Worn in New York

Spivack Emily Spivack

Description

The boots a passenger had on when his plane landed on the Hudson River. The tank top Andy Warhol's assistant wore to one of their nightclub outings together. The jacket a taxi driver put on to feel safe as he worked the night shift. -These and over sixty other clothing-inspired narratives make up Worn in New York, the latest volume from New York Times bestselling author Emily Spivack. In these first-person accounts, contributors in and out of the public eye share surprising, personal, wild, poignant, and funny stories behind a piece of clothing that reminds them of a significant moment of their New York lives. Worn in New York offers a contemporary cultural history of the city-its changing identity, temper, and tone, and its irrepressible vitality-by paying tribute to these well-loved clothes and the people who wore them. Includes contributions from:Adam Horovitz Amy Heckerling Andre Royo Anna Sui Aubrey Plaza Catherine Opie Coco Rocha Dick Cavett Eileen Myles Fab 5 Freddy Gay Talese Genesis Breyer P-Orridge JD Samson Jenji Kohan Jenna Lyons Kyp Malone Lena Dunham Pee Wee Kirkland Thelma Golden Timothy Greenfield-Sanders

Informations

• Publié par: ABRAMS BOOKS
• Date de parution: 10 octobre 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781683351795
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

It carries on its lapel the unexpungeable odor of the long past, so that no matter where you sit in New York you feel the vibrations of great times and tall deeds, of queer people and events and undertakings. -E. B. WHITE, Here is New York , 1949
INTRODUCTION
ADAM HOROVITZ
ALICIA VAN COUVERING
AMY HECKERLING
ANDRE ROYO
ANDREW LAMPERT
ANNA SUI
ARIEL CHURNIN
AUBREY PLAZA
AYA KANAI
BARBARA HANSON TREEN
BEAUREGARD HOUSTON-MONTGOMERY
BEN BOSTIC
BENJAMIN LIU
BETTY HALBREICH
BILLY GONZALEZ
BRENDA BERKMAN
CATHERINE OPIE
COCO ROCHA
DAVID BARTON
DEBORAH BERKE
DICK CAVETT
DONNA DRAKE
EILEEN MYLES
ELIZABETH MARIE RIVERA
ELIZABETH SWEETHEART
EMILY SPIVACK
ERNIE GLAM
FAB 5 FREDDY
FRANCES GOLDIN
GAIL OLDFIELD
GAY TALESE
GENESIS BREYER P-ORRIDGE
GEORGE HIRSCH
GERARD MEADE
JANETTE BECKMAN
JD SAMSON
JENJI KOHAN
JENNA LYONS
JIM WALROD
JOSHUA STOKES
KIMBERLY DREW
KITTEN NATIVIDAD
KYP MALONE
LENA DUNHAM
LEVONDA BROWN
LISA BONANNI
MARK JACOBSON
MARTY MARKOWITZ
MATT CAPRIOLI
MEL SHIMKOVITZ
MICHAELA ANGELA DAVIS
MIKE MASSIMINO
MIRAH ZEITLYN
NICK HARAMIS
NILE RODGERS
PATRICIA BATH
PATRICIA TALISSE
PEE WEE KIRKLAND
RAY GOODMAN
ROSEANN PALMIERI
RUTH FINLEY
SHOHAM ARAD
TAUNO BILTSTED
THELMA GOLDEN
TIMOTHY GREENFIELD-SANDERS
TREN NESS WOODS-BLACK
WILLIAM HELMREICH
WILSON TANG
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INTRODUCTION
In New York City, we wear our clothes hard. We grind the soles of Converse and Manolo Blahniks into the pavement. Over the course of a hot summer, we sweat through crisp white T-shirts until they re a dingy gray. We hire cobblers and tailors to keep things from falling apart, and we schlep our laundry by hand and cart to laundromats and drycleaners. Our clothes are worn, and they get worn out. Our bodies help them disintegrate into the landscape of the city. The wear-and-tear is proof that we are active participants in city life.
And New York touches our clothes and leaves its own traces, too. The moment we walk out the door our experiences get mapped onto or absorbed into what we re wearing. Our jeans get splashed with muck from a passing bus. Fellow passengers trample our shoes in an overcrowded subway car. An air conditioner in a window overhead drips onto our shirts. And, until recently, a night in a smoky bar would live on our clothes for days. Whatever choices we ve made about why we put on the clothes we wear-fashion, comfort, creative expression, protection-the city will have its say.
The only thing between our skin and the city is our clothing, simultaneously shielding and exposing us. Our bodies press against our clothes just as the city presses back. As the British cultural theorist Elizabeth Wilson described in her book, Adorned in Dreams , A part of this strangeness of dress is that it links the biological body to the social being, and public to private [The body] is an organism in culture, a cultural artifact even, and its own boundaries are unclear.
Those public-private boundaries blur in New York, a place where you are rarely in isolation, and where you are often seen and watched. The sidewalk is a runway-even more so than the runways at fashion week-as is the bus stop, the line at the bodega, and Central Park. Unlike in cities that depend on cars, we put ourselves on display in New York. The construction worker in steel toe boots, the tourist in trekking gear, the woman in her suit, the high school kids with backpacks and skinny jeans are all juxtaposed: We absorb the looks of everyone around us, all of us on the D train together. A few flaunt. Some observe. Many disappear in the sheer volume of people.
The flaunters, the observers, the invisible-I watch all of them. I take in and catalog their sartorial cues. I learn a lot from what people wear (and also from what they read, eat, how they look at their phones, how they look at each other). That s one of the reasons I chose to live in New York. When I m away from the city for long periods of time, I feel depleted. I miss the looking. And the speculating-I always find myself imagining what the people of New York are doing when they are not sitting across from me on the train. What are their stories?
It is that curiosity which drove me to make Worn in New York . I didn t want to merely imagine the lives of strangers, so I asked sixty-eight real people for real New York stories centered on an item of clothing that had meaning for them. I interviewed artists, writers, doctors, musicians, athletes, astronauts, fashion designers, performers, architects, squatters, firefighters, business people, and bodega owners. I began each interview by asking the same question: What piece of clothing reminds you of a significant moment or experience in New York City?
That question had been refined from an early incarnation of this project in 2010. Back then I hosted a series of creative non-fiction writing workshops at places such as Philadelphia s Institute of Contemporary Art. I had a suspicion that clothing might be a catalyst to help people tell their stories, so I asked participants to bring something from their closet with special significance. I guided them to explore that significance, steering them through the process of divining stories from their garments.
Story, to me, is the unrealized dimension of our wardrobe. Sometimes, a glance inside a closet is like browsing through a great essay collection. That belief led me to start the Worn Stories website in 2010, in which I curated and published contributions from friends and strangers. This eventually became the basis for my first book, Worn Stories , which gathered clothing-inspired narratives from across the country.
I was confident that a similar premise would flourish in New York City, a densely populated place with people who have come from all over the world to make their mark. For Worn in New York , I set out to capture the city s constantly-evolving identity, temper, and tone, and its irrepressible vitality by paying tribute to well-loved clothes and the people who wore them. Here, I ve assembled a contemporary cultural history of New York City, told through clothing.
Selecting contributors for Worn in New York was both an intentional and organic process. I sought out notable and everyday people who were native New Yorkers, tourists, and anywhere in between, who represented diverse age groups, backgrounds, professions, and all five boroughs. But as I conducted the interviews, those stories organically shaped who I interviewed next. I cast a wide net. I reached out to friends, individuals whose work I admire, and strangers on Craigslist.
I traversed the city to interview the book s contributors. I talked to Adam Horovitz on his fire escape in Chelsea and Gay Talese over a scotch on the rocks at his townhouse on the Upper East Side. Michaela Angela Davis showed up at a Clinton Hill caf wearing the piece from her story, and Ariel Churnin slid her stolen garment to me across a caf table in Bushwick. I met Billy Gonzalez at his namesake bodega in the Bronx and Betty Halbreich over tea sandwiches at her office at Bergdorf s. I spoke to contributors over the phone who now live in California, Pennsylvania, Maine, North Carolina, and Texas.
As I heard more and more stories, I watched a multilayered map of New York emerge, linking contributors who likely had never crossed paths. Mirah Zeitlyn told me of her underwear that got ripped while training for the 2015 New York City Marathon, the event that George Hirsch founded nearly forty years before. Both Jenna Lyons and Lisa Bonnani had firsts at The Met-Jenna described her first time at the Met Gala, and Lisa described her tradition of wearing the same shirt on every first date, including one to The Met. The many unexpected intersections, like these, made the city feel both smaller and less daunting.
The stories within Worn in New York span seven decades, and its contributors range in age from their mid-twenties to mid-nineties. But there are innumerable people I wish I could have spoken to who are no longer alive. I would have loved to ask photographer Bill Cunningham about the blue jacket he wore everyday to photograph New Yorkers or hear James Jarrett Jr., a.k.a. Buster, talk about the uniform he wore for seventy years as Henri Bendel s only doorman. Socialite and philanthropist Brooke Astor might have talked about the white gloves she wore to present charitable donations at a public school or gala, and Jack Kreindler, co-owner of the 21 Club, could have told me about the cowboy attire he wore around New York City when he wasn t at his restaurant. And that s just to name a few.
Knowing I couldn t speak to these iconic figures motivated me even more to make this archive of sartorial memoirs of the city before the storytellers and their clothes-which will inevitably be thrown out, given away, or fall apart-are gone. But this book isn t about wistfulness for times past; rather, it s about documenting stories that emerge between the quotidian and extraordinary moments that only New York can offer, creating a living history of the city.
Clothes are the tangible material of memories. They reveal the historical, the cultural, and the personal. That s especially true in New York where they accompany us as we live our lives in public. No matter if you were born in New York or visited for a single day, every one of us who has moved through the world s ninth largest city has experienced it clothed. And each of us has a story to tell. Here are some of those stories.
-EMILY SPIVACK
ADAM HOROVITZ
I don t exactly know how I ended up with this T-shirt. It had been Kate Schellenbach s and we used to be in Beastie Boys together. I must have borrowed it from her when I was fifteen. I liked it because it was comfortable. And because it was Kate s, who I thought was so cool, especially because she was a year older than me, which was a big deal then.