by Emily Spivack
(Princeton Architectural Press)
Polonius was right — clothes do make the man — but he was wrong about why.
Why you love certain garments has less to do with how they look and more about the memories they evoke, says Emily Spivack. For instance, she wears a ring every day because it was owned by her grandmother and keeps a pair of peach socks because it’s what she wore to her first concert (Milli Vanilli).
This emotional connection to clothes inspired Spivack to put together a collection of tales called “Worn Stories.”
Inside, New York City Ballet dancer Tiler Peck explains why she wears the same leg warmers before every performance for comfort and luck; soccer player Brandi Chastain shows off the shirt from her first tournament at age 10; and film director Jonathan Levine details his love/hate relationship with a Latrell Sprewell jersey.
Here are six of the other yarns found inside.
Cynthia Rowley
The fashion designer was a Girl Scout overachiever, getting so many badges in her small Illinois town that she didn’t have time to sew them on — she pinned them. She credits the scouts with her business acumen: Always one goal at a time, make your uniform fashionable, and sell those cookies.
Of keeping the sash, she writes: “After all these years, it still made me feel proud of myself.
“I can still do the Girl Scout Promise: ‘On my honor, I will try to do my duty to God and my country, to help other people at all times, and obey the Girl Scout laws.’ I am such a total dork.”
Greta Gerwig
At age 18, the actress and writer (“Frances Ha”) worked as a stage manager at a theater company in Vermont. She had a crush on 26-year-old actor named David, and found any excuse to hug him — and his soft, button-down shirt.
Though nothing ever happened between them, after she saw him off at the bus station, Gerwig discovered that David left behind the shirt with a note in the pocket saying she was beautiful.
“Doesn’t it just kill you?” Gerwig writes. “Can you imagine an 18-year-old girl coming back from the bus station to her room and seeing that the guy she loved had left his shirt for her? He knew. He just knew it, and it was beautiful.
“I always write in the shirt because it makes me feel like I have a secret.”
Marcus Samuelsson
By coincidence, two foreign chefs — April Bloomfield of the Spotted Pig, who hails from England, and Marcus Samuelsson of Red Rooster, who grew up in Ethiopia and Sweden — both chose Converse sneakers, which they both bought as a symbol of America.
Bloomfeld bought hers the day she received her green card.
Samuelsson got his while in Switzerland on a culinary scholarship.
“If you’re American, it’s hard to understand how aspirational America was for people like me . . . particularly around brands like Converse, Levi’s, Vans and MTV,” he writes.
No one was allowed in the kitchen in sneakers, but Samuelsson said if he was feeling rebellious, he’d wear the Converse.
“As a cook, you’re taught that you aren’t supposed to be seen, but that was impossible for me because as the only young black cook, I was seen the moment anyone entered the kitchen. So what did it matter if I wore Converse?”
Piper Kerman
After entering into a romantic relationship with a drug dealer and laundering money for her, Kerman was sentenced to 15 months in prison. Her experience became the book, and later television series, “Orange is the New Black.”
This was the suit she wore to her plea deal, a vintage 1950s “coffee and cream tweed” she had bought on eBay. “It looked like something a Hitchcock heroine would have worn.”
“For someone standing for judgment, the importance of being seen as a complete human being, someone who is more than just the contents of the file folders that rest on the bench in front of His or Her Honor, cannot be overstated,” Kerman writes.
It was also a nice counterbalance to her neck tattoo, which served her better in prison.
“That’s the one,” her lawyer said of the suit. “We want the judge to be reminded of his own daughter or niece or neighbor when he looks at you.”
Kathleen Drohan
The Brooklyn freelancer writer has worn this sweatshirt almost every day for six years.
Her mother had gotten sick, and while Drohan imagined a serene, touching moment, it was instead cold, remote and devastating. On seeing Drohan, her mother whispered, “You’re here, too? I know what that means.”
Instead of the Dr. McDreamy she imagined would be there to comfort her, Drohan got a doctor she called McIHateYou, who turned off the machine monitoring her mother’s vitals. Seeing Drohan shivering in the air conditioning, he gave her the Harvard Medical School sweatshirt.
“I put the sweatshirt on, grateful for its warmth, but I still hated him. I would hate him until he turned the machine back on, turned my mother back on,” she writes.
“Since that day, I’ve put on the sweatshirt whenever I’m home alone. . . . I look less like a coed in her boyfriend’s sweater, as I imagine myself, and more like a homeless woman in cast-offs. The stains are deeply set in, and its cuffs are frayed, but I can’t imagine replacing this sweatshirt.
“My mother would have hated it. Most people hate it. I love it.”
Rosanne Cash
It’s a shirt that her father, Johnny Cash, owned that you wouldn’t necessarily expect. The Man in Black wore this purple shirt on stage a few times, and Rosanne at first wasn’t sure why she kept it.
Now she knows. “Sometimes when I look at the jackets and the boots, it makes me very sad and I miss him. I think of his big feet and those big boots. But I look at the purple shirt and I smile.”