Shirts, Shorts and Worn Memories Featured at Ginny's in Harlem - Emily Spivack, Author " Worn Stories"

In 2007, James Billington, the long-serving Librarian of Congress and renowned American tastemaker, added director Jim Dassin’s 1948 film noir, “The Naked City,” to the National Film Registry.

The honor, bestowed on just 25 films each year deemed worthy of federal preservation, confirmed that Dassin, the Harlem-raised son of Russian Jews and one-time Communist, was an artist responsible for an indelible portrait of American life. But Dassin’s “Naked City,” closes with a single line -- a metaphor that so ably captures the experiences of love, avarice, fear and lechery often concentrated and only temporarily disguised in any metropolis -- that has remained more famous than the film. “There are eight million stories in the naked city; this has been one of them.”

Still, for all but a few New Yorkers most of the experiences that define their lives happen while at least partially clothed. It’s the ubiquity of clothing -- our pants and skirts, shoes and shorts, our stilettos and boots, our hats, our coats, our gloves – when stuff happens that, to Emily Spivack makes it an important element of our personal archives.

In early February, Spivack, 36, brought the concept of clothing as access point to memory, to Harlem. Spivack, author of the New York Times Best Seller, “Worn Stories” (published by Princeton Architectural Press in 2014), believes that clothing carries experiences. It makes us recall specific moments. And sometimes, we hang on to it well past its fashionable wear-by date, modify it or even give it away, specifically because of the stories our clothing contains. So, while much of the city shuffled through small mountains of snow or burrowed in at home, Spivack and three cultural luminaires with personal tales included in “Worn Stories,” shared their own clothing-centered narratives at Ginny’s Supper Club.

Red Rooster chef and owner Marcus Samuelsson read a story about his kitchen-work worn, “slightly feminine, turquoise Chuck Taylors.” They are an artifact of his time at a Swiss culinary school. For Piper Kerman a vintage, bone-colored skirt suit gave way to a story about what she wore the day she took a plea deal in exchange for a shorter prison sentence for drug trafficking. The outfit and the story Kerman read highlighted the vast class differences between Kerman, a well-educated and affluent white woman, and most of the human beings ensnared in the drug war. And Daniel Day, the Harlem designer and blogger known as Dapper Dan, read the story of a 40- year-old coat and its connection to the sweeping adventures fashion brought into his life. Day dressed early Hip Hop and New Jack Swing musicians such as Run DMC, LL Cool J, Salt n Pepa and Bobby Brown and, in that sense, influenced the sartorial choices of generations to come.

“In my closet, really in everyone’s closet are effectively documents, these items that catalogue our memories and experiences,” Spivack said in an interview with Harlem One Stop this week. “I would look into my own closet and see trips that I had taken and important conversations I’ve had. So I started writing some of my own stories down.”

When Spivack was growing up in Delaware, she nursed the kind of interest in fashion that always ran deeper, or at least distant from the rows of dresses and jeans sold at the mall. Spivack shopped at thrift stores, wore Doc Martins and went to Brown where she studied art semiotics. After college, Spivack founded a nonprofit that helped women with cancer develop a healthy body image. Clothing, can be therapeutic, “a wellness tool,” Spivack said.

In her personal life, at home with family and friends, Spivack started asking about their clothing. A simple question about the origins of a scarf or the age of a sweater often gave way to revealing stories Spivack had never heard before. Instead of the usual blanket statements about who they are or were and where they have been, Spivack’s family and friends talked about very specific moments – a battle, a birth or the second day of their honeymoon, Spivack said. 

“That’s when it occurred to me that clothing, precisely because it is universal, could be an overlooked story-telling tool,” Spivack said. 

 

In 2007, Spivack began collecting stories about the items of clothing posted for sale on eBay, on the Sentimental Value web site. Eventually, Spivack began writing The Smithsonian’s first ever fashion history blog, Threaded. And in 2010, Spivack began collecting the clothing-centered stories of strangers on her own blog, Worn Stories. What people shared gave way to a book filled with the full range of human emotion and experience that might pour out if, as National Public Radio put it, all of our “shorts could talk.”

The book includes a stabbing-victim’s story, inspired by the one-inch gash in a polo shirt that he refuses to throw away. It features a story about glorious moments with one writer’s baby and low moments in the same woman’s marriage all brought to mind by a tattered sweater. Then, there is the story of an ill-fitting and scarcely-worn suit made of wool one Polish-born Jewish woman salvaged from her parent’s store before it was destroyed. The woman and the wool survived the Holocaust, a gunshot wound, typhus and a near capsizing at sea. Her parents did not.

Even, Spivack wears a ring that her grandmother used to slip off her own finger whenever the two baked. And when Spivack gives workshops or speaks at public events like the Ginny’s Supper Club event in Harlem, the most amazing stories often pour out, from the audience.

“That’s the thing about clothes. People tend to get it right away,” she said. “Everyone can think of something in their closet that is of some significance to them, something that they just can't get rid of.”  

Photo credits: 

·          "Chuck Taylors" worn by chef and restauranteur Marcus Samuelsson while a student at a Swiss culinary school. Photo by Ally Lindsay.

·          The vintage suit worn by Piper Kerman the day she took a plea deal to reduce the prison time she was ordered to serve in connection with a drug conviction. Photo by Ally Lindsay. 

·          A 40-year-old coat owned by Daniel "Dapper Dan" Day, which reminds the Harlem designer of the adventures and opportunities he experienced outfitting early Hip-Hop and New Jack Swing musicians. Photo by Ally Lindsay. 

·          Seated (L-R) Marcus Samuelsson,  Emily Spivack, Piper Kerman and Daniel "Dapper Dan" Day at a Feb.2, 2015