Dressed up and obsessed
"to generate intensity even when not required" notes on a clothing obsession, the New Moon in Sagittarius, and fixed star Antares
I’ve been obsessed with beautiful clothes for as long as I can remember.
More than that, I’ve been obsessed with identifying and dressing myself in my own version of beautiful attire, above and beyond what anyone else might like to see my body adorned in.
I have an idea where this obsession comes from. I’m pretty sure it began, like these things do, with an interdiction, forbiddance, a taboo. I was (am) the oldest of three girls, raised in a household where my dad tried to test out all of his conservative anxieties about sex, gender, and the body on me, the eldest.1 He was gratified to have three girls that society deemed beautiful. He was terrified to have three girls that society deemed beautiful. Hence the rules, the list of which grew longer as I entered puberty:
No long hair, because long hair was for hippies.
No tight shirts, because those were for … people who were … beneath us? (the euphemisms! Who could say the word breast in our house? “Slut” entered the family vocabulary only when my dad was possessed by an inhuman rage that took him out of himself and into a world of language he normally wouldn’t let himself touch. So funny these days to send texts and emails and health updates to my parents about breast amputation, reconstruction, cancer, “nipple complexes,”2 boobs, boobs, boobs, signifiers of death in a way I think we all wish weren’t so these days!)
No jeans at schools, because jeans were “sloppy.”
No makeup except for special occasions.
You get the idea, we all get the idea. Men like this exist; it was, in fact, still possible to grow up like this in the late 90s and early 2000s in an otherwise highly educated, upper-class Southern home. I was born in the midst of the moral majority and the Satanic panic of the late 1980s, and my parents couldn’t shake it out of themselves by the time I started bleeding and wanting to dress myself.
The injunctions against dress stoked my passion for it. I didn’t care about magazines or what other girls were wearing at my middle and high school. I cared about a sense of clothing that seemed totally perfect for my body, a sense that came to me through many long weekends spent in solitude in my room or with my own journal or in the backyard woods, exploring my belly, my shoulders, my butt, my legs with my hands and thinking about what would look good on them. I liked the idea of big skirts and tiny tops. Exposed neck and shoulders, hidden legs, petticoats that swished. If my dad had ever thought to ask, I would have told him I didn’t care for jeans anyways. I was reading Gone With the Wind, baby! I was reading Nancy Drew! I loved the thought of a good pointy-toed flat, a hoopskirt. I tried on old Laura Ashley sheets as full skirts, rummaging in my mom’s walk-in closet for brightly colored silk or sequin tops that I never saw her wear. My favorite thing to do as a middle-schooler and young high-schooler, other than reading stories of Scarlet O’Hara’s curtain dresses or Nancy Drew’s smart drop-waists beneath the tried-and-true detective’s trench coat, was to spend hours at a time in my head, with my eyes closed, while my dog Belle snored beside me, imagining my body in different colors, different fits, different blouses and flats.
The passion I felt in these moments could quickly turn ecstatic if I wanted. I was obsessed by visions of what I would wear when I grew up. What I might do and who I might be as result of the wearing.
As I grew older, I dealt with this passion in the real world in various, mostly terrible ways. There was this weird class adjacency to extreme wealth going on with my family, and I was a total loser about it. In high school, I was always borrowing clothes from friends, trying to assemble my own outfits from their drawers, and being shitty about actually returning the items on time. A gauzy floral top from Emily our junior year of high school: roses, muted pinks and blues, one of the first purchases she had made from the first Anthropologie that opened up in Richmond circa 2004. A black silk bra with a bow delicately situated in between the ample cups from Abigail. A fitted turquoise dress from Blair. My friends had to seek me out to get these things back. I was shameless in my pleas to hold onto things for longer than they’d intended to loan them out. “Is that my bra?” Abigail asked when she spied it among other skimpy things in my suitcase on our senior spring break. “No!” I lied. Lying. “No way! I got one just like it.”
In college, I was shameless in weaponizing my envy and resentment toward my very rich roommates into an excuse to “borrow” their clothes when they weren’t around. My roommate from New Orleans owned a silk navy swing dress that, after being inducted into a secret drinking society, she stopped for a time being able to fit into, so I wore it without asking on a date to D.C. with my then-boyfriend. The dress felt like mine! It was not! I didn’t care! A month or so later, I wore a New England finance heiress’ brown quilted Tory Burch flats that were a half-size too large for me to some holiday event I knew none of my roommates would attend. The shoes kept sliding off my heels. They did not feel like belonged to me. I got drunk, though, and made the mistake of putting the shoes back in my closet at the end of the night instead of hers.
The next week, I was caught out! Cameron the Klepto! My roommates staged an intervention. They were furious and elated at proof of how gross I was. We had never really gotten along. I was this intense, earnest, lurching person who said ridiculous things while she was drunk and was too into her boyfriends. I had hung onto the refined sorority sister vibe by a thread. But now! The shoes were in my closet. No one needed to try with me anymore; I wouldn’t have tried with me anymore! I had handed my roommates the high road: We’ve talked to the school therapist about you, the New Orleans girl said, we know you have an eating disorder and other issues.
Oh my god! The shame! It was, I thought, crying in the basement stacks in the library later that evening, the worst day of my life. Nothing could surpass its misery. (Honestly, my cheeks are so red writing this, I do wonder if it might not actually be the worst day of my life. This is surely hyperbole, given my experiences with cancer and death and all the rest, but it’s one of those moments where I was caught red-handed being well and truly and intentionally bad. And more than bad, just flat out dumb! So dumb! So dumb and seething and drawn down into that seething by my sense of entitlement to a fantasy of adornment that I enjoyed in my head and so thought deserved to become real, that I couldn’t even muster up the brains for self-reflection or, at the very least, cunning or stealth!)
I was like a crabbed version of person, sneaking along, waiting for opportunities to be caught out. I couldn’t stop blushing. A paranoid feeling crept in, about evil, about myself.
In the dim of the library, I checked out H.D’s Vale Ave but spent the night reading my business journalism textbook instead. It was in this moment I decided I’d be a reporter rather than a writer. I had passion but no morals. I had to face myself. I’d face myself! I’d build a career out of seeking out and telling the truth. I started a journalism blog the next day: In Pursuit of Truth And Happy With the Chase. I have to laugh at myself. I think about how those girls must have seen and read that blog and laughed a lot at me behind my back. Cameron is fucking insane, one of them texted the other, and left the phone out on the counter for me to read one night. I do not disagree, I thought. Also: I really want your dress.
I have to give myself credit: I did try at journalism, very hard. And it did feel very good, when I could finally buy my first black patent leather pumps, my first fitted, shimmery Diane von Furstenburg skirt. I’d forgo good groceries for eBay finds on my reporter’s salary at The Anniston Star. The DvF viscose and silk black wrap coat. The pointy-toed Frye flats that were reliable at crime scenes but still had some fashion bitch! in them.3 I was losing my mind on the job, but I dressed up every day like I wasn’t. When I lost the job (when I lost my mind), the only time I cared to take advantage of my allotment of private computer time in rehab was when my FMLA-reduced paycheck came in and I could afford to purchase myself some soft socks, a new pajama shirt, a good lip balm, to make the summer-long stay feel bearable.
In grad school, I figured I finally had the time and the injunction to figure out the clothing obsession thing. Although I was ostensibly funded in the PhD program as a creative writer, it turned out that I was often more interested in the literature, history, and anthropology classes I was taking to pad out a women’s and gender studies certification. Over the course of six months in 2017 and 2018, I wrote three academic papers on clothing. For my Women, Gender and Empire course, I designed a research project where I examined portraits of white, wealthy women in Virginia in the 17th century alongside descriptions of the “runaway” ads for enslaved women from the same era. The point was, to quote my own paper:
to analyze the ways in which white women in Virginia throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries deployed apparel and modes of appearance to frame themselves as crucial to the success of the colony, carving out spaces of agency for themselves amongst their white male counterparts while actively capitalizing on entrenched visual hierarchies that would further the violent oppression of Native American inhabitants and enslaved women brought to Virginia from Africa.
Around the same time, I was writing a close-reading of the function of dress in Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy and Nella Larsen’s Quicksand, novels which had quickly become favorites of mine for the way Dreiser and Larsen both attended to descriptions of clothing and dress in rich and minute detail. If in the history paper, I was trying to understand the relationship between white women, clothing, and place at the outset of the American project, in the literature paper, I wanted to get at how the advent of mass-produced clothing allowed Dreiser’s and Larsen’s characters to navigate modernity, class and race divides, and the industrialized city in the twentieth-century United States. As part of that project’s introduction, I wrote:
Throughout the journey of their protagonists, Dreiser and Larsen use narrative attention to dress and demeanor as well as the persistent depiction of character obsession with the popular fashions and attitudes of the time to heighten the sense of psychological struggles associated with the industrialized U.S. city as well as critique the very machinations of urbanization that make these struggles so pervasive and traumatic.4
And for the anthropology course on the “Socio-Psychology of Fashion” in which I was also enrolled, I found myself putting together an essay on the ways in which body image affects clothing practices in 21st-century women, particularly those like me, who had found themselves, at some point in their adulthood, institutionalized for mental illness. That essay tried to unpack the notion of a garment’s “good fit” through a (pretty terribly written, I have to say) review of several prominent studies about the relationship between clothing choice and what could be considered “deviant bodies.” What’s most interesting to me rereading the essay now is how I end rather blandly on a quote from one of the studies’ authors: “As Klepp and Rysst accurately note: ‘there exists an intimate relationship between people and their clothes that surely affects how they are perceived by others, but even more how they perceive themselves.’”
I’m sure that quote spoke to me, above all else, for its emphasis on clothing and the dressed body as affecting self-perception more than anything else. My clothes, my whole life, had never really been for other people. They had been for me—so much so, that I had found myself willing to identify5 items of clothing that clearly belonged to other people as mine.
There was, it turned out, a certain self-elucidation that happened, writing these three academic essays alongside each other.6 An understanding began to form around my obsession with clothes that had a wider lens than the parameters of my own life, the sicknesses and desires inherent in my own nature, those built out from how I was nurtured, too. I could slot myself into a trajectory of adornment amongst Virginia ladies of a certain class and race since at least as far back as the 1600s. I could understand myself in terms of post-industrial alienation and ambition. I could read my obsessions through the lenses of mental illness and eating disorder etiology.
Understanding in formation, the Three of Swords in the tarot: these histories, my participation in them, caused me not a small amount of embarrassed sorrow. A studied awareness of them also helped me grow up. I know it’s trite to say that reading and writing can change the world, but in truth reading and writing have always been some of the ways I’ve changed my world—or at least the way I operate within it. I am not one of those truly good or lucky people who was born with a built-in sense of ethical behavior. I have always been, in ways large and small, deficient, in need of a detour or an interruption to course correct, to right my own deficiencies.7
I think about my life a lot these days, seeing as I’m on the verge of maybe losing it, and I realize that some 7.5 times out of ten, I have chosen the Decidedly Wrong Thing To Do instead of the right one. I’ve had to work, very hard, sometimes, at becoming a good person, never mind just being one. Intellectual effort, by which I mean engagement with all sorts of books from across all sorts of disciplines, has been one of the ways I’ve managed to balance the scales of my own ethics, just a little bit, in favor the good.
Beauty, I've always had more of an affinity with. I know how it can get me into trouble. I know how it can undermine real living, and the honest relationships with self and other and the divine that, for me, define the parameters of real living. It’s also the only thing that’s kept me alive, time and time again, for better or worse. My green-heeled rain-boots I wore to every chemo session. The utter delight when my hair grew back curly last year. Venus as an impossible point of departure from every dark and cloudy night this fall. H.D., of course, in Vale Ave:
The candle swells with the weight of its own fervor,
the melting wax runs down,
to fill the hollow of the candleholder,and as it flames with headier heat and headier,
it seems to blaze with iridescent splendor,
that I may never look upon;prostrated as I am in adoration;
the lashes of my eyes are wet,
my swollen eyelids burn.dear Lord, how long can I endure,
my cold hands clasped, my numb knees
frozen on this chapel floor?
Living with my passions—for clothes, for writing, for the esoteric, for self-understanding, for the health and joy of my children, for my weird friends, for my husband Kiernan—has mostly been about understanding how to manage, as HD writes, the weight of my own fervor. My obsessions have set fire to my life, put me on my knees where I belong. Lit up the sky, too, when it’s finally time to lift my head.
The New Moon in Sagittarius occurs at 1:21 pm ET on Sunday, December 1 conjunct the fixed star Antares. Centuries-old astrological tradition and myth considers Antares to be one of the “royal stars” that consigns blessings and ruin according to its particular affinities and aversions.
Regulus is beloved, for example, because it bestows fame and prestige based on a person’s ability to tap into its associations with virtue, self-sovereignty, and visibility. Antares is, well, a bit more intense. Blessings come to those born under Antares’ purview through their participation in obsession, intensity, and an ability to grab something by the teeth and never let it go. Beethoven was born with this as his heliacal rising star (me too, lol), which the astrologer Bernadette Brady notes as interesting, given Beethoven’s “renown for his obsessive and brilliant music.” Other notes on Antares from Brady: it is suggestive of “great success, worldly or otherwise” through one’s ability “to be driven by passion and obsession.” She continues: