A Biography of Clothes

I've read a few stories over the years where some gal sewed herself tasteful, upper class clothes above her station in life and suddenly found herself in a situation where that was the perfect answer and her boxes of clothes stuck under her bed were suddenly needed. 

That's not how reality typically works. It usually runs the other direction where for some reason you are suddenly hob-knobbing with a different class of people and need better clothes, a la the movie Pretty Woman.

My mother's mother came from a low level German noble family that sold title long before I was a twinkle in anyone's eye. I grew up with very conservative expectations for how I should dress and social decorum that was distinctly out of step with the people around me. 

I was inculcated with the idea that bra straps do NOT show upon pain of death and I was standing in line at the grocery story behind cringe-worthy displays of bra straps by someone wearing a normal bra under a top with spaghetti straps where the bra straps were wider than the spaghetti straps of the top.

A guy once told me he thought I was braless because my sports bra straps under a tank top did not show at all. I was probably in my thirties before I realized my mother's expectations echoed the dress code of the British royal family and were almost certainly an artifact of her mother's social background. 

When I was in high school, my mother was buying me office appropriate suits. At Christmas, she bought my sister and I each a few pieces from an upscale wardrobe on base where they periodically offered designer clothes at discount. 

They didn't really fit ne because I was extremely flat chested. I gave them to my older sister so she had a more complete wardrobe, along with other office wear, in exchange for her old high school clothes so I could dress like a high school student.

At my first job as a cashier at Kmart where we were required to wear a jacket to work, I showed up in a comfortable unlined homemade cotton suit my mother had sewn because it was comfortable in the hot weather.

My manager gave me dirty looks because of my power dressing, daughter of the owner vibe. At my first break, I rolled up the sleeves, belted it and opened a few buttons to give it a more casual feel.

When I lived in Germany in my twenties as a military wife, Americans greeted me in German if they ran into me on the street outside of clearly American spaces. 

No one ever assumed I was an American military wife and homemaker. I got assumed to be German, French, a teacher or at best an officer's wife, not a low ranking soldier's wife. 

That last was because I was on base and the assumption was made by a soldier. 

I was comfortable talking with officers and their wives. I'm generally chatty and once went to my husband's office and was talking to anyone and everyone and people were friendly.

My husband had a job usually held by someone higher in rank and was working directly for a colonel. When he walked in, I also was chatty and personable with him exactly like I had been behaving with everyone else.

People who five minutes ago were friendly, averted their gaze and stopped being friendly. Years later, I was similarly comfortable talking with one of the big bosses in my department at my corporate job.

After Germany, our next duty station was Manhattan, Kansas. Manhattan was a small town of about 50,000 people with a big, old land grant university. Students plus staff accounted for half or more of the local population. 

Local stores sold clothes appropriate for 19-year-old college students or college staff and their wives. There was nothing appropriate for the military wives that were a subset of the 10 percent of the population that was military families. 

I regularly went home to Georgia to visit family in Columbus and Augusta. These are two of the largest cities in the state and both are associated with large military bases, so both had clothes suitable to my needs.

They are also both vastly more sophisticated than you might expect. Fort Benning is Home of the Infantry and it's a training center. Large numbers of military members, including officers and foreign military members, pass through there. The PX (post exchange, aka department store) sells designer clothes at steep discount two or more times a year.

Augusta is probably best known as being the location of the annual Masters golf tournament. It's also where highly educated employees of local federal resources shop and sometimes live.

So I would shop in Georgia and attend military wives meetings in Kansas and women would get excited and ask "Where did you get that?!" thinking I knew of spme secret local boutique. They were crestfallen when I said Georgia.

When I lived in Fairfield,  California in the San Francisco Bay Area, I owned a lot of knitwear and the wardrobes on this site are inspired by those outfits. I had several knit pants suits plus multiple knit dresses. 

One of my favorite outfits was an extremely comfortable medium tone gray knit dress with a mock turtleneck paired with a black and white houndstooth jacket with no collar. I wore that one day to the homeless shelter where I was interning for college credit and someone who knocked on the front door thought I was in charge of the facility. 

There's also a biography elsewhere, but it says nothing about my relationship to clothes.