Kate Sullivan-Jones: Heroin Chic

"I'll move to Paris, shoot some heroin, and fuck with the stars." This is typed out in bold black letters next to pictures of a leopard-spotted fur coat, a pale sage green dress, a pretty young thing writhing on a bed in a sheer bra, and the Eiffel tower. Under the bra lady, above some $250 suede sandals, is a tiny photograph of an uncapped syringe, a spoon, and a small packet of beige powder. This is a "set" on Polyvore.com, a site I use to make little fashion collages for my blog about clothes. Every item in a Polyvore set is conveniently labeled, and most are available for purchase. Hover your mouse over the fur coat, and a window pops up: "Tory Burch leopard-print rabbit fur jacket $1,450." Over the dress: "Alexander Wang asymmetric satin-jersey knit dress $895." Over the needle and spoon: "Heroin." There's no price listed, but I know it's cheaper than most of the stuff actually for sale on Polyvore.

I've started noticing syringes and prescription pill bottles in more and more sets lately. Heroin chic is nothing new, but it seems bizarre now that I work in a pharmacy. Everyone knows that drug addiction destroys lives, that it tears families apart, that recovery is long and painful and hard and totally sucks. I'm not even going to get into that, because I wouldn't be telling you anything you don't already know. What you might not know, at least what a whole bunch of Polyvore users don't know, is that heroin ruins fashion.

I have never sold a pack of syringes to a person in a leopard-fur coat, but I have refrained from buying sandals because there are occasionally used needles on my sidewalk. Addiction isn't glamorous. Addiction wears sweatpants for months without washing them. Not "nice" sweatpants -- elastic ankle sweatpants. Addiction makes a man ride the bus in his pajamas to CVS then to RiteAid then to Wal-Mart then back to CVS, just trying to get somebody to fill his Oxycontin script two weeks early. Addiction makes a woman sob on the carpet because the pharmacy is closed. Are you picturing her with mascara streaking down her face? She doesn't bother with make-up. She doesn't even know when the pharmacy closes, and she's in here every damn day.

A ten-pack of syringes costs less than three bucks, but plenty of customers still pay with handfuls of change, and I doubt that it's because they spend the rest on designer clothes.

Most heroin addicts don't look like Kate Moss, or even Courtney Love. Some of the people who come through my line have eyes so puffy they barely open. Some customers are deathly thin, but with hard round bellies, because opiates make you constipated. People have hair so greasy it looks wet. Track marks leave angry red scars lacing around the forearms of men in stained shirts. Fingernails are black with filth, so who cares about the latest nail lacquer shades? Girls wearing flip flops in December loudly proclaim that their diabetic grandmothers are in town. Everyone's diabetic grandmother is in town. Everyone's diabetic grandmother forgot to bring her needles on vacation.

"One CC? Half CC? Long? Short?" I ask as I reach down below the counter without looking. Just once, I wish someone would say, "I need a ten pack of rigs for my grandmother. She's a heroin addict."

It's depressing, and it's ugly, and nobody wears anything cool. Would suede sandals or a statement necklace distract from missing teeth and picked-at skin? What would be the perfect outfit to wear while screaming into your cell phone at your doctor or dealer? What handbag should you bring to detox? What coat should you wear while standing outside in the cold, selling Xanax to middle schoolers? Is that dress available with long sleeves?

I doubt that many of the Polyvore users who make sets with pictures of needles and pills are actual drug addicts. They're mostly talented, clothes-obsessed kids who don't know too much about the substances they fetishize: the syringes are often too big, more likely to be used for steroids. The spoons are too shiny and clean. One bottle of pills is clearly filled with omeprazole, a drug used to treat acid reflux. Another is venlafaxine, an antidepressant. Thyroid pills. Antiepileptics. Antibiotics. It's just a fantasy, like so many things in fashion. Still, I hate that drug use is viewed as something stylish and edgy, when I know the tedious, smelly, sweatpants-wearing truth.

Kate Sullivan-Jones counts pills, takes pictures, makes jewelry, and writes about clothes ( asweetdisorder.wordpress.com ). She lives in Portland, Maine, where she uses her spare bedroom as a closet.

Steve Strong: Incidental Fashion

My kids saw a picture of me from when I was in 9th grade and they asked me if I were wearing Capri pants, and if those were popular for boys in the 70s. No, sorry. The clothes I wore as a youth were never a fashion statement -- just a statement on how poor we were.

By the time I was 13 my waist was probably 28 inches. And it never changed until I was 19, although I grew at least a foot during that time. I literally could wear the same pants in high school that I got as hand-me-downs in junior high. But I was wearing pants much too short for me.

For Christmas one year my sister gave me a pair of cuffed denim bell bottoms that I just loved. As I grew taller, I discovered I could let that huge cuff out and wear them another year. Then, I found out I could take a jackknife and cut out the hem and get another year’s wear out of them. I started doing that with all my pants and I thought I was really clever. But I sort of looked like a tree with growth rings around my ankles.

By the time I graduated high school in 1975 my mom decided it was time to get me some fancy, trendy clothes that better reflected the fashion of the time. I wore with pride the white and blue plaid bell bottoms, with a midnight blue shirt and a white tie and white belt. To be really cool, I tied a double Windsor knot in the tie so the knot was as big as my neck. I was six foot three, but wore this outfit with platform shoes. To top it all off, I wore a double-knit sport coat that looked like patchwork denim from afar. I alternated, either wearing that white tie, or going with a dark blue turtleneck sweater under the sport coat. But either way, the threads were totally far out.

When I turned 19, I bought a couple three-piece suits and went off to serve a mission for my church. When I came back, I found my mom had given away my old clothes to a family whose house had burned down while I was gone. I had nothing to wear but the same three-piece suits, 10 white shirts and ratty old shoes I’d been wearing in Japan for the past two years.

I came back from Japan with $11 in my pocket. So I went to the store and got a pair of jeans and a beret (because it made me look so dashing). I suppose that was the first thing I ever did to consciously try to make myself look more attractive.

I guess I’ll never know if it was the beret, or if Mormon girls are just drawn to returned missionaries like moths to a porch lamp on a summer evening. But I was dating a lot, and every girl had their idea of how to recreate me into their idea of a proper fashion plate.

The first thing they had me do was part my hair in the middle and get a “feather cut” so I’d look more like David Cassidy. That task completed, I then got a pair of white bib overalls called “painter pants” which I wore with a red flannel shirt underneath. I think I looked kind of like a sissy lumberjack on vacation.

When I wasn’t wearing that get up, the girls I dated convinced me to dress in corduroy bell bottoms with Robin Williams rainbow suspenders. I coordinated those pants with long-sleeved shirts with huge lapels.

Because I was so thin, I could make a lot of clothes look decent I suppose, but why on earth did I let them convince me to buy a track suit made of yellow terrycloth? Of course, I wore that suit with a pair of blue suede Pumas with yellow striping.

When John Travolta made Urban Cowboy my girlfriends dressed me in cowboy boots, straight-legged Levi’s a long sleeved shirt with white snaps on the buttons and cuffs. When I played basketball, I wore really short shorts, a tank top and a pair of Converse All Stars. For some reason, I figured white sweat bands on both wrists would be a nice compliment for that getup.

By the time I got to college in the early 80s the latest fashion was the “preppie” look. Luckily I had a steady girlfriend by then, and I never seriously considered wearing the Top Siders, Oxford shirt with a sweater tied over the shoulders. It’s bad enough I have old pictures of me dressed the way I was. Thank Heavens I never had preppie pictures to have to live down.

J. Allen Holt: Less Important Than Fashion

I never give much thought to fashion. I have spent more time thinking about it this week than I had in the last 12 months combined. With “fashion” the topic for this week, I was banging my head against the wall trying to think of something to write about.

I came up with the idea a few days ago: "Hey. I know. I’ll write about the things that are less important than fashion." It should be a short list, right? Turned out, it was very short. Zero. Zilch. Nada. I couldn’t come up with one thing I thought was less important than fashion.

I thought maybe some obscure sport that no one paid attention to, such as polo. Even that, though, has some physical benefits for those involved. What does fashion do? Do you get a boost to your self-esteem from feeling good in your new clothes? Does that outweigh the body image problems caused by the industry’s continued use of pencil-thin models? I say the harm more than nullifies any good effect physically.

I’ll never be a spokesman for fashion. My fashion thinking follows the following steps: 1) What am I going to be doing? 2) What can I wear that will be appropriate and as comfortable as possible? 3) Is that thing clean, or do I need to do laundry first?

That’s the entirety of my thought process, and it takes about one second to process most the time. "It’s 100 degrees and I’m playing basketball: Shorts!" "It’s a wedding: No shorts!"

I haven’t really had very many serious romantic relationships in my life. So few, in fact, I wonder if there is perhaps something broken with me. There almost assuredly is, but that’s a topic for another conversation. There was one consistent thing about every girl that I dated though: they always tried to dress me. They would buy me clothes; rather, often, they’d pick out clothes that I was then to buy and wear. Now, is this something women do? Or was it because I’m hopeless? My feeling is it’s a bit of both. I just asked my roommate that question, though, and judging by her facial expression, I’m guessing it’s probably a lot of the latter.

I think I’m okay with it. Really, I am. I spend my waking hours thinking about many things. I have extreme bouts of insomnia that can last for days. I can’t sleep because I can’t switch off the thinking. Often those things I’m thinking about aren’t really very important, but they’re still more important than fashion.

Tina Rowley: Sartorialism, Bespoke

If you haven’t been to the wonderland that is The Sartorialist (http://thesartorialist.blogspot.com), go there first, quickly, before you read this. Spend a few minutes. You might not have any reaction, but maybe you will. If you already know and love The Sartorialist, stay with me, because chances are you might never come back and read this essay if you don’t. You’ll fall down a rabbit hole masquerading as an alleyway in Milan, tumbling after some impossibly cool old man in oxfords and anklets, with the hem of his trousers rolled just so. (These old Italians all dare to eat a peach.) Or you’ll fall into a pretty dungeon of despair/envy/desire when you see some mile-long gazelle of a girl in modern, sky-high heels, leaning against what was an ugly, nothing wall until she was juxtaposed against it. Slightly wrinkled trench coat, topknot, sleek legs, only the barest hint of elegant tension beneath her languid posture . . . oof. It creates this longing that makes me think of theater; what she has going on in that moment is almost completely ephemeral. Some elements may remain for a remount: shoes purchasable here, trench there, hair, well, you have some or you don’t. But the rest you can never have, and you’re just lucky or unlucky to have seen it, depending on how you carry that 10 ounce glass of water with the five ounces of water in it.

Aspirational, that’s the word for that site. I frankly love the tension The Sartorialist sets off in me, my glass blinking from half-full to half-empty by the moment. Possibility! Impossibility. Possibility! Not every last photograph is of some paragon of physical beauty – you’ve got young people, old people, thin people, fat . . . old men -- but every single one shows us someone who has absorbed/created/lucked into a sense of style, and that is mostly, largely, maybe? almost? democratic. You can cultivate one. It’s available to you. You might be tone-deaf, but everyone who cares to do it can probably struggle out a real sense of style.

Or not. And those who can’t are left with fashion. But I don’t want to talk about fashion. Fashion, apart from style, is something tinny and temporary and quickly embarrassing. It requires no thought on the part of the wearer, only a kind of pitiful trust that he or she is being handed the right information. Fashion without innate style is that good-looking (or not) kid who heads to Hollywood and is dying to be a famous actor but doesn’t have any talent, whose only hope is a gargantuan dedication to craft. Dubious. That actor who’s not exactly bad, who’s hitting the marks and all, but you just don’t give a shit. Styleless fashion. Nothing gives a sadder, more desperate feeling, sartorially, than that. Especially with the wrong information. You know what I’m talking about.

(And you’ve got the segment of the population who don’t care about style AND don’t care about fashion. Carry on, wizards. Stay warm and dry in the winter and cool and comfortable in the summer. Bust out some “generally appropriate for the situation,” and your dignity is basically intact.)

Let me digress a little. I have a mild, vague obsession with French culture. (Can you have a mild, vague obsession? I think I figured out how to do it; see me for tips if you’re interested.) Parisian culture, maybe, in particular. I spent one day and one night in Paris almost a decade ago. I’d looked forward to going there all my life, nearly maniacally. I’d have dreams about it, and since I’m always fooled by my dreams, I’d invariably think, “My god! Mon dieu! The day has come! Finally, it’s not a dream! I’m really in Paris this time! All those other times -- dreams! But not this time! Hurray!” and then a giant deck of cards would walk into the room and I’d think, “Paris is not quite what I expected, but it’s great to be here. Great . . . to be here.” And then I’d disappear up into a skylight and continue the dream in Ohio or what have you. My point is that I’d always looked forward to the challenge of Paris. I was intrigued by the idea that it didn’t come easily for visitors, that there was an intricate code to learn, some intuitive and some counterintuitive tricks for comporting yourself in such a way as to make the city fall open for you. (I hadn’t considered the option that it might also be okay if Parisians didn’t like you.) (Me.) And one of the most obvious things you had to do when you got to Paris was dress well, but that wasn’t enough, either. You had to dress with style, because the Parisians THROW DOWN.

So how did it go?

Yes, well. Since I’d been overly excited, I hadn’t slept for one minute the night before, and arrived with a huge headache. So, a good chunk of time was lost sleeping and then taking a bath with my sunglasses on. And then we went out to dinner and then I got to spend a few hours back in the hotel room throwing up some bad tuna. (“Paris! Pinch me! Am I dreaming?!”) Then the people at the front desk denied to my boyfriend’s face the very existence of mint tea in the whole world. (“Ma’am, I’m afraid that you’re wide awake.”) Montmartre was delightful, the next day. I spoke French successfully in a bookshop, to a taxi driver and in a perfume shop. OH! And on the train from London to Paris, I was in the bathroom when they were collecting tickets or checking passports or something. They knocked on the door and I said, “Un moment” and the ticket taker/passport checker said, “Elle est Français.” !!! I practically started singing the Marseillaise. Anyway, they couldn’t see me or they wouldn’t have made that much-treasured mistake. I did my best but I was not, I could tell, able to dress myself to Parisian standards. I really only took two outfits on the town:

1) Dinner (and then vomiting): A navy v-neck t-shirt, gathered in the front with a little patch of red paillettes, atop a navy pinstripe a-line skirt, with modern-looking black flats.

2) Montmartre, the next day (aka “The nice part”): A risk-free ensemble of white button-up shirt, black trousers, the aforementioned black flats and the sunglasses from the bathtub.

Neither here nor there, ultimately, and no heels = not good enough. It just wasn’t good enough. I could feel it. It didn’t risk enough or express enough or . . . who cares, right? Who cares what I wore in this one part of the world over the course of slightly more than 24 hours almost ten years ago? I DO.

I do, I care, because it’s to do with nuance, and I love nuance, and consequently hate missing nuance. It’s so aggravating. I wanted to nail it and I didn’t nail it. So Paris is still hanging there, unconquered, and therefore it remains this vague obsession, and so we’re back to The Sartorialist. The pictures I examine most keenly from his site are the ones, obviously, from Paris, but it doesn’t matter, really. The whole question of style and nuance dangles there in every photograph, which begs the question of my own style, and just what in the hell that is, and what it’s for, and why it matters, because it does matter. It’s not enough that the clothing flatter my figure and my coloring. We all want to be found beautiful, that’s basic. And it’s nice to be accepted, to be thought cool. But the ultimate -- for me, at least -- is to be known, and if you really want to be known, then you leave as many breadcrumbs as possible for the people taking you in, pointing as much as you can to something ineffable. It’s art, and even if you miss the mark you’ve set out for, you will at least have hit something.

Tina Rowley is a writer and performer who lives in Seattle. She's run a little blog operation for a few years called The Gallivanting Monkey. She works with social media for dollars, and makes theater for love. Follow her on Twitter this-a-way.

Marsi White: Mirror

I have mixed feelings about the mirror. Sometimes it glares at me stonily. Sometimes it boosts my confidence. Sometimes it is indifferent, as if I am just one of its many minions for which it does not have time to pass judgment. Always, though, the mirror reveals the ravaged scars on my chest where breasts once perched. Always, it tells me if my wardrobe choices succeeded in hiding said scars. Always, the mirror shows all, tagging me awake, as if to say, “you’re it!”, as it turns and runs away.

Mirrors have been my enemy this year. They were the impoverished newspaper reporter thirsting for a real story who always settled for the scrupulous scandal where truth was subjective and lies breached even the sweetest memories. When I lost my hair and wore my buttery soft sleeping hat for the first time, I did not recognize the person in the mirror. That person was a cancer patient. I cried. I remember the moment clearly. Months later, a steady gaze in the mirror revealed one remaining eyelash on my lower right eyelid. I became practiced at only employing focused glances to check specific features of my appearance.

However, I love clothes. In fact, I am not ashamed to admit that retail shopping is almost guaranteed to change my mood. Putting together a really great outfit will do the same. You need mirrors for that. Sometimes more than one.

My colleague teases me about my extensive wardrobe. Truth be told, she is right. I have a lot of clothes. However, I work in an industry where appearance is crucial, where shoes are shined and shirts are pressed. I feel justified in always having “the right” thing to wear. It feels good. It helps me walk tall.

I have needed that lately. Clothes fit awkwardly and I consistently misjudge necklines I think will completely hide my scars. That said, dressing usually requires time to try on two or more outfits, my discerning eye for fashion not easily satisfied. For example, a typical flip through my closet reveals an article of clothing that I would like to wear. Sometimes it is a shirt, sometimes just a belt. I then go about deciding if my clothing inspiration covers all it should. As the layering of the outfit progresses, I feel like I am donning a costume, the costume that helps my mind go on, even if my body has temporarily lost its will.

Stuffing my bra is another morning ritual, one I usually complete with haste. Seeking perfection has no place right now. It is an odd thing, really, and it’s further complicated by the fact that I have no nerve endings in my chest wall. As my bra and its contents slip around throughout the day, I don’t receive any sensational warning that something is out of place.

Carefully, I spot check throughout the day, still avoiding the mirror.

I think nearly everyone has a love-hate relationship with mirrors at some point in their life. There is a particularly vindictive ceiling-to-floor mirror residing on the wall with the elevators in the building where I work. It is impossible to avoid, unless you plan on tramping up and down the ten flights of stairs leading to the fifth floor. In the sordid moments spent waiting for the elevator each day, this mirror takes pleasure in reminding me that my clothes do not flatter my shape as I thought they did when I put them on in the morning. I think it also conspires with the overhead lights to accentuate the bags under by eyes, usually making my skin look painfully sallow. I make it a practice to hit the elevator button and then stand five feet back and to the side. It’s a little dance I have learned over the years . . . not letting the mirror have a spot on my dance card.

These days, my bathroom mirror is sometimes kind. I enjoy a sprinkling of good hair days, make-up helps to accentuate eyebrows, and my eyelashes have grown back and don mascara. I think I will always have misgivings with every glance in the mirror; I cannot imagine a woman who does not. But one day soon, I know the scars will not be all that I see.


Marsi lives in San Diego, CA with her husband, two children and dog. A private foundation grants writer by trade, Marsi explores her creative side by contributing to Writing Writer Writest.She is a breast cancer survivor and keeps a blog of her journey, entitled Nip It.

Sean Tabb: Dressing for the Apocalypse

These hoarders, the ones who never throw anything away, the ones who live amid their stacks of junkyard squalor and die beneath an avalanche of magazine back issues and TV dinner tins; I am not one of them. But I understand where they’re coming from. I get the motivation.

Letting go can be difficult. These things may come in handy some day. When the world melts down and zombies rule the streets, it’s unlikely that the publishers at Entertainment Weekly are going to continue mailing your subscription. In the eternal quest for reading material, you’ll be happy you kept those magazines. You’ll be the envy of all your non-zombified neighbors. And the TV dinner tins? With a little glue and gumption, they can be fashioned into a fine antenna for picking up signals from The Resistance.

My particular hang-up is clothing. I am constitutionally incapable of parting with any of it, even when it stops fitting (it may fit again one day), or is full of holes (darn those holes! No, seriously, get me some needle and thread. I’m going to darn them). My closet and bureau are a museum of sartorial history.

Take socks, for instance. The socks in the top dresser drawer are out of control. It won’t even shut, owing to the number of socks stuffed inside it. There are brown socks and gray socks, green socks and black socks, work socks and play socks, cotton socks and wools socks, thin socks and thick socks, argyle socks and striped socks. And socks with holes, lots and lots of holes. My wife has attempted to impose a sort of Marshall Law around the socks, an edict that goes roughly like this: "No new socks shall enter this house unless an old pair of socks is first surrendered." It’s a fair deal, net neutral. Regardless, the thought of giving up my socks makes me unreasonably anxious. How can I part with them? What if my feet get extremely cold? I skirted compliance of the Sock Law by culling out a number of long-neglected pairs (vintage 1990 - 1996, or thereabouts), stuffing them in a plastic grocery bag, and hiding it behind the mountain range of moth-eaten sweaters on the shelf in my closet.

I’ll spare you the details of my boxer short drawer; let’s just say that, of the forty-two pairs kept there, only seven or so are worn. It would seem like a trick of clown car physics that a drawer six inches deep could house so many pairs of shorts, but there’s an explanation. Sedimentation. The boxers at the bottom have been pressed to an impossibly thin stratum beneath the layers of cotton above them. Under such tremendous pressure, conditions are perfect for the spontaneous formation of diamonds.

Shirts, pants and shoes are not excluded from my compulsion. The shirts are roughly ordered in sequence of chronology; recently purchased are first and most frequently worn, followed by a succession of ever-older styles in passé colors with missing buttons and threadbare collars. In the trouser stacks are some contemporary models; newer denim that retains its indigo hue, classic twill and khaki for dressing up. But closer inspection reveals a stockpile of poorly weathered jeans and cargo pants and antique corduroy, in wales too wide and humiliating to mention. Of the 20-odd pairs of shoes only five are actually worn; the rest are jumble of worn out soles, leather dried and cracking, laces chewed by an orally fixated dog. I must keep them, though. We’re going to be doing a lot of running away in the future -- from zombies, from Tea-partying fascists, from the irreparable mistakes of our own sordid pasts. It’ll be wise to have some footwear in reserve.

So there it is. I have opened my wardrobe to you, and bared my fashion-forsaken soul. I find it difficult to get rid of these clothes because I suspect I’m going to need them again someday. Honestly, I have the most sincere intentions of rediscovering those Nantucket Red chinos with the tiny, embroidered Golden Retrievers or that overly large, awkwardly heavy lumberjack plaid flannel shirt and wearing them proudly once again. "When?" you ask, and by "you" I mean my irritated wife. I’ll tell you when. When the economy collapses and 1% of the population hold 99% of the wealth and the Confederation of Formerly Beleaguered Retail Employees burns down the shopping malls and The Eternal Light of Zappo’s is violently extinguished and we’re all living in shanty towns and changing our minds a little about the NRA as we train our crosshairs on the looters who’ve come to take our Entertainment Weeklys and our tin foil ham radios, that’s when. I’m going to be glad I kept these clothes when the revolution comes. Or the zombies.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some ironing to do.


There’s a pretty good chance that Sean Tabb resembles the guy your sister dated in college. He gets that a lot. There’s an almost equally good chance that he DID date your sister in college, and just doesn’t remember. He does his parenting, husbanding, living and writing from his home in Portland, Maine. Check out his website at http://punctuatedequilibriumblog.wordpress.com, or follow his drivel on Twitter at http://twitter.com/pithnvinegar.

Fashion Week at WWW!

Hello, readers! This is Meg Wood speaking (writing, whatever), sitting in as Editor-in-Chief pro tempore this week while the Big Kahuna (Josh) is making last week's theme, moving, a reality in his own life.

We're about to embark on a journey together, my friends. A journey into the world of FASHION. Fasten your seat belts, lace up your boots, and brace your cheeks for Heidi Klum. You never know what might show up.

Platform heels? Acid-wash jeans? Hammer pants (see Simplicity pattern number 0693)? All I know is that in fashion, one day you're in and the next day you're OUT.

Take it away, writers! (And hey, I've only gotten four submissions so far and I'm taking late entries, so get hot: meg@megwood.com.)