In their latest catalogue, J. Crew featured a spread called “Saturday with Jenna.” A photo shoot showing creative director and company president Jenna Lyons at home on a Saturday, enjoying her morning coffee, her J. Crew sweats and a round of toenail painting with her 5-year-old son Beckett. The caption reads, “Lucky for me I ended up with a boy whose favorite color is pink. Toenail painting is way more fun in neon.”
Incidentally, the company doesn’t even seem to be selling this shade of polish—though it does advertise a couple of more modest shades in the “necessary luxuries” section of the women’s wear shop—and it is certainly not listed alongside the pint-sized bowties and gingham shirts in the little boys’ section. But, so what if it did?
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If you ever go into your average shopping mall men’s wear store to buy a suit for a job interview, you’ll likely be told by an earnest and insistent saleswoman that you absolutely must purchase a white shirt and navy jacket. If clothes make the man—as such a saleswoman would likely agree, if she doesn’t outright assault you with that old chestnut—it would seem that all men unquestionably want to be made in the same way, at least in job interviews. But, maybe some of us would prefer a blue shirt. We might look better or feel more comfortable in blue. Maybe we believe that blue better represents us, and surely a job interview should tell a prospective employer a bit about you, even if it’s something as small as saying, “I would choose blue over white for this interview. I’m not so crazy as to think a mauve shirt would fly, but I’m not so programmatic as to simply follow the suggestions of a saleswoman.”
If clothes form first impressions, then they are also the introduction to our story, they frame the way our narrative will unfold, the plotline around which our current and future actions will develop. Clothes say a lot about us, and so we have a lot to say about our clothes. Who knows, in the end, the decision to wear the blue shirt might get you the job. And if you’re passed over for wearing blue? Well, do you really want to work in an office full of white-shirt wearers anyway?
To say that fashion is based on story-telling is hardly revolutionary. Designers, magazines and creative directors have long understood that giving an item of clothing a story turns it into fashion. Take fashion photography. How many Vogue spreads show a series of vignettes that look like they could be film stills, shots from a Cirque de Soleil production, or too-perfect photojournalistic snaps? The clothes are an afterthought, an overlay that accentuates the unnatural poses of the characters, the shoot is successful, or not, in its capacity to draw the viewer into its story.
Angelika Kocheva as Amelia Earhart, shot by Giuliano Bekor for Marie Claire Romania.
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