Sometimes the Stories Matter More Than the Clothes
In her new book, Worn in New York: 68 Sartorial Memoirs of the City, Emily Spivack describes, quite romantically, why wearing clothes in New York City is so different than almost anywhere else.
"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."
In a four-page introduction, Spivack touches a certain nerve that only a metro-dwelling, clothing-conscious person could relate to, all while presenting the city itself with elements of both villainy and virtuousness.
Take an average commute for example. The villainous city pins you smack up against the attire, personal hygiene, and fragrance choices of a dozen strangers. You're flattened against the subway doors that you're not supposed to lean on, slithering your hand down to your pocket to grab a buzzing phone, all while the unregulated temperature puts the breathability of what felt like a lightweight sweater this morning to the test.
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New Yorkers' wardrobes take a beating, and often, those unique-to-New York moments of exhaustion yield stories that you don't have to be a New Yorker to relate to.
And so with Worn in New York, Spivack set out to tell those stories. The stories of real New Yorkers, famous and un-famous, permanent and temporary, young and old. The stories we all fantasize about while we're busy trying to live out our own versions of them. And the stories that show the righteousness that only a city with a stressful side can bring about.
In Worn, each story is tied to an item of clothing that serves as a nostalgic portal to a chapter of the storyteller's New York life - one that provided a lesson, a turning point, or a new sense of meaning. Like Aubrey Plaza's NBC Page uniform, the antics that go along with it, and how her stealing it landed her a role in 30 Rock. Or fashion editor Aya Kanai's black boots that were no match for a New York-winter, causing a fall, a concussion, and eventually, something pretty beautiful.
Getting that concussion made me realize that when a challenging life moment happens, the person I wanted to have around me, other than my family, was my ex-boyfriend, and now husband. Every once in a while, something changes and the people who matter and the way you need to take care of yourself are instantly apparent.
"It's that curiosity that drove me to make Worn in New York," Spivack says. "I didn't want to merely imagine the lives of strangers, so I asked 68 people for real New York Stories centered on an item of clothing that had meaning for them. Clothes are the tangible material of memories. They reveal the historical, the cultural, and the personal."
Below are stories from Kanai, author Gay Talese, and bodega owner Billy Gonzalez in Worn in New York, as told to Emily Spivack.
Aya Kanai
I am a punctual person. As a lifelong New Yorker, I know how long it’s going to take to get from place to place. But on February 14, 2014, there was a massive blizzard, the kind where there are no cars on the road and people are skiing in the middle of the street, where everything is white until it gets dirty and you’re jumping over a puddle the size of Lake Michigan to get across the street.
I was attending New York Fashion Week as I had done every season for the past thirteen years. But I was late to the Ralph Lauren fashion show. The venue was on Washington Street, close to the West Side Highway. Because of the weather, the car-service cars were backed up in front of the venue. I was nervous about being late, so I got out of my car about two blocks away and started running. I was wearing this pair of boots that are a fashion editor’s version of snow boots, which is to say they weren’t a chunky Sorel boot that some- one would go trekking in. As I was running down the sidewalk, I slipped about half a block from the venue and slammed my head against a building on Washington Street.
Later I learned that an editor from another magazine had found me in the snow, passed out on the sidewalk. She got security guards to drag me inside the venue. I remem- ber opening my eyes and seeing an ambulance. They put me on one of those boards where they lock in your neck and you can’t move. Thankfully a coworker joined me and called my parents.
In the hospital, I was told I had a mild concussion. I was getting asked all these med- ical questions, like when I’d had certain vaccinations. I had gone on a trip to Africa with my ex-boyfriend and he knew all that information, which I couldn’t remember, so I texted him. He was alarmed that I’d had an accident, so he came to check on me. I imagine it was hard for someone who I was out of touch with but who I’d been in a serious relationship with for three years to see me on a gurney and in a vulnerable condition. I hadn’t even realized until now that it was Valentine’s Day!
The doctors told me that because I’d had a concussion, I wasn’t supposed to work,
check my phone, watch TV, or, if I was by myself, sleep. I was supposed to be around people in case something happened neurologically. At the time, I was living alone in Greenpoint and my parents were living in a studio apartment in Murray Hill, because their house was being renovated. I stayed on their floor for a week. It was very cocoon-like. My parents would make me Japanese-style home cooking and we would sit around this little card table with my ex-boyfriend, drink soup, and hang out. It was like being a kid again in this strange way, a bizarrely nice moment to just be with my family. If this accident hadn’t happened, I wouldn’t have had this time with my family and my ex, and he and I wouldn’t have had a real reason to be in touch again.
"It’s so easy to get wrapped up in everything you’re doing, going from thing to thing, unaware of the ground beneath your feet."
In the fashion industry, it always feels like if you’re not present for every event, you’re
going to fall behind. What I learned through this accident, though, is that if you step away for a moment, it’s totally fine. When I returned to work I was a little more interested in taking care of myself. Getting that concussion made me realize that when a challenging life moment happens, the person I wanted to have around me, other than my family, was my ex-boyfriend, now husband.
Every once in a while, something changes and the people who matter and the way you
need to take care of yourself are instantly apparent. Otherwise, it’s so easy to get wrapped up in everything you’re doing, going from thing to thing, unaware of the ground beneath your feet.
Aya Kanai has been chief fashion director at Cosmopolitan, Seventeen, Good Housekeeping, Redbook, and Woman's Day, and is a judge on Project Runway: Junior. She is a native New Yorker who currently lives in Brooklyn.
Gay Talese
I have an affinity for familiarity. What I have now, in many cases, is what I decided I wanted fifty years ago. My wife, Nan, and I married in 1959, and that same year, she moved into my rent-controlled apartment in a brownstone on East Sixty-First Street. Later, I bought the brownstone, and I still live there today. Where I sleep, our marital bedroom, has been the same since we moved in. In 1958, I bought a Triumph TR3, an English sports car. I still drive it. If I make a decision, I don’t change it. Not because I have a certitude about things. But once I do it, it’s done.
And then there are my clothes. I have sixty to seventy winter suits and probably the same number of summer suits. I still wear a Brioni suit I bought in Rome in 1959 on the occasion of my marriage. I have a whole room just for hats and ties. I have about fifty hats, mostly wintertime fedoras, and about three hundred ties that range from 1950s styles to where we are now. Styles change, colors change, fabrics change, the width of a tie changes - I don’t care. I can still live in any decade I want.
Some of my clothes require facelifts as I get older. I’m very slender, but because I might have put on four or five pounds in fifty years, certain jackets and suits become a little tight. Instead of getting rid of clothes, I’ll have new fabric artistically inserted into the seams of a jacket to give it a whole new look. I have fifteen to twenty jackets I’ve com- pletely redesigned with the main purpose of not getting rid of them. I’ll take them across the street to the tailor and say, “The cuffs and lapel are getting worn. Let’s add tan piping across this brown jacket.” Or, “The back is a little tight, so we’re putting two stripes, maybe suede inserts, that fit in an artistic way.” It’s the same with shoes. I never get rid of them.
I have them redesigned or remade by a shoemaker on Lexington Avenue and Seventieth Street, Vincent & Edgar. I never go more than a five-minute walk from where I live to buy whatever I need - a haircut, a bottle of Scotch, or some milk. I have tremendous loyalty to restaurants. I know the names of waiters and follow them when restaurants close. Waiters who I once ordered martinis and dinners from at Elaine’s in 1962, if they’re still alive and I’m still alive in 2017, I order my martinis from them at Caravaggio, on Madison and Seventy-Fourth Street. Recently, Nan and I went to dinner at Primola, on Second Avenue and Sixty-Fourth Street, with my friend Don DeLillo, a well-known novelist, and his wife. I’ve known the man who owns the restaurant for fifty years, since he was a waiter at another restaurant. And even though I’m older, not so much do I feel older, because I’m wearing a suit to dinner that I wore for the first time in 1962, when I was a young reporter at the New York Times.
I’m a working writer, eighty-four, and my wife is a working editor, eighty-two. Our life together hasn’t changed. Why? Because I don’t want it to change. Because I like the way we did it originally and I like that I made the right decisions, even if nobody knows it or agrees with me. I have had to make certain concessions. But never did I sell out the suits, never did I sell out the car, never did I sell out the wife, never did I sell out the brownstone. When we first bought the building, we fixed it up like I fix up jackets, like this one, with only slight alterations from when I first bought them. It’s a locked-in love affair, a lifetime love affair with people, objects, and locations, and a memory that goes back for more than half a cen- tury with familiarity, satisfaction, and enduring commitment.
It’s central, too, to my writing. Many of my pieces are fifty years old and they still hold up. I never wanted to write for the next day’s newspaper. I wanted to write for the news- paper that was going to be read years later. I never wanted to be on the front page, because the front page is what matters today. Why couldn’t I do what John O’Hara, Irwin Shaw, F. Scott Fitzgerald, or Ernest Hemingway did with fiction? Why can’t I, as a journalist, write permanently interesting stories of lasting value and endless readability that you could read in 1959 or 2017? I believe I’m a foot soldier that historians, long after I’m dead, will appreciate for the insight I imparted into the story. This is very glorious thinking, but I’m not ashamed of it.
"I dress for the story."
Dressing, to me, is a celebration of being alive. It’s also an appreciation for what I do, which is talk to people and write about people. I dress the same way to interview a home- less person as I do to interview a guy in a hard hat building a bridge, a gangster, or Mike Bloomberg. I dress for the story.
And even if I don’t have to dress up for anybody but myself, I still dress up. On a day when I’m around the house, I’ll wear an ascot. I’ll also wear loafers, but I would never wear them in the street. I like to have finer shoes when I’m walking in public. I take walks in the afternoons and I’ve always dressed up. Whether it’s on Madison Avenue or Canal Street makes no damn difference. I’m always dressed in a way that I make a fine appear- ance, that I uphold standards.
I live on a block with many doctors and I see old people coming in for their appoint-
ments. The old people look like hell. They’re sagging, their death is about two weeks away. And I think, “Jesus, what the hell is the matter with you? If you burn your windbreaker and put on a Brioni suit, a better pair of shoes, and a fedora instead of that crooked baseball cap, you’ll look better and you’ll feel better.” I tell these people, but they don’t listen to me.
Well, that’s not true for Gay Talese. Eighty-four years old and I walk outside looking
like a million bucks.
Gay Talese is a bestselling author and journalist whose work includes "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold" and "The Voyeur’s Motel." He has lived in New York since 1953.
Billy Gonzalez
Like most immigrants, I came to the United States because my mom wanted to have a better life. I arrived in New York from the Dominican Republic in the winter of 1983 when I was sixteen. It was cold and ugly. I wanted to go back the same day I arrived. I told my mom, “My dream is not here. How am I going to play baseball?” Since I was a little kid, my passion was to be a baseball player. But I stayed because I wanted to make my mom happy.
I tried out for the Yankees and the Mets in 1986. I never got signed, because I’d broken my leg. I had been hit by a car a year earlier and my whole life had changed. I had good power, good hitting, I had almost everything, but the main reason they didn’t sign me was because of my leg.
This uniform is from the last time I played baseball twenty years ago, when I was playing in the Crotona Park league in the Bronx, the best minor league in New York City. We played two to three games per week each summer. I played third base. I was playing with my heart, but my leg never entirely healed. Every baseball player knows when their body isn’t working the same way, when they’re not seeing the ball the same way - they know when they need to retire. I knew it was time to go.
I decided to run my own business. I started my deli with $100 in 1998. The guy who had the deli before me was probably very tired. He told me to pay him $100/week for five years to take it over. I gave him what I had in my pocket and I got the business. This is my passion now. I love this business like I loved baseball before. I work almost every single day, twelve hours a day. As soon as I arrive in the morning, the only thing I think about is the business.
Every penny I made, I put back into the floors, the ceiling, the walls, the equipment, redoing it little by little. I had this crazy guy paint the night sky with a coyote on the ceiling. The nighttime is so beautiful when there are a lot of stars and this glow from the sky. I wanted everybody coming into my store to look at the sky.
I work here with my wife. She works in the kitchen and I run the front. She was originally a customer. She liked my sandwiches. She was on vacation from the Dominican Republic and she came to the store and ordered a chicken sandwich. She came back for another one the next day and I decided to give her my number. I told her to call me at
10 p.m. And she did. She returned to her country and we talked on the phone every single day. Then she came back to see me, and we have been together ever since. I had been feel- ing lonely and depressed because I had gotten divorced and my kids were living with their mother, but I said, “God, please send me a beautiful wife,” and he did.
I’ve been in this neighborhood for thirty-five years. I see a lot of things, good and bad. Every night at 10 p.m., we give away the food we don’t sell, because we want to keep everything fresh. Usually between twenty and twenty-five people come by. Sometimes, people will come in and say, “Billy, you might not remember, but I was in that line looking for food and now I’m good.”
"I cried—not in front of him—because he had listened to me."
One time my son, Jonah, when he was ten years old, asked, “Daddy, why are these people always in line?” I told him it’s because we give away anything we don’t sell. I told him, “It’s better to give than to receive because every time I give to anybody, I feel good.” Later, my son told me one of the kids at school said that he didn’t have money to buy lunch, and his mind went back to what I said about helping other people. Even though he was hungry, Jonah gave money to the other boy. I told him, “You’ve done the right thing.” That day, I cried - not in front of him - because he had listened to me. I feel lucky. I have my family, my kids are proud of me, and there’s nothing better than that.
Billy Gonzalez is the owner of Billy’s Deli in the Bronx. He grew up in the Dominican Republic and has lived in New York since 1983.
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