To See A Flower, CB I Hate Perfume" data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/l2tWg0ZkDZy_9_TOmLeo-wdYdN0=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/8428209/to_see_a_flower.jpg">
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<p id="MyPL0t">CB I Hate Perfume’s <a href="https://go.redirectingat.com?id=66960X1514733&xs=1&url=http%3A%2F%2Ftwistedlily.com%2Fshop%2Fcb-i-hate-perfume%2Fto-see-a-flower-perfume%2F&referrer=racked.com&sref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.racked.com%2F2017%2F5%2F1%2F15475146%2Fspring-perfumes-best-scents-fragrances" rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" target="_blank">To See A Flower</a> smells like dirt. A technical perfume categorization would call it a green, and it is perhaps the greenest green I’ve ever smelled. It smells like the green shoots buried in wet, brown soil that appear sudden and neon against the landscape. It smells like kneeling over a garden, working with your hands, the patience of turning dirt again and again, believing in the promises of care, repetition, and waiting — believing that the earth will yield abundance if treated with proper kindness. </p>
<p id="ISkfG5">As it dries down, florals emerge from the wet earth, but there’s nothing indolent about these florals — they’re fresh and brand new, something guided out of the earth by two hands. The bright green note persists as it moves from dirt to flowers, a scent about living and dying expressed by how the earth comes visibly back to life in the spring. Spring is the hope of return, of redemption, another try, a better world beyond this one, and it calls us back to hope even after hope is painful, even after we’ve been disappointed too many times.</p>
<p id="WfUBMI">Christopher Brosius made his name working with Demeter, a brand of single-note perfumes that were wildly cult-popular in the 1990s and are now sold in Duane Reade. Each is extremely specific and most are pointedly strange — pizza, earl grey tea, sugar cane, kitten fur. Few of them smell beautiful, and more than one is repulsive, but each smell exactly, almost bizarrely, like their name. CB is Brosius’ passion project, the further evolution of this idea. <a href="https://go.redirectingat.com?id=66960X1514733&xs=1&url=http%3A%2F%2Ftwistedlily.com%2Fproduct-category%2Fbrands%2Fcb-i-hate-perfume%2F&referrer=racked.com&sref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.racked.com%2F2017%2F5%2F1%2F15475146%2Fspring-perfumes-best-scents-fragrances" rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" target="_blank">In a manifesto </a>explaining the line’s name, he says perfume is “too often an ethereal corset trapping everyone in the same inelegant shape, a lazy and inelegant concession to fashionable ego.” </p>
<p id="Jwj5ki">Each of the CB I Hate Perfume fragrances is achingly simple and exact, intended to evoke a specific memory. To See a Flower smells like the springtime of hands in the dirt, of earth-buried blooms, of stubborn, bright-green hope. It’s that one unexpected heraldic flower pushing up through the dirt with a promise that something better is coming, that this is where it begins, that once again hope will drag us up into the sunlight, into another new year, another round of belief. Its green smell is the scent of the world filling in like a coloring book, like the moment in <em>The Wizard of Oz</em> when the black and white picture turns Technicolor — all of it is irresistible even when we should know better. It is green springing up again and again through the wet dirt, stupid and unconquerable, refusing to learn from its mistakes, still able to hope even after we should know better. </p>
<hr class="p-entry-hr" id="t6NjGF">
<h3 id="VVVboq"><a href="https://go.redirectingat.com?id=66960X1514733&xs=1&url=http%3A%2F%2Ftwistedlily.com%2Fshop%2Faroma-m%2Fgeisha-vanilla-hinoki%2F&referrer=racked.com&sref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.racked.com%2F2017%2F5%2F1%2F15475146%2Fspring-perfumes-best-scents-fragrances" rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Vanilla Hinoki, Aroma M</a></h3>
<p id="TvxaXD"><em>Rachel Syme</em></p>
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<img alt="Vanilla Hinoki, Aroma M" data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/gDXsh-aT7Ns1D7MqY9cYqqJgQKY=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/8428217/Geisha_Vanilla_Hinoki.jpg">
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<p id="NIONsh">My favorite shopping day of the entire year, if I can be honest and also 8 years old, is the Monday after Easter, when drugstores put candy on sale in bulk. I don’t even have to buy anything to enjoy it (but who am I kidding; I walked out this year with an armful of Snickers eggs and three boxes of coconut Peeps). I just love knowing that one day of the year, candy actually costs the 25 cents that your grandparents say it used to, and that all around the country people are filling up shopping bags full of ovoid pastel malt balls because the getting will never be this good, not for a whole year, anyway. </p>
<p id="OqbMUK">This is the one day of the year when everyone briefly becomes a child, reverts to a primal state in which the pursuit of new ways to consume sugar was an all-consuming project; when chocolate was the end goal in itself. Things become so tediously complex in adulthood, but not in the Easter sale aisle. Choices are simple: Which puffy mallow bunny do I purchase for one dollar and proceed to shove into my mouth on the sidewalk? Which of the many seasonal shapes of Reese’s cups should be the ideal vehicle for delivering granular peanut butter flavoring to my body? Milk or dark? </p>
<p id="5o0MfD">Gourmand perfumes are often referred to in sneering tones by fragrance snobs (we’ve written a bit <a href="http://tinyletter.com/thedrydown/letters/the-dry-down-7-the-sunday-six-gourmands">about this</a> in The Dry Down in the past), as if wanting to smell like salted caramel and crème brûlée is an adolescent preoccupation; that <em>real</em> adults opt for indolic death jasmine and metallic whale secretions and basenotes of mud and tannery leather. That smelling borderline off-putting is what grown-ass perfumery is all about, and that vanilla is for rubes. And sure, I love a funky, weirdzo juice as much as anyone (I have a <a href="https://www.zoologistperfumes.com/products/bat">perfume</a> in my current rotation that mimics the exact smell of a bat’s habitat, rotting fruit and stalagmites and all), but I think that being anti-gourmand, uncomplicated and crowd-pleasing though they are, is a very silly hill to die on. </p>
<p id="bkaog5">Just as there’s something deeply soothing about standing in a fluorescent Rite Aid picking out waxy rabbits, there’s a sheer delight to putting on a scent that has to be nothing else but sweet and lactic, that peaks quickly like meringue and then fizzles out into burnt sugar. </p>
<p id="L6lUHr">What I love about <a href="https://go.redirectingat.com?id=66960X1514733&xs=1&url=http%3A%2F%2Ftwistedlily.com%2Fshop%2Faroma-m%2Fgeisha-vanilla-hinoki%2F&referrer=racked.com&sref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.racked.com%2F2017%2F5%2F1%2F15475146%2Fspring-perfumes-best-scents-fragrances" rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Vanilla Hinoki</a>, which comes from a New York-based line called Aroma M (in which every single scent is good — seriously, not a bad egg in the batch!) is that it gives you everything you love about candy (easy comfort, instant gratification) without the cloying stomachache that some vanilla perfumes can induce. Perfumer Maria McElroy found a charred, almost meaty vanilla available only in Morocco and then cut it with the Japanese wood hinoki, which to me always smells like the inside of a sauna right after someone pours a ladle of water over the rocks. It hits your nose as less of a bonbon and more of a barrel, maybe an oak one that some sweet liqueur was aged in years ago. It takes the idea of a silky gourmand and puts a few decades of life into it. It has depth and space and ambition. This perfume is the part of you that knows that life doesn’t get better than half-price sweets, and that when you get older, you don’t stop buying them. You simply stop asking for permission.</p>
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<h3 id="3C0b3H"><a href="https://go.redirectingat.com?id=66960X1514733&xs=1&url=http%3A%2F%2Ftwistedlily.com%2Fshop%2Fds-durga%2Fwhite-peacock-lily%2F&referrer=racked.com&sref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.racked.com%2F2017%2F5%2F1%2F15475146%2Fspring-perfumes-best-scents-fragrances" rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" target="_blank">White Peacock Lily, D.S. & Durga</a></h3>
<p id="gvHj8G"><em>Helena Fitzgerald </em></p>
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<img alt="White Peacock Lily, DS &amp; Durga" data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/hgG7ffM70Y4KGAVnQ79ciETr4gs=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/8428225/White_Peacock_Lily.jpg">
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<p id="TwTus3">A couple weeks ago, it was <em>that day</em> in New York: the single perfect day that happens every year. It’s not the first one of such days; there’s only ever one of them. Every spring, I stop hoping for it, convince myself it won’t happen this year. And then it arrives, all clanging choruses and church angel harmonies, fresh as linen and open windows: the first true day of spring. </p>
<p id="U5jJN6">D.S. & Durga’s <a href="https://go.redirectingat.com?id=66960X1514733&xs=1&url=http%3A%2F%2Ftwistedlily.com%2Fshop%2Fds-durga%2Fwhite-peacock-lily%2F&referrer=racked.com&sref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.racked.com%2F2017%2F5%2F1%2F15475146%2Fspring-perfumes-best-scents-fragrances" rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" target="_blank">White Peacock Lily</a> is the smell of this day. It’s full of huge, indolent white flowers and hints of candy at its edges, playful and welcoming and seductive without ever being dirty. It’s the first day you can go outside in a T-shirt and not feel even a little cold, the sunshine and the temperature suspended in impossible grace. Every year around this time, I buy a white dress and walk around in it feeling like a new flower licking up the sunlight out of the air. White Peacock Lily smells like wearing a sundress on the first day of spring. </p>
<p id="jfanNP">White florals are often intimidating. I always worry that they are only meant for a rich Upper East Side mom who has a different Birkin for every occasion and has never broken a nail. But White Peacock Lily is a white floral that’s about skin and sunlight. The jasmine and violet and lily notes in it crowd together loud and adolescent, gloriously impolite, like taking off your shoes in public to have a picnic in the grass. A vanilla note near the base of the scent hints just slightly at 1990s Bath & Body Works shower gels, but in an endearing way, making the fragrance teenage and human rather than cloying. </p>
<p id="xHJJXS">Under its thick blanket of candy florals, there’s a base note just listed as “fog.” The cool relief of its contrast against the springtime exclamations of the rest of the scent is part of what makes me think of the perfect spring day. One reason this day is so perfect and so singular is that, just when you need it, there’s always a breeze. It makes the air feels almost bizarrely kind; it truly feels as though the weather likes you and wants the best for you. That fog note rising against slow-fading white flowers is the end of the day when the light lasts long and blue into nighttime, when even after dark the air is still safe for bare shoulders. It smells like leaving the park a little buzzed after a picnic with friends and walking home past a city full of people out on their stoops in the chatter of the soft twilight, refusing to go inside, refusing to let the one perfect day end.</p>
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<h3 id="M1L1Dp"><a href="https://go.redirectingat.com?id=66960X1514733&xs=1&url=http%3A%2F%2Ftwistedlily.com%2Fshop%2Feau-de-parfum%2Firis-de-nuit%2F&referrer=racked.com&sref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.racked.com%2F2017%2F5%2F1%2F15475146%2Fspring-perfumes-best-scents-fragrances" rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Iris de Nuit, Heeley</a></h3>
<p id="eHYOWt"><em>Rachel Syme</em></p>
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<img alt="Iris de Nuit, Heeley" data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/Orz0RtcVMr3BA1ZPh0vZ5apLek8=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/8443435/iris_de_niut.jpg">
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<p id="jH9RxG">I cannot resist an impulse purchase, and my favorite one lately has been <a href="http://www.chowardcompany.com/mm5/graphics/00000001/violetbig.jpg">Choward’s Violet Mints</a>, these small blocks of chalky lilac-colored candies that taste exactly like flower petals, meaning that they’re acerbic and not quite sweet, like botanical children’s aspirin. I may be addicted to them. When I first started buying them from bodegas and pharmacies and pretty much anywhere with a whimsical checkout set-up, I thought they must be European. They just seem like something shipped over from London or France, similar to those rock-hard pastilles they sell at the Met Museum gift shop that are never, ever satisfying, but you’re in it for the ornate tin. </p>
<p id="e0tSky">But no! I’ve since discovered that these are a native New York invention, the flagship product of Charles Howard’s confectionary, run out of a Soho loft in the 1930s. Further research reveals that Raymond Chandler named a noir detective after the candy, and also that Peggy Olsen always kept a pack of them in her desk on <em>Mad Men</em>. They have a permanent vintage quality, like you always just found them while rummaging around in the bottom of a bag that you forgot about for a decade.</p>
<p id="HNLOa4">Up until this year, I’d been on an endless hunt for a perfume that smells like Choward’s. I tried about 50 violet scents while looking, but none of them had that chemical zing, that milky, bitter floral aftertaste. And then came Heeley’s <a href="https://go.redirectingat.com?id=66960X1514733&xs=1&url=http%3A%2F%2Ftwistedlily.com%2Fshop%2Feau-de-parfum%2Firis-de-nuit%2F&referrer=racked.com&sref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.racked.com%2F2017%2F5%2F1%2F15475146%2Fspring-perfumes-best-scents-fragrances" rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Iris de Nuit</a> when I was on the prowl for something else entirely. I sprayed it on a blotter and there it was, the holy grail of perfumes that smells exactly like this one very specific thing. It’s funny how quiet the end of a quest can be.</p>
<p id="fyAAlW">There are other notes here: angelica, carrot, amber, white cedar, and iris, the latter of which gives the perfume its name and which tends to smell in fragrance like flowers dipped in fat (if you smell this one really closely, you almost smell brown butter — that’s iris giving up its last sigh). But really powdery violets are the main event here; they smell like the candy, but also like a makeup compact that has just turned, or lipstick gone slightly stale. I once heard a perfumer call violets the “grandma’s vanity note” in fragrance, because they really do smell like sitting at an old dressing table, like watching someone older than you put her face on before you were allowed to do it. </p>
<p id="y2rpOJ">That is exactly what Iris de Nuit is to me, though other people have told me it smells like earl grey tea, or like being depressed in springtime when it won’t stop raining. It’s the scent of carving out personal space, of being a little bit bitter in the back of the throat. It’s what you may want to wear when you know summer’s coming, and with it, your life will become sweaty and public and overripe. </p>
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<h3 id="TLe6AM"><a href="https://go.redirectingat.com?id=66960X1514733&xs=1&url=http%3A%2F%2Ftwistedlily.com%2Fshop%2Fcanada%2Fpays-dogon%2F&referrer=racked.com&sref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.racked.com%2F2017%2F5%2F1%2F15475146%2Fspring-perfumes-best-scents-fragrances" rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Pays Dogon, Monsillage</a></h3>
<p id="Wyf6O0"><em>Helena Fitzgerald </em></p>
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<img alt="Pays Dogon, Monsillage" data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/8DjHRS3wSJbShKJvKAtFbq7xXAw=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/8428237/Pays_Dogon.jpg">
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<p id="pNGThS">Sometimes perfumes are seductive not because they summon up memories, but because they summon up absences: They don’t smell like our own life, but rather someone else’s. Sometimes the sudden tug of a scent is the same longing I feel when I pass by the lit-up yellow windows of a stranger’s beautiful home late at night and imagine who I would be if I lived there. Sometimes we long sharply for certain experiences precisely because they have not happened to us.</p>
<p id="9Ve411">Monsillage’s <a href="https://go.redirectingat.com?id=66960X1514733&xs=1&url=http%3A%2F%2Ftwistedlily.com%2Fshop%2Fcanada%2Fpays-dogon%2F&referrer=racked.com&sref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.racked.com%2F2017%2F5%2F1%2F15475146%2Fspring-perfumes-best-scents-fragrances" rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Pays Dogon</a> is another green fragrance, but a woodier, meatier green — a green that hasn’t showered in a few days and has been sleeping in a car. It’s like wearing someone else’s shirt that you refuse to wash because then it would lose the scent of him. It’s an Atlantic forest green, the green of a house in a town in Cape Cod or Maine where I have never actually been, the green of a house I’ve seen but not visited, a weekend I’ve imagined and never had, all woods and campfire, pine needles and sand.</p>
<p id="f26nBJ">Every spring, I scroll through endless Airbnb listings for cabins on beaches in New England locations that I’ve never been. I spin vivid fantasies of a house in New Hampshire or Vermont or Cape Cod, the kind of house where everything is made of wood, a place that feels like maybe it was built by a sea captain before the Revolutionary War and passed down to people who loved boats and fixed things with their hands and had big grudging holidays with family members in heavy flannel shirts — New England people who settled into the tough seasons of the year and knew how to do the outdoors correctly. </p>
<p id="jW11Y3">Each spring, I build a made-up life around rented New England homes. In my made-up life, I have a group of friends who all want to pile into a car like labradors and drive up the coast of the Atlantic, stopping at Dunkin’ Donuts to get foaming coffee drinks. We spend a weekend together in a charmingly dilapidated wooden house in front of an austere Protestant beach that emerges out of the woods in grudging but soaring beauty. It’s a springtime about mosquito spray and slamming doors and raw, gritty seafood, about collecting driftwood and building a bonfire on the beach. </p>
<p id="LDRjJn"><a href="https://go.redirectingat.com?id=66960X1514733&xs=1&url=http%3A%2F%2Ftwistedlily.com%2Fshop%2Fcanada%2Fpays-dogon%2F&referrer=racked.com&sref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.racked.com%2F2017%2F5%2F1%2F15475146%2Fspring-perfumes-best-scents-fragrances" rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Pays Dogon</a> smells like that imaginary weekend. All woods and vetiver, smoke and green and sand. It’s a musty wooden-walled beach house that’s just been opened for the season. It’s a family vacation in a home built by a dead sea captain. It’s a bonfire on the beach with people you love and whom you trust can build a bonfire correctly. It’s couch naps and motor oil and sap, a rusty family boat coming back into a small, anonymous beach in the late afternoon. It smells like somebody else’s springtime, and the light that spreads out from the windows of a home where somebody else’s family is making dinner. </p>
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https://www.racked.com/2017/5/1/15475146/spring-perfumes-best-scents-fragrancesHelena FitzgeraldRachel Syme2017-04-06T15:00:02-04:002017-04-06T15:00:02-04:00The Best Part of Dressing Up Is Changing Back Into Sweats
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<figcaption>Photo: Ben Bryant/Shutterstock</figcaption>
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<p>With your fancy hair and makeup still intact.</p> <p id="Lb9feC">Most of us, whether or not we work from home (as I do), have indoor outfits. They’re the clothes you look forward to changing into when you get home from work. They’re what you put on when there’s little to no chance that you’ll leave the house today. They’re things you would never wear outside, that you <em>couldn’t</em> really wear to a bar or dinner or certainly not to a meeting but that, in your own apartment, achieve a level of perfect artistry that public outfits often lack. I keep a file in the back of my mind of my favorite indoor outfits; I know which ratty T-shirts go best with which pairs of sweatpants, which college-branded hoodie best pairs with which pair of my boyfriend’s old jeans. I never feel better about myself, more attractive, or better put together than when I’m staying in my apartment all day wearing my favorite indoor clothes. </p>
<p id="yK4PEk">And the very best time to wear indoor clothes, the time when they achieve their truest meaning and highest purpose, is when one comes home from a fancy event. When I get dressed up, when I spend painstaking hours doing my hair or makeup, it’s not for the other people who’ll be wherever I’m going, or even for my boyfriend if we’re going on a fancy date. I get dressed up for my four-hours-from-now self, the one who’s going to take off her dress and her heels and put on sweatpants and a raggedy T-shirt. I get dressed up for my very-slightly-future self because I know, like anyone who knows what’s good knows, that the actual best look is when you come home after something you had to dress up for and put on an indoor outfit with your fancy hair and makeup. </p>
<p id="ncclan">This look can’t be achieved on purpose, either. Occasionally I’ll do my hair and makeup like I’m going to the Met Ball at the beginning of a day when I don’t plan to leave the house, hoping to achieve the alchemy of that post-event combination. It never works; sweatpants with fancy makeup, in the daytime, in one’s own home, feels itchy and self-conscious, an embarrassing distraction. I’ve had to accept that I can’t achieve my favorite look without the part where I actually have to go outside and walk places in my shoes and spend money and talk to people. (One exception here is that this does work when you truly <em>intend</em> to go out, when you get fully dressed but then something happens — a crisis, a phone call, a fight, getting way too high — and you unexpectedly have to stay in and ditch your plans. Then you can change back into your sweatpants with your fancy hair and fancy makeup and it all might come together perfectly. But you have to mean it. You have to truly, deep in your most honest soul, intend to go out before you change your clothes. Look, I don’t make the rules.)</p>
<div class="c-float-right"><aside id="EAc7QY"><q>I get dressed up for my four-hours-from-now self, the one who’s going to take off her dress and her heels and put on sweatpants and a raggedy T-shirt.</q></aside></div>
<p id="ASp56q">This is much the same truth as how grabbing random clothing off the floor after sex often produces a perfect look that can’t be replicated, not even by combining the exact same items in the exact same way on purpose. Every so often, a bunch of magazines run features about how to style sex hair — hair meant to look like you had a bunch of sex and then rolled out of bed and got dressed without fixing your hair — for a work lunch or first date or whatever. This never works, either. Consciously styled sex hair looks bad exactly one hundred percent of the time. Sex hair only works in context. It’s just like how most flannel shirts look terrible because you can’t just buy a flannel shirt, you have to earn one, ideally by stealing it from someone you once loved and now don’t speak to anymore. It’s the same thing with sweatpants and post-event hair and makeup. Any “messy” fashion look only really works if it’s the product of lived experience rather than careful styling, so that a look becomes a trace of what happened to one’s hair and face and body on a particular day. </p>
<p id="FSeiJo">Indoor outfits are profoundly cozy, the fashion equivalent of a large bed, a couch with a worn-in butt dent, a small apartment when the radiator comes on in winter. This coziness is the reason I love my indoor outfits more than almost any of my fancy clothes. Coziness is a form of intimacy, offering the things that not everyone gets to see, putting the public self away for the night. Sweatpants with fancy makeup at the end of the night is the fashion equivalent of how a party only really gets good after almost everyone has gone home, when the remaining people have taken off their shoes and are drinking leftover wine out of whichever glasses are sitting near them and saying things about the people who just left that they couldn’t say when everyone was still in the room. The best party is the one that happens once the party is technically over. And the best part of the night is not going out in your careful, fancy makeup, but taking selfies on the couch in a sweatshirt afterwards. </p>
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https://www.racked.com/2017/4/6/15091000/indoor-outfits-sweatpants-fancy-hair-makeupHelena Fitzgerald2016-09-26T10:02:09-04:002016-09-26T10:02:09-04:00The Presumptions of ‘Boyfriend’ Clothes
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<p class="c-entry-disclaimer"><i>Racked is no longer publishing. Thank you to everyone who read our work over the years. The archives will remain available here; for new stories, head over to Vox.com, where our staff is covering consumer culture for <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-goods">The Goods by Vox</a>. You can also see what we’re up to by <a href="https://vox.com/goods-newsletter">signing up here</a>.</i></p>
<p>Being in a long-distance relationship means you wear your boyfriend’s shirt a lot, or at least it did for me. During the year my boyfriend and I spent living in different cities, I accumulated three to five shirts of his that I wore with more frequency than anything else in my closet besides my jeans. Each time he visited, I acquired a new shirt that he "accidentally" forgot to pack. It was never an accident. Wearing the shirts was a way to wrap myself up in his presence when he couldn’t be present himself, a balm for my inability to physically reach out over the distance.</p> <p id="CtlevI">It wasn’t a particularly fashionable choice when I wore these shirts in public – the shirts he left were usually his oldest and most worn-in ones; they were softer and they smelled like him but they didn’t look great. They also didn’t fit in the way "boyfriend" clothes are supposed to. Most men are actually not all that different in size from most women, and men’s clothing sizes aren’t actually all that different from women’s clothing sizes. I looked like I was wearing a very slightly too-big shirt that I’d pulled out of a laundry hamper.</p>
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<p><q class="pullquote">At any time, in any season, some brand wants to tell everybody about boyfriends.</q></p>
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<p>But by wearing these shirts I was supposedly participating in a perennially current fashion trend. The "boyfriend clothing" trend, looks "borrowed from the boys" and "steal his jeans" styles have been popping up once again not because it’s fall but because at any time, in any season, some brand wants to tell everybody about boyfriends. It’s definitely not anything new.</p>
<p id="ddrkyf">Neither is a woman wearing clothes made for men. People like to trace women in menswear to Coco Chanel’s semi-androgynous style, but women had been wearing men’s clothes and incorporating menswear into their personal style since long before Chanel’s crisp white shirts and neat suits. Sarah Bernhardt, a nineteenth century actress whose tabloid-courting fame would be more at home in today’s Kardashian-era world, famously dressed in men’s clothes — it was a gimmick, but a gimmick that inspired hordes of imitators. By the early twentieth century, a woman in beautifully tailored men’s clothes was a recognizable form of glamour, whether Marlene Dietrich’s flawless black tie or Katherine Hepburn striding across a lawn in high-waisted pants.</p>
<p id="JDfF3V">The trend was, and is, inescapably about social class — whenever images of women in men’s clothes emerge into a mainstream idea of fashion, it’s a very wealthy woman; their wealth and fame protect the wearer, allowing them to publicly act out subversion from within the protective cocoon of money and social status. Men’s clothes on women, yes, but only a tuxedo tailored to a level beyond the reach of just about woman who might get ideas from photos of Dietrich. It’s for similar reasons that so many people incorrectly cite Chanel as the inventor of androgynous style; Chanel’s use of men’s fashion never impacted her traditional presentation of femininity and thus never threatened to give other women permission to do the same.</p>
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<p><q class="pullquote">The trend was, and is, inescapably about social class.</q></p>
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<p>Popular images of women in menswear up through the 20th century for the most part show similarly meticulous tailoring. This isn’t "boyfriend" clothes yet — no one is trying to look like they just got out of someone else’s bed.</p>
<p id="rvMmCp">Perfume ads in the ‘90s and early ‘00s showing supermodels in large white dress shirts and nothing else, all the legs and trailing French cuffs, coincide with the onslaught of photos of petite female celebrities wearing men’s jeans. Both contribute to the popularization of "boyfriend" clothes. As off-duty celebrity style grows ever more popular, as we begin to be told not to aspire to look like the rich and famous at their best but — as social media and reality TV welcome us into celebrities’ day to day lives — at their most mundane, sloppiness becomes aspirational.</p>
<p>The boyfriend clothing item, whether jeans or a shirt (it’s pretty much always either jeans or a shirt), is about spontaneity. It’s about happenstance and carelessness and clothing that was left on the floor. It’s about the small ways in which we seek to own one another’s bodies, and about the desire for our relationships with others to leave visible marks on us, to follow us tangible out into the world beyond a private encounter. It’s about telling everybody that you had sex. Its visual reference is to a woman stumbling out of a man’s house in the morning having grabbed the dress shirt he was wearing the night before — it’s titillating because it’s just a little wrong, it’s almost appropriate but not quite.</p>
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<p id="u4mBLS">The boyfriend shirt tells the world that you got to go into a man’s house where all his clothes are, that someone liked you enough to take off his shirt in front of you. It’s a reminder of a private space in public, but only one tied to traditional binary gender roles and heteronormative relationships. When clothes are marketed with the phrase "borrowed from the boys" they reference the packaged fantasy of being the girl in the boys club, approved by a masculine audience but still recognizably a girl, like the lone female member of a heist movie’s team.</p>
<p id="MiOKBr">I am a good customer for the idea of spontaneity, which is one of my worst and most embarrassing qualities. I fall for the kind of marketing that re-labels natural ability into a commodity, that claims luck is something you can buy on a hanger or package in a tube. The type of aesthetic that extols the boyfriend shirt is the one that sells carelessness as elegance, the one that thinks you should go to a party looking like you just came from the gym and that while you’re at the gym you should look beautiful.</p>
<p>Life impacts all of us in ways that make looking messy sometimes unavoidable – coming home from the gym or from a guy’s apartment is one way this happens, and neither of these things is necessarily glamorous. Sometimes the good thing about staying at someone’s house so late in the morning that you grab their shirt in a rush to go to work is that the experience is big enough to make you forget to care whether or not you look glamorous. But a certain, popular strain of fashion demands these spontaneous, careless experiences be staged and polished. Not a shirt actually borrowed from a man, but a shirt bought expressly to be a "boyfriend" shirt.</p>
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<p><q class="pullquote">It’s a competition in which looking beautiful only counts if you can do it with your eyes closed.</q></p>
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<p id="1Zcuo2">The aesthetic of spontaneity is a Protestant simplicity, an idea that if only you would stop reaching for spectacle, stop showing off, you’d be reborn clean, all your sharp edges sanded down. It’s a competition in which looking beautiful only counts if you can do it with your eyes closed. The boyfriend shirt is another example of the way in which fashion and beauty industries point at naturally occurring youth and beauty and call it skill, marketing models’ style tips and workout secrets and beauty routines, as though the real secret in each instance is not just a miracle of genetics and circumstance. The boyfriend shirt, much like the athleisure trend, seems to promise something less stratified by class than traditional ideas of glamour. But this kind of studied carelessness is just another version of a bespoke suit you can’t afford.</p>
<p id="g20ibR">It’s also difficult to define the "boyfriend" trend item in terms of fit in any meaningful way. I’m six feet tall and relatively broad shouldered, with excessively long limbs. I have trouble finding anything labeled "boyfriend" that fits me like something other than a half-size too large women’s version of the same item of clothing. The idea that men and women are supposed to be certain sizes in relation and proportion to one another is reinforced by boyfriend clothing. Images of heterosexual relationships almost invariably show a woman so small she is swallowed up by her boyfriend’s clothes. All my life I’ve worked to shake the idea that my relationships don’t count because they have not looked like this. But what the boyfriend shirt is selling is that very idea, love defined by comparative body size.</p>
<p>Women wear, and always have worn, masculine clothing for myriad reasons, reasons to do with identity and reasons that have nothing to do with identity, reasons to do with gender and reasons that have nothing to do with gender, and reasons to do with the fact the men’s clothes have pockets far more often than women’s clothes do. I might buy a men’s shirt for a million reasons that have nothing to do with a man.</p>
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<p><q class="pullquote">I might buy a men’s shirt for a million reasons that have nothing to do with a man.</q></p>
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<p id="1u3pXc">Sometimes I want to wear a type of clothing I can most easily find by searching women’s sections with the keyword "boyfriend" not because I want to show that I have a boyfriend, but because I want to hide my body, to be relieved for a while from presenting its shape and dimensions to the world. Shapeless or oversized clothing can serve as an escape and a safe place. Beyond that, sometime it’s just more comfortable. Plenty of women wear clothing made for men as part of their personal style, for reasons that have nothing to do with boyfriends or with gender. But calling these clothes "boyfriend shirt" and "boyfriend jeans" makes it not about personal style but about a promise that this shirt will show everybody that you can get a man.</p>
<p id="MWVTsj">Now that we live together, I still borrow my boyfriend’s shirts. Most often it’s his tuxedo dress shirts, as they’re the only ones that are really big on me. I also borrow his sweatshirts and t-shirts and in the winter we buy big sweaters for both of us to wear. We borrow a lot of things from each other; that’s part of the slow process of intimacy, a line-blurring sloppiness that folds two lives together. Sometimes these clothes look good on me, and sometimes they don’t. I wear almost exclusively his clothes on days when I don’t have to go outside but I have to get a lot of work done. It’s nice to imagine that utility can be elevated into an aesthetic and that carelessness is always fashionable, but sometimes it’s just careless. The intimacy of putting someone else’s clothes next to your skin is the type of thing brands want to sell you, and exactly the kind of thing you can’t manufacture or buy.</p>
<p id="zfH38g">The term "boyfriend" takes all the danger and meaning out of the idea of gender-swapped clothes. It further enforces the idea that items of clothing have to have genders, like French nouns that can be lined up according to male and female.</p>
<p id="VyrthW">I’ve never been able to ignore that putting the word boyfriend as a modifier in front of the name of a piece of clothing makes it sound like the clothing item is supposed to actually <em>be</em> your boyfriend, standing in for a man. I like oversized clothes, but maybe I just want to buy a big shirt, not a boyfriend.</p>
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<h3>Watch: Are Henley Shirts Really That Sexy?</h3>
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https://www.racked.com/2016/9/26/12907446/boyfriend-jeans-shirts-heteronormativity-expectationHelena Fitzgerald2016-09-06T11:02:02-04:002016-09-06T11:02:02-04:00The Gentrification of the Leather Jacket
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<figcaption>Edward Berthelot/Getty</figcaption>
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<p>When I was growing up, my best friend had a leather biker jacket she had found at Goodwill. It had started its life as men’s jacket, it was much too big for her, and it was perfect.</p> <p id="JoqpcI">This was in the ‘90s, just before high-end leather jackets became ubiquitous. My friend referred to the jacket as a kind of armor – she went to a middle school she hated, but the jacket kept her safe. In it, she looked like the girl lead in the John Waters films we both loved, or like Winona Ryder on the cover of a magazine. I was impossibly jealous. I wanted desperately to find my own jacket like hers.</p>
<p id="GDzsXv">Almost exactly a year ago, as the season turned into back-to-school, I decided to make a significant investment in a piece of clothing for the first time. I have always been wary of spending money on clothes, seeking out second-hand items or passable inexpensive imitations. But I decided it was time to purchase a piece of clothing from which would emerge not an upgraded wardrobe, but an entire upgraded life.</p>
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<p id="UA4pQR">If this is perhaps an absurd expectation to put on a single purchase, it is also often what we want from clothes, no less than complete transformation. We imagine an item will launch us out of our inescapable banality into a better, cooler, more interesting self. With clothes, as every makeover sequence in a movie promises, we can escape ourselves. I considered other options, but ultimately there wasn’t any choice. It had to be a leather jacket, because it was a leather jacket that would finally make me cool. It would offer me a fully formed new identity, pre-made and irrefutable.</p>
<p id="1sBeUf">The leather jacket, in particular the biker jacket, is for many people this transformative item of clothing. Wearing a biker jacket promises that you get things done, that you’re not trying to impress anybody, even as the whole point of the jacket is look impressive. It promises action, moving beyond the restrictions of purely decorative clothing – the leather jacket carries in it the idea of escape and adventure, and promises to transform you into the kind of person capable of both. The jacket is a new, tougher, better skin.</p>
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<p>The history of leather jackets progresses unavoidably along binary gender lines. Men’s jackets start from function – the <a href="http://www.racked.com/2016/3/4/11156080/bomber-jackets-history">"bomber jacket,"</a> the immediate inspiration for the jackets worn by movie stars in iconic photos from the 1950s, was a military garment, designed to protect pilots from falling out of planes. A version of the same jacket was marketed to civilian men in the 1920s, when Schott jackets cost $5.50. In the 1950s, male movie stars and musicians appropriated the jackets from motorcyclists and pilots, and then women re-appropriated it from them in the decades that followed.</p>
<p>Leather jackets on women in the ‘60s and ‘70s are images of rebellion. The jacket meant either sleeping with the boys or wanting to be one of them. It was a means of refusing femininity, and in many instances a signal of female queerness. The women’s leather jacket enters the world of fashion in the 1960s and ‘70s, but it stays firmly in specific demographics, symbolizing a particular identity – a wealthy straight woman in these eras would never have worn a biker jacket. It wasn’t until the 1990s, when it became part of the personal uniform for supermodels that the jacket joined mainstream fashion. Designers started making versions of the biker jacket tailored specifically for women. It no longer necessarily looked like one had borrowed it from a boyfriend who owned a motorcycle, and it no longer visually represented a rejection of femininity.</p>
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<p>Somewhere between Debbie Harry and Cindy Crawford, the leather jacket transforms into an accessible symbol of cool. Cool often indicates gentrification and gentrification’s inherent violence. Much of what becomes cool begins its life as part of the codes necessitated by oppression. Cool is then a translation of these codes into the mainstream – the swagger that comes with cheating death is often a very strong look. The 1990s in particular was a high tide of gentrification, a time when the country mined the underprivileged corners it had left in the dark for successful mainstream aesthetics. In this era of gentrification, the leather jacket moves from a symbol of alternative identity to a symbol of generalized cool.</p>
<p id="UcDp35">The outerwear brand The Arrivals was founded in 2014 by Jeff Johnson and Kal Vepuri. Johnson came from a career as an architect (Vepuri’s background is as an investor; he has also backed companies including Warby Parker and Reformation), and sought to bring the ideas of architecture to outerwear. The Arrivals quickly achieved popularity in particular for its leather pieces, biker jackets that at once perfectly call up the archetypal jackets of past decades and seem to be of a future era. Speaking about The Arrivals’ leather jackets, Johnson returned to ideas of subversion and of nostalgia. The subversion of these jackets again takes place within ideas of gender, and once again seeks to explode those ideas. The Arrivals’ designs are aggressively unisex – Johnson mentioned how some designs intended as men’s jackets are based on jackets originally made for women, while some of the brand’s jackets ostensibly made for men have proven most popular with female customers.</p>
<p id="s6oUKU">Nostalgia is even more apt. The leather jacket is always a quotation, perhaps more than any other single piece of clothing. We imagine ourselves into a black and white photo of James Dean crouched against a wall or Marlon Brando grinning around a cigarette, into the jacket that hangs off of Debbie Harry as she walks out of a show, into a gaggle of supermodels dodging paparazzi into the full bloom of the ‘90s. The jacket exists not just as a moveable piece in a wardrobe, but as a specific performance of toughness and desire, an invocation of any number of past eras and their extinct transgressions.</p>
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<p class="caption">Photo: The Arrivals</p>
<p>Veda’s offices on Canal Street, in a long, low second-floor showroom overlooking filthy subway stations and illegal sidewalk vendors, still feel a little bit like the old New York. Veda is a small independent clothing brand whose name, to some, is synonymous with the idea of the biker jacket. Veda’s jackets have a more particularly feminine edge, lush colors and flattering shapes rather than austere utility. Veda’s owner and creative director Lyndsey Butler spoke with me about Veda’s jackets, and emphasized both their femininity and their versatility. Their jackets are influenced by Harley-Davidson jackets – Butler triumphantly tells the story of finding a vintage Harley Davidson jacket that fits her perfectly, but then immediately stresses how rare this is — updated to be sleeker and more feminine, to welcome a broad range of aesthetics, jackets for wearing to the office and then out to drinks with friends.</p>
<p id="S84ZO2">When I set out to purchase my own jacket, I was looking for something that would act as the same kind of infallible style armor as a vintage Harley Davidson jacket. But instead of searching for a perfect vintage piece – a process demanding equal parts time, investment, and luck – I could buy it somewhere that specialized in providing exactly the piece of clothing of which I dreamed. The beat-up jacket that one would once throw on as a symbol of rebellion is now comparable to a high-end handbag, something to save up for and choose carefully. At Veda, Butler talked about designing pieces with this kind of buyer in mind. "I know that it’s a big purchase, people are spending a lot of money, and they want something that reflects that," she explained. "Styles change, but a black leather jacket, you can wear that for a long time, and if you’re not into it for a couple years, eventually you can come back to it and pick it up again. There are only a few other items like that — maybe a classic leather bag or a classic motorcycle boot."</p>
<p>For myself, I ended up choosing something more punk than not, made of heavy leather and modeled after traditional motorcycle jackets, with puffed-up sleeves and utilitarian details. It weighed five pounds and felt consequent in my hands. I felt beautiful in it, but not primarily – instead, it felt like armor. I still wanted to be defiant. I wanted to reach back to a past in which a woman in a leather jacket was refusing manners, class, and politeness. Or at least that was what I believed I wanted.</p>
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<p class="caption">Photo: Melodie Jeng/Getty</p>
<p>The night I bought the jacket, I had tickets to the opera. I threw it on over a fancy cocktail dress and ascended past people in gowns and fur coats at Lincoln Center. I thought this would feel subversive, the way it might have to wear a leather jacket to the opera twenty years ago, but instead I just felt like I fit in. The jacket had done what I had purchased it to do – it had transformed me so that my external image signaled fashionable. But more than that, it signaled money. The jacket was built in the shape of a traditional motorcycle jacket, but its lines were elegant and architectural, and it was made of flawlessly new, high-quality leather. It felt like wearing a new car. I didn’t stand out; I blended in with the people around me because what I was wearing was visibly expensive. The jacket had more in common with cocktail dress than with what someone riding a Harley Davidson might wear. I felt cool not because I was rebelling, but because I was acceptable. It is difficult to feel subversive in something that cost a week’s pay.</p>
<p id="53di8K">In Atlanta last year, my boyfriend and I wandered into a favorite thrift store and discovered a table piled high with biker jackets. The store’s proprietor, staggering under an armload of leather, let us know that a motorcycle club had just donated several lifetime’s worth of old gear. The jackets were at once a mess and gorgeous – puffy, protective shapes, weathered black and brown and declarative combinations of red, white, and blue. But when I tried on jacket after jacket, none looked right on me– they didn’t fit correctly, too large and masculine, too heavy and restrictive, turning my upper body into something reptilian and threatening. Perhaps I wanted the idea of the thing and not the thing itself — real vintage jackets didn’t convey the aesthetic I sought. This is how we approach so much in our nostalgia-soaked present moment. We praise the bad old days, the gritty realities, the black-and-white version of an old neighborhood, but what we actually want is the cleaner imitation that can be bought with money – all of the swagger and none of the experiences, the theme park version of the neighborhood but not the neighborhood itself.</p>
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<p class="caption">Photo: Edward Berthelot/Getty</p>
<p>And yet there’s more to it than that. The longer I wear my jacket, the less expensive it looks and the more I love it. It molds to my body, telling the story of a repetition of days. It acquires the smell of sweat and perfume and food and bars. It gets stained with my makeup and scratched from contact with the city into which I wear it like armor. Both Butler at Veda and Johnson at The Arrivals talked first and foremost about the leather jacket as singularly personal, an item that grows to resemble its wearer. "You get a new leather jacket," says Butler, "and at first you’re kind of precious about it, but then you get that first scratch or whatever and you’re like "all right, this is really mine now." With any leather I think it’s that cool kind of skin mentality, this kind of thing that grows around you."</p>
<p>Perhaps this has always been part of the transgressive, fetishized quality of the jacket: These garments become part of the architecture of our own bodies. Comic book superheroes wear a better version of their own skin as costumes, and perhaps that’s what the leather jacket offers, even in its current gentrified incarnation: A chance to transform ourselves by finding a new skin, one we get to choose for ourselves this time.</p>
<p id="V78YDE">"I would say for someone purchasing their first-time leather jacket it’s always like this coming-of-age moment," Butler says. The leather jacket has become more glamorous than gritty. But glamour is a kind of armor, too. The origin of the word glamor comes from the idea of casting a spell to disguise oneself, beauty as a means of protection. The leather jacket is gentrified, but it still has the power to transform us, allowing us to step out into the world in a chosen skin.</p>
https://www.racked.com/2016/9/6/12623512/leather-jacketsHelena Fitzgerald