"a profusion of lovely clothes": (Ad)dressing the Longing Imbued in My Fibers

Abstract

This dissertation focuses on clothing and the sartorial in an unorthodox archive of extra-literary and literary text objects. I argue that engagement with clothing is about the desire for relation with self, with parents, with siblings, with community, with nation, with family. The archive under consideration includes the following: Kara Walker’s The Means to an End (1995), silhouettes from my girlhood, a racist tchotchke from Mt. Vernon that I rescued from my maternal grandmother’s home, a number of photographs of my family members, American Girl Dolls and their wardrobes, Rubbermaid bins of baby and toddler clothing, Abercrombie & Fitch clothing, a pair of Dr. Scholl’s sandals, Babaá cotton cardigans, the contrastive tuxedo jacket my father wore to prom, Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928), and Gwendolyn Brooks’ Maud Martha (1953). Situated as it is, in a number of different fields, this project is a contribution to literary studies, African American studies, clothing studies, material culture studies, life writing, and creative nonfiction. Using a methods-forward approach that includes a number of maker-minded solutions to close reading an archive of mostly sartorial objects, I offer the following three distinct methods for engagement: 1) Accretive Returns: returning to critical objects in repeating cycles, and accumulating a number of non-hierarchical readings that, through their juxtaposition, allow relational understandings and new orientations to emerge; 2) “the blueprint” for close reading text objects, in this case sartorially inflected photographs, that asks readers to orient “beside” the object, becoming physically present with it and engaging multi-sensorially in order to yield intimate, relational readings; 3) Ledgers of (Be)longing: an analogue process of collecting and housing, in a single location, both sartorial objects and relationships in order to concretize and visualize the unreconciled–and unreconcilable–longing for relationship at the heart of our longing for clothing. Each chapter illuminates some dimension of the human engagement with clothing. In this way, sartorial engagement is about an engagement with garments at the same time that it is about the relationships that those garments point us toward, like a spotlight or a heat lamp. Clothing is a vehicle toward, and a material instantiation of, the longing to be a self in relation to, or “beside,” others. Our engagement with clothing must always consider the object itself (the maxi-skirt; the sandals) as well as the relationships that those objects point us toward (a relationship with other slow-fashion enthusiasts; an attempt to court the father’s undivided attention). I argue that clothing can and does do all of the following relational work: it is a force of assertion and evasion; it enables flight and also allows dressers to nest and court feelings of home; it is a buffer as well as a tether; it is a force for approximating in relationships that require distance and those that require proximity; it is an intermediary to communities and a reminder that one exists on the outskirts of said communities; it is an orientation point or homing device that can also disorient and destabilize. In each case, clothing is a tool for approximating, courting, sustaining, identifying, suturing, maintaining, and/or dissolving the relationships that animate our lives. Clothing is always clothing and more-than-clothing.