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1968-ish, Bronxville, NY

… Vanessa and I … were both … tomboys; … [we were] said not to care for clothes…. Everything to do with dress –  to be fitted, to come into a room wearing a new dress — still frightens me; at least makes me shy, self-conscious, uncomfortable. – Virginia Woolf, A Sketch of the Past

In my experience, in both college and grad school, with one exception (Joseph Campbell), the more casually a professor dressed, the more effective he was as a teacher. At Sarah Lawrence the male teachers wore corduroy, nice and baggy. It took the female teachers a few years to exchange their pleated A-line skirts for cuffed flannel trousers. The students (who were 98% female back then), wore jeans as tight as leggings and Frye boots. For class they often changed into hem-dragging, antique satin negligees, a la Myrna Loy, but never forsook those clunky Fryes, which they’d indolently prop on the classroom table in a gesture requisite to igniting the first cigarette of the hour.

Later, when I was at art school at Penn, everyone wore bluejeans except for Neil Welliver, who favored bucolic khaki chinos and khaki shirts, having just flown in from Maine (he commuted). Joe Brainard, one of the many visiting artists from New York City, who was around 25, had a mop of brown wavy hair, oversize glasses, and a boyish look of equal parts innocence and guilt. His jeans had a big red rose appliqued on the crotch, which I chalked up to evidence of maverick genius. He made intricate collages by cutting images out of postage stamps and he wrote poetry. Also, he was gay, which impressed me. How glam to be out, and outrageous about it.

Until I was 18, and my youngest sister 9, we four were attired in identical little dresses with puffy sleeves, and patent-leather Mary-Janes with white knee socks. Our ages ranged from pre- to post-adolescence, and being dressed like a child for so long may have accounted for my arrested development. We called ourselves the “Trapped” family, not thrilled to have to play Baroque recorder–soprano, alto and tenor–with our four girl cousins, who were our ages and lived just two houses down, a proximity that made us think we all had two sets of parents. (The recorder-idea, and perhaps the dressing alike, happened when Mom and Dad saw the Von Trapp Family Singers, pre-Sound of Music, I think, on Broadway.)

When I left the rather formal, upper-middle-class Miami suburbs of my elegant parents, with their movie-star looks and immaculate grooming, I donned forbidden jeans, buttoned my one skimpy cardigan up the back, and wore boots from then on. I let my hair grow out of the regulation good-girl bob that was styled at a beauty-parlor whenever my mother noticed my hair descending below chin-level. Simultaneously she made a moue and a salon appointment, commenting, “You look like the wild woman of Borneo.” On vacations home from college, that first year, she’d say (only half joking), “Before you go inside the house, step out of those clothes. They should be burned.” It was our little ritual. Of course she didn’t burn them—she washed them, so at least they were clean. (As Hawthorne remarked about Melville, “He is a person of very gentlemanly instincts in every respect, save that he is a little heterodox in the matter of clean linen.”) And someone had to work the matted tangles out of my eventually waist-length hair, which I never brushed. Those behaviors, plus not eating, were my forms of rebellion, in lieu of the drugs and sex everyone else was experimenting with. I never outgrew an abhorrence for having to dress up, but thankfully I did transcend the anorexia.

In Miami, in the old days, we were close to a certain family who were bohemian intellectuals. The mother, who had gone all the way through school with Mom from first grade through college, was a concert pianist. The father, having been mysteriously debarred from practicing law, happily concocted a renaissance-style life at home, painting wild pictures and doing all the cooking.  At a time when men had their barbers clip their hair very short, this father wore his in a multicolored frenzy like an orchestra conductor.They lived with their four kids (I guess it was fashionable back then to have exactly four), whose ages corresponded with ours, in a ramshackle two-story mansion (sagging, everything on the brink of collapse and the bedrooms always a creative mess). At a time when furniture came in matching sets, theirs was eclectic, once-good pieces debased by time, which looked as if they’d been collected piecemeal from the Salvation Army.  This didn’t jive with the invisible fact that they were quite wealthy. But there was a Steinway grand, and more books (and many in foreign languages) than I’d ever seen in a house.  The family disdained air conditioning, which contributed to a pervasive odor of humidity, saltwater and mildew, common in the oldest Miami dwellings. Out back sprawled a huge borderless tract, complete with a derelict fire engine, that seemed a metaphor of their ethos of poetic dishevelment and haphazard nonchalance. The kids went to parties with holes in their shirts, and that made them seem immensely free.

Their aesthetics informed my own. Now that I’m older (well, old, to be precise), it is socially outre to be slovenly. I do consider upgrading my sartorial literacy, but have no real aptitude for it. Recently, on two separate occasions, it was suggested that I make more of an effort. My department head at NYU said, “Wearing the clothes you paint in, to teach, is simply unprofessional.” We’d been sitting in his office, talking merrily about art and philosophy. Suddenly he noticed the threadbare denim (once black, now gray) on my left knee, which that very day had metastasized into quite an unprofessional-looking tear. I  apologized and bought a pristine new pair of jetty jeans. But within a day or so they somehow acquired a spot of Permanent Green Light. (Sigh.)

With luck, no one will notice it or care. At least until the pigment works its way into the cotton (for oil corrodes fabric, which is why we prime canvas). But it’s slow. I figure it will be a few years until I have to face the eventuality of that particular rip. Meanwhile, I can make cut-offs of my old flawed jeans, for the summer. Not to wear out, of course. I know better than to make that sartorial blunder.

PLEASE SEE MY NEW WEB SITE at http://www.janefreemanart.com