Dressing with purpose

"Dress for the job you want, not the job you have," it’s said.

Overall, it's sound advice. If you don't know how to look, overdressing is always safer than underdressing. But that begs the question: why don’t you know how to look?

After all, this is the age of the Internet. Pretty much anything you might want to know can be found at the touch of the button. If you’re reading this, you’ve officially lost any excuse for not knowing how to dress at any event you might find yourself at.

“Business casual? That’s a bit vague.” Look it up. “Black tie? What’s that?” Look it up. Yes, yes, you could play it safe and overdress, but that carries the risk of coming across as arch and aristocratic, and putting off everyone around you. Instead, I recommend a conscious effort to understand the role your outfit plays.

I recommend dressing with purpose.

Consider this: clothing is a tool, just like a hammer or a cooking pot, and like any tool it serves a specific purpose…but only if you know what you’re doing. Some clothing is built with physical needs in mind: sportswear are designed for comfort and durability, cold weather clothing is designed to keep you warm, and so on. That’s important, but it’s not what I’m talking about.

Beyond the physical level, the purpose of clothing is to create a certain impression of yourself, a specific impact that affects not only how others think of you, but how you think of yourself. Uniforms, the clearest example of outfits with a specific purpose, proclaim that the wearer is acting in a specific role, and subtly nudge their behavior in that direction. Suits are a bit less specific in their meaning, but also convey a clear message about the type of image their wearer wants to project. Otherwise, individual pieces can be mixed and matched to create an outfit that sends exactly the message you want and makes you feel exactly how you want.

I’m not going to go into further detail about which pieces cultivate which impressions; entire books can, and have, been written on the subject. For anyone interested in traditional menswear, Alan Flusser’s Dressing the Man is a fairly comprehensive and accessible guide on the subject. (Unfortunately, I know of no such guide for women’s clothing. If you know of one, please tell me!)

One final note: it’s paramount that you feel comfortable in the outfit you wear. However snazzy it might look on a mannequin, if you don’t feel right wearing it, it won’t look good. Maybe that outfit needs one last thing to finish it, maybe you’ve overdone it, or maybe it’s just not your thing. Develop a feeling for it, and figure out what works best for you.

So, what is dressing with purpose? First: understanding what kind of impression you want to make. Second: finding clothing that creates that impression. Third: making sure it feels right!

"Memoir of an Independent Woman" takes a walk through history

I don't read memoirs. It's not that I think poorly of them; it's that I don't think of them at all. I'm very pleased to say that Tania Grossinger's Memoir of an Independent Woman convinced me otherwise. In many ways, it’s exactly what it says on the cover: a powerful and personal tale of the life of an extraordinary and fundamentally Jewish woman in during a time of great cultural change in America.

Structured as a series of letters to the daughter she never had, Ms. Grossinger builds this story of her life not as a timeline but as a set of thematic threads woven together partly by time and place, but more by conceptual association. This is a wise choice, creating a rambling, conversational tale covering themes ranging from family to career-building to romance to mental health. She delivers it through anecdotes about her early life at Grossinger’s, the resort hotel that attracted America’s elite, to the who’s-who of historical personalities she met working in PR, to her rocky relationships both familial and romantic, to her later work as a travel writer. These little bits of history often touch on difficult and personal subject matter, but Tania approaches all with commendable grace and insight, reflecting as much on her own perspective and actions as the events around her.

Before reading her book, I had the good fortune to speak with Tania, who generously took the time out of her book tour for a call. Speaking with her in advance brought her story to life in a way I'm lucky to have experienced. With her voice and her unique, rambling style of storytelling fresh in my mind, it was almost as if she were reading the book to me herself. Few writers can convey their style of speech as written word, but Ms. Grossinger does so with an understated grace that is truly remarkable.

Often funny, sometimes bitter, always fascinating and wise, Memoir of an Independent Woman binds the personal and the historical into one thoroughly charming whole. For anyone interested in what it means to be a Jew in America, a woman in America, or a person in America, I recommend it. For anyone interested in American culture or history, I recommend it doubly.

Memoir of an Independent Woman: An Unconventional Life Well Lived was published by Skyhorse Publishing in 2013. It can be found here.

When it comes to treating people well, don't trust your instincts

The other day I discovered a particularly brilliant series of tweets.

All of this is brilliant, but the bit about not trusting your instincts really stuck with me. Stereotypes, casual observations of The Other, heirarchies are a poison of the mind that linger like a shadow on the edge of every thought, a darkness just out of view that colors beliefs and perceptions, even when you believe consciously that they’re wrong. 

As the privileged class (men, straight people, white people, etc.), in order to not be awful people, we must wage a constant war of spies and shadows in our own minds, where every thought and feeling, however innocuous, could be an enemy in disguise. We owe it, both to the less privileged around us and to ourselves, to fight this war, to run a background check on every idea and feeling and thought, to treat our own minds as a warzone.

Never assume you’re free of those ideas, because the moment you do, they’ve won.

And listen.