Only some of my sisters are dead; I wear their clothes. I remember them in the red canvas skirt I wore today, in the denim jacket that’s almost a bathrobe and almost too long, in the windbreaker patterned with Time Magazine covers. If I have met these sisters, I am not aware of it. Their clothing is washed, stains scrubbed out, worn or loose threads replaced with new, strong ones and knotted to keep their hems intact by the time I find it on a rack in a vintage store, slotted between others that aren’t my style or wouldn’t fit me.
Why is vintage clothing special to me? I told myself I would stop buying fast fashion at the end of high school, but proceeded to slip up whenever I saw something through a store window and immediately went from thinking it was cute to thinking I couldn’t live without it. I still guiltily returned to the Urban Outfitters website at the end of stressful days. In the past year, this has stopped happening. I enter a traditional clothing store and find nothing I like. Everything feels sort of false, like it’s not really clothing at all but pieces of flimsy, unworn materials that I worry would cause me to lose all sense of identity should I put them on.
When clothing feels like it could fall apart at any moment, I worry that life and wear will destroy it; when I know there are hundreds of identical copies of that piece of clothing, I worry that I can’t give it a distinguishable meaning before its seams break or its frail threads rip.
When I look through a vintage store, the clothing already has an identity. It often has lived decades longer than I have. I can trust it not to fall apart. Even if it is not one of a kind, its path has diverged so much from any copies that it feels unique anyway. Fingerprints stay in clothing; the DNA of people who made and wore it remains in the fibers. There is care sewn into it, from the original maker, the vintage store owners who rescued it from death in a landfill and the previous owners, who cared for the clothing before it got to me. Those owners are the sisters I mention. We have not met, but we share the same clothing, we care for the same clothing and the life of that clothing binds our lives together. Vintage clothing is not immortal; no clothing is. But it is less mortal than I am. Wearing something that I will likely outlive makes me uneasy. Receding into the vintage denim coat that drops to my ankles, my mortality is extended by its enclosure in something that will live on. My life merges with those who have worn it before and will wear it after me.
I like things to outlive me. Maybe I want to avoid dealing with loss and would prefer everything to stick around at least until I’m gone. If you read “clothing” and “sisterhood” and were waiting for me to mention “The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants,” I will. I read this book and the next three in the series in middle school, when I had to walk to the library after school and stay there until my mom finished working and could retrieve me. I sat in one of the chairs in the library’s minuscule “teen” section and read, noted my place and returned to my book the next day. I never checked a book out. The four friends (“sisters”) between whom the pants travel agree that they shouldn’t be able to fit in the same pair of jeans. I assume this magic is not present in the vintage clothes I wear. I can only picture their previous owners by the fact that they fit into something that also fits me. They are outlines, at best. Maybe I know their waist measurements, but not their height. Perhaps we have similar genetics in some way, giving us similar bodies, perhaps we molded our bodies into similar shapes of our own accord or perhaps we don’t look similar at all — maybe one sister bought something too small, another too large.
Sisterhood is a form of immortality, or at least prolonged mortality. By sisterhood, I mean connection and friendship. Sisterhoods don’t have to be founded in material objects, but these can help with that mortality. They inherently involve sharing things — ourselves, our lives, our jokes, our flaws. Tying people together via a more durable, stable material object can create something less tenuous. I have been involved in several “sisterhoods” of traveling objects. I bought the book “Kiki Man Ray” by Mark Braude and told my friends they would all have to read it — the sisterhood of the traveling “Kiki Man Ray.” Other film writers and I went to The Getup Vintage on State Street and I saw a Beatles shirt hanging high on the wall, white with colorful squares across it. It cost more than $100, too much for even me to justify spending on a T-shirt. What if we all bought it? We could share it. (Well, I could technically own it and lend it to other writers if they so desired).
“Sisterhood of the traveling Beatles shirt,” texted one writer. One sister.
“Exactly.”
I bought the softest pair of jeans that I own at Malofta Vintage, a vintage store in Kerrytown. The jeans are so well-worn that the waistband is fuzzy in places. The measurement listed on the tag would have been too small for me, but because they seem to have been some previous owner’s favorite jeans, they fit comfortably. The sisterhood of vintage clothing is not necessarily a way to have my presence or body remembered, but a way of being remembered by sharing something, some part of myself and my life, intertwined with those of others. There is — or there was — someone out there with not just the same favorite brand or style of jeans, but the same pair of jeans as me.
Clothing can be a box. It is created with limits of fabric and thread, and I must find the clothing that can properly contain me in particular. I like fitting into things. Clothing. The red skirt. And friendships. Communities. Sisterhoods. I like to create them using shared objects because of those objects’ immortality — that feeling that there is a way of making space for myself in the world.
My one real, biological sister — twin, at that — flies helicopters. She texted our family groupchat a week ago, telling us she had gotten her private license. An update two months before told us that she had made a mistake while flying — a stupid mistake, something she knew but messed up for no reason — and sent the helicopter diving toward the ground. She and her instructor survived by luck. Mathematically, they should have crashed based on how the propeller was moving and how fast the helicopter was going.
In my life of literature classes and vintage shopping, I can ignore my mortality. Hers is insistent, constant. I could always be about to find out she has died.
When someone’s mortality is that apparent, I have to find her in as many material objects as I can, in case I need something to turn to, rather than having her life entirely wiped from mine.
I cared about clothing in high school; she didn’t, but she liked the things I bought. When I got sick of them, I gave them to her: a green bomber jacket, a red faux leather one. She has taken my old clothes and bought me some clothing. It is inherent to our sisterhood. She has touched the red suit she bought me for Christmas; her DNA is still in it, and that trace of her is as immortal as the clothing allows. We can sew ourselves into the clothing we own and share; does it not make sense to wear clothing that we can trust to outlive us?
Vintage clothing is strong. It can take on the world. It won’t fall apart and leave me once again trying to find something to make myself identifiable, to make myself fit.
Senior Arts Editor Erin Evans can be reached at erinev@umich.edu.