Women in Clothes
Editors: Sheila Heti, Heidi Julavits, Leanne Shapton, 2014
Blue Rider Press
528 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780399166563
Summary
Women in Clothes is a book unlike any other. It is essentially a conversation among hundreds of women of all nationalities—famous, anonymous, religious, secular, married, single, young, old—on the subject of clothing, and how the garments we put on every day define and shape our lives.
It began with a survey. The editors composed a list of more than fifty questions designed to prompt women to think more deeply about their personal style. Writers, activists, and artists including Cindy Sherman, Kim Gordon, Kalpona Akter, Sarah Nicole Prickett, Tavi Gevinson, Miranda July, Roxane Gay, Lena Dunham, and Molly Ringwald answered these questions with photographs, interviews, personal testimonies, and illustrations.
Even our most basic clothing choices can give us confidence, show the connection between our appearance and our habits of mind, express our values and our politics, bond us with our friends, or function as armor or disguise. They are the tools we use to reinvent ourselves and to transform how others see us.
Women in Clothes embraces the complexity of women’s style decisions, revealing the sometimes funny, sometimes strange, always thoughtful impulses that influence our daily ritual of getting dressed. (From the publisher.)
Author Bios
Sheila Heti
• Birth—25 December 1976
• Where—Toronto, Ontario, Canada
• Education—University of Toronto; National Theater School of Canada
• Currently—lives in Toronto
Sheila Heti is a Canadian writer and editor. She was born in Toronto, Canada, as the child of Hungarian Jewish immigrants. She studied art history and philosophy at the University of Toronto and playwriting at the National Theatre School of Canada. She works as Interviews Editor at The Believer where she herself conducts interviews regularly. She previoiusly wrote a column on acting for Maisonneuve. Her brother is the comedian David Heti, a stand-up comedian.
Books
Heti's short story collection, The Middle Stories, was published in 2001, when she was twenty-four
Her novel, Ticknor, was released in 2005. The novel's main characters are based on real people: William Hickling Prescott and George Ticknor, although the facts of their lives are altered.
The Chairs are Where The People Go, published in 2011, was co-written with her friend, Misha Glouberman. The New Yorker called it "a triumph of conversational philosophy" and named it one of the Best Books of 2011.
Heti describes her 2010 book How Should a Person Be? as a constructed reality, based on recorded interviews with her friends, particularly the painter Margaux Williamson. The New York Times selected it as one of the 100 Best Books of 2012, and James Wood of The New Yorker also considered it one of the best books of the year.
In a 2007 interview with Dave Hickey for The Believer, she commented:
Increasingly I'm less interested in writing about fictional people, because it seems so tiresome to make up a fake person and put them through the paces of a fake story. I just can't do it.
Extras
• Heti is the creator of Trampoline Hall, a popular monthly lecture series based in Toronto and New York, at which people speak on subjects outside their areas of expertise. The New Yorker praised the series for "celebrating eccentricity and do-it-yourself inventiveness." It has sold out every show since its inception in December 2001.
• For the early part of 2008, Heti kept a blog called The Metaphysical Poll, where she posted the sleeping dreams people were having about Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton during the 2008 primary season, which readers sent in.
• Heti was an actress as a child, and as a teenager appeared in shows directed by Hillar Liitoja, the founder and Artistic Director of the experiemental DNA Theatre. Heti appears in Margaux Williamson's 2010 film, Teenager Hamlet.
• Heti plays Lenore Doolan in Leanne Shapton's book, Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry
• In November 2013, Jordan Tannahill directed Heti's play All Our Happy Days are Stupid at Toronto's Videofag. Heti's decade-long struggle to write the play is a primary plot element in her book How Should a Person Be? (From the publisher.)
Heidi Julavitz
• Birth—1968
• Where—Portland, Maine, USA
• Education—B.A., Dartmouth College; M.F.A., Columbia University
• Currently—lives in New York City and Camden, Maine
Heidi Suzanne Julavits is an American author and co-editor of The Believer magazine. She has been published in The Best Creative Nonfiction Vol. 2, Esquire, Story, Zoetrope All-Story, and McSweeney’s Quarterly. Her novels include The Mineral Palace (2000), The Effect of Living Backwards (2003), The Uses of Enchantment (2006), and The Vanishers (2012).
Background and education
Julavits was born and grew up in Portland, Maine, before attending Dartmouth College. She later went on to earn an MFA from Columbia University.
The Believer
For the debut issue of The Believer, she wrote one of the lead articles, titling it "Rejoice! Believe! Be Strong and Read Hard!: A Call For A New Era of Experimentation and a Book Culture That Will Support It." The Believer, is a literary magazine founded by Dave Eggers in 2003 and publised nine times a year from San Franciso. It urges its readers and writers to "reach beyond their usual notions of what is accessible or possible."
New York Times cultural critic A.O. Scott described the magazine as part of "a generational struggle against laziness and cynicism, to raise once again the banners of creative enthusiasm and intellectual engagement." It has a "cosmopolitan frame of reference and an eclectic internationalism," mixing pop genres with literary theory.
In 2005, Julavits told Scott how she decided on The Believer's tone:
I really saw 'the end of the book' as originating in the way books are talked about now in our culture and especially in the most esteemed venues for book criticism. It seemed as though their irrelevance was a foregone conclusion, and we were just practicing this quaint exercise of pretending something mattered when of course everyone knew it didn't.
She added that her own aim as book critic would be "to endow something with importance, by treating it as an emotional experience."
Personal
Julavits currently lives in Maine and Manhattan with her husband, the writer Ben Marcus, and their children. (Adapted from Wikipedia articles. Retrieved 10/12/2014.)
Leanne Shapton
• Birth—June 25, 1973
• Where—Toronto, Ontario, Canada
• Education—McGill University; Pratt Institute
• Awards—National Book Critics Circle Award
• Currently—lives in New York City, New York USA
Leanne Shapton is a Canadian artist and graphic novelist, now living in New York City. Her second work, Important Artifacts and Personal Property From the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion and Jewelry, has been optioned for a film slated to star Brad Pitt and Natalie Portman. The novel, which takes the form of an auction catalog, uses photographs and accompanying captions to chronicle the romance and subsequent breakup of a couple via the relationship's significant possessions or "artifacts."
Shapton's first work, Was She Pretty?, was a 2007 nominee for the Doug Wright Award, a Canadian award for comics and graphic novels. It explored, via a series of line-drawn illustrations, the issues of relationship jealousy and feminine insecurity as told through the imagined superior traits of the subjects' boyfriends' exes.
Shapton is also an art director for newspapers and magazines. Formerly associated with Saturday Night, Maclean's and the National Post in Canada, she has worked as art director for the op-ed page at The New York Times. She has created hand lettering for a number of book covers, including Chuck Palahniuk's 2003 novel Diary. She is also a partner in J&L Books.
Her autobiographical book Swimming Studies (2012) deals with her youth as a national competitive swimmer, who made it as far as the 1988 and 1992 Canadian Olympic trials. It is a "meditation on the grueling years of training, the ways swimming is refracted through her memory now." It won the National Book Critics Circle Award (Autobiography).
Shapton created the "armpit sex drawing" for Spike Jonze's 2013 film Her. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 10/12/2014.)
Book Reviews
[P]art advice manual, part anthropological study, part feminist document…The volume contains hundreds of stories, which is why it's not the kind of book you'll read straight through but is perfect for flipping around in late at night in the tub, or for giving as a gift with certain parts marked…All three of the editors, when they appear in the text as interlocutors, are wonderful interviewers and essayists—subtle, probing, sympathetic—but Heti, especially, has a gift for pulling insight from details of other women's lives that might at first seem banal or irrelevant.
Sasha Weiss - New York Times Book Review
This charming patchwork expands the scope of fashion writing by looking not at forerunners of style but at how those outside the industry think about what they wear….The range of women involved [is] dazzling…a welcome addition to writing that often focuses on a single trend for all.
Madeleine Schwartz - Boston Globe
Thoughtfully crafted and visually entertaining, this collection...uses personal reflections from 642 contributors to examine women’s relationship with clothes in a deceptively lighthearted and irreverent tone.... A provocative time capsule of contemporary womanhood, this collection is highly recommended. B&w illus and photos throughout, 32 pages in full color.
Publishers Weekly
[A] delirious assortment of conversations, essays, journal entries, and photographs…This big, busy book feels like a thrift store brimming with jumbles of clothes and accessories and alive with women’s voices.... A uniquely kaleidoscopic and spirited approach to an irresistible subject of universal resonance.
Booklist
A quirky anthology exploring the meaning of clothes. [The editors] are interested not in what women wear, but why.... Poems, interviews, pieces that read like diary or journal entries—all these responses help the editors fulfill their aims: to liberate readers from the idea that women have to fit a certain image or ideal.... [A] delightfully idiosyncratic book.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
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• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
(We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher.)