FROCK CONSCIOUSNESS
Is it the height of frivolity to love clothes? Not fashion, but clothes: their princess seams and elegant zippers, their fabrics and trimmings, the way they hug, or hint at, or flare away from the body. Call me frivolous, then, for I love clothes. I particularly love dresses—I do like some contemporary designers, but my real passion is for vintage dresses. I am enamored with the dresses of a long-defunct company called the Vested Gentress, which made the most extraordinary prints I’ve ever seen. I’m so delighted by these dresses that I collect them, and the sight of a closet with a yellow shift with big green sea turtles and a crisp white summer frock with poppies and puppies gives me more than a frisson of pleasure.
Vested Gentress garments are summer incarnate: bright colors, fun shapes, and a distinctive style of screenprints. If you search for them on Etsy or eBay you will surely see the word whimsical bandied about because VG dresses have the most astonishing fabrics, mainly of the natural world rendered in the—well, whimsical—VG style (and they all have “vg” incorporated into the prints). My collecting has the fervor of the acolyte: I cannot imagine anything as wonderful to wear as some of the Vested Gentress dresses I have seen. I’ll buy them in my size or larger, since I can always get them altered. I have tote bags full of VGs to be shortened, let out, or taken in so I don’t feel like I’m wearing a bold screenprinted sack.
In the meantime, I have a bright yellow dress with line drawings of orange lions, a soft white one with pink and green pastel pineapples, a maxi dress that brushes my ankles and has a pirate-style parrot repeating on it, a blue gingham dress with the outlines of white horses coming and going on the skirt, and many dresses with maritime themes (blue and green whales on a white background, black and white seagulls on a tan sundress, blue martinis and bright red anchors alternating in a red, white and blue checkerboard number), an amazing pink dress with giant two-toned green grasshoppers and two contrasting green rope belts; I have purple irises, pink and yellow daffodils, a baby blue one with turtledoves, a green shift with a smiling alligator, and a cartoonish white dress with huge green cacti surrounded by pink pots. Pictured is a pink dress with blue, green, and black decorations: tiger heads, crocodiles, elephants, and a hippo and a lion too. It’s a shift dress, but the shape follows mine quite nicely, and the dress ends with a bow and flare on each side.
Because I check for VGs daily, I always have a couple in the wings of my consciousness: after I got the pink one from Birmingham, Alabama, I bought a dress called “In the Trees,” a red robin in a bird’s nest repeating on a white background, from a woman in the Midwest. When that comes, there’s a frog dress I have my eye on with tabbed straps and a ruffle at the bottom (which will be my third frog VG). It’s a hobby that regenerates itself, like a hydra.
I fell in love with vintage clothes because I never wanted to be seen wearing the same thing as another woman. They are an escape from the conservative boredom of Banana Republic or the fast fashion of H&M. I love that my clothes have stories with past lives and histories I’ll never know. They’ve been to wild parties and staid country club dinners, balled up in suitcases, and left in a pool on the floor after a long day at a beach or in a village market. They’ve been lovingly laundered and hung in closets I will never know, closets I suspect look like mine: Vested Gentress attracts loyal fans. Like potato chips, people can’t buy just one. For me, clothes are inseparable from lived experience: if something significant happens, even years later, I will remember what I was wearing. If it was something really bad, I’ll never wear it again.
I’ve only found the passion for clothes I have in one writer: Virginia Woolf. Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton also write about clothes, as did Nancy Mitford and Joan Didion. None have the fervor of Woolf, who inherited her love of finery from her mother, Julia Stephen, a great beauty and Victorian trendsetter. She was photographed along with her sisters by their aunt, the pioneering photographer Julia Cameron Howe. Along with her friend Roger Fry, the art curator, Woolf edited a book of Howe’s photographs: the men stately, knowing, regal; the women haunted, ambiguous, tense. Howe’s reputation dipped in the early 20th century but with the excavation movements of the second-wave feminists, the photographer was not lost for long.
Woolf’s love for clothes was a private one. There’s a picture of her in April 1925 wearing her mother’s dress in Vogue. Woolf reflects in her diary that “people have any number of states of consciousness: & I should like to investigate the party consciousness, the frock consciousness & c.” Frock consciousness is a state I find myself in often, one of the few in which I’m not thinking in words but in pictures: I think of dresses I’ve loved, I think of the ones I aspire to have, and I think of the way in which those dresses will shape what happens to me. I wonder about when “In the Trees” will arrive, its red robins bopping happily in their nests just as summer finally comes to Canada.
Lisa Levy is a writer, essayist, and critic. Her work has appeared in many publications, including the New Republic, the LARB, the Believer, the Millions, and Lit Hub, where she is a contributing editor. She is also a columnist and contributing editor to Crime Reads. She is pursuing an MFA in nonfiction writing at Goucher College and working on a collection of linked essays about chronic illness and cultural ideas about life narrative, time, and futurity.
Lisa collects all sort of things: MOD dresses, varieties of Cadbury Dairy Milk Bars, etiquette books, dated essay anthologies, Lilli Ann coats, and old copies of the Partisan Review. In 2019, Lisa moved from New York City to Canada with her husband and their Basset hound. They live in the Leslieville neighborhood in the east end of Toronto. She considers herself an amateur Canadian.