Fiction and What Woment Wear

Some readers of my novella "Manhattan Morning" have wondered why my protagonist, Dan, spends so much of his time thinking about attire -- mostly female but not entirely -- as he walks around midtown.

His excuse in the book, if he needs one, is that his former wife worked in the fashion industry and that as a result, clothes were a constant topic of consideration and conversation. He has been conditioned to be observant.





More generally, one can argue that for the most part, "we are what we wear" and first impressions often center on that.

In my previous post, I wrote about a prize-winning socio/political novel called  "The Sympathizer" by Viet Thanh Nguyen.

The following is from page 114 of the Grove Press paperback edition:

"Lana was nearly unrecognizable from the schoolgirl I had seen at the General's villa during her lycée years and on summer vacations.  In those days, her name was still Lan and she wore the most modest of clothing, the schoolgirl's while ao dai that had sent many a Western writer into near-pederastic fantasies about the nubile bodies whose every curve was revealed without displaying an inch of flesh except above the neck and below the cuffs."

A form of dress " ... hinting at everything and giving away nothing in a dazzling display of demureness, a paradoxical incitement to temptation, a breathtakingly lewd exhibition of modesty."

"... the young girls who rode their bicycles to and from school in those fluttering white ao dai, butterflies that every Western man dreamed of pinning to his collection."

By clicking on the term "ao dai" in material above, you can read a description and history of the garment in question, which, in the white form worn by schoolgirls, is depicted above.

I submit this as an example of why clothes matter.

But what about Viet Thanh Nguyen's observations above, through the eyes of his protagonist, of course?  Is it really only Western (read "white male") writers who find girls so dressed alluring in what, by implication, represents white exploitative, colonialist attitudes?  Well, as reported in the previous post, conventional literature about the Vietnam War failed to express enough anger about American culture, the author believes.

People who find girls dressed in ao dai alluring as opposed to modest must be sleazy for sure and presumably equally reprehensible about everything else having to do with non-white cultures.

But what about the unnamed protagonist and narrator of "The Sympathizer" when it comes to women's attire? (He, by the way, is a Eurasian bastard and, as a result, a "nothing" as we come to learn, so he is presumably not responsible for anything, either.)

Let's stick with the woman named Lana, for the moment, who having made it out of Vietnam with her family as Saigon fell, is now in Los Angeles, singing on stage at a party.

"Even I was shocked by the black leather miniskirt that threatened to reveal a glimpse of the secret I had so often fantasized about. Above her miniskirt, her gold silk halter top shimmered with every gyration of her torso as she flexed her lungs."

And what do we know about one Mrs. Mori, a woman the narrator was dancing with at the time? Most poignantly, we are told "she wore a chiffon dress that actually exposed her knees."

The point of all this?  Clearly we are supposed to form opinions about the women in this book -- and many others -- at least in part on what they wear, and perhaps change our opinions of them based on changes in their attire.

Dressed in her ao dai, Lan was off limits, at least to the narrator.  Dressed in her miniskirt, the reverse was true, we eventually learn.

We are what we wear. Maybe you don't think so, but others do.