Getting dressed—remedying nakedness, by definition—has never been just that in New York. Here, you’ll find outfits, not clothes. Curating an ensemble requires a recipe: Levi’s, mary janes, button-downs, accent socks.
As such, mirrors are necessary tools: Our sartorial spell check, if you will. We’ve developed a sort of dependency, even. Think of the frequency with which we assess our reflections throughout the day: in bedroom closets, apartment foyers, the grainy subterranean windows on subway cars, the glassy facades of storefronts. In truth, the propensity might qualify as addiction, if there weren’t so many more destructive vices available to us.
This October, however—contrary to a lifetime of conditioning—I found myself in France, mirror-less, for the better part of a month. Fashion’s equivalent to flying blind.
To be clear, this was neither an editorial prompt, nor a thought-experiment, but rather, a fact of circumstance. While my colleagues flocked to Paris for Fashion Week, I landed two hours east in the region of Alsace, on a small natural wine domain. I’d come to work for the duration of wine harvest—the three-odd weeks of labor required on any given vineyard when the year’s grapes ripened to their ideal point. Traditionally, volunteers gravitated toward various wineries across the globe to pick, press, sort, and stomp the fruit before it exceeded its prime, all in exchange for housing, food, and of course, capital E–Experience. Think of it like an agricultural summer camp for wine-addled adults. And in my dormitory for sommelier-adjacent grown-ups, it just so happened that my assigned room lacked a mirror—as did our shared restroom. For the first time in adulthood, I would spend nearly a month clothing myself without the reassurance of my own reflection.
Routinely, our mornings began before seven, at which point we’d distribute ourselves among the vines with the intent to pick as much fruit as possible before the heat became unbearable. Given the nature of the work, there was a pragmatic uniformity to my outfits: Blundstone work boots, crew socks, leggings or spandex shorts, a sweatshirt, an outer shell (both for rain, and for warmth). The simplicity of the template did not, however, alleviate my desire to select the right combination of said items—nor my ever-present fear that, without a mirror for revisionary purposes, I’d worn something backwards, missed a button, overlooked an ill-placed stain.
In my early morning daze, I’d toggle between tank tops for no discernible reason beyond the fact that I was adjusted to trying things on, shirking them off, before coming to a final decision. I’d braid my hair in one long rope down my back—the most efficient way I knew of taming the mass of it without visual aid. Then, last of all, I’d change my socks, sometimes two or three times before committing. Peeking out over the rim of my boots, they were perhaps the only accessory in my daily ensemble conveying any personality.
Throughout the work day, we slid in and out of sweaters and nylon layers as the sun rose, or rain spattered in (talk about day-to-night dressing). By noon, everything was lacquered, almost as if with intention, in dirt and grape juice. And of course, among the vines, there were no subway windows or storefronts available in which to clock my reflection. I’d fidget, smooth wrinkles, wonder whether I’d tied my sweater around my waist so as to maintain the proper silhouette. I’d pick burrs from my shorts near constantly—the only element of maintenance I could reasonably undertake. I’d look down at my knees submerged in soil, a bucket of mounting Pinot Gris between them, and I’d picture the girls I knew, just miles away, gazing down at purses, mini skirts, square-toed leather boots, in the throes of Fashion Week.
By the end of my first week, however, the mathematics of getting dressed had become palpably easier. My options were increasingly limited by what was least offensively dirty. I developed a newfound trust in my garments: The ribbed tanks, vintage T-shirts, crew socks, that I’d selected with such intention. They each did, indeed, play their most essential role: remedying nakedness.
By week two, my compulsion to make adjustments throughout the day began to wane, too. I stopped wondering what had shifted, whether or not all of my hair had made it, successfully, into my braid, or my sunscreen had rubbed in properly. What was the point? Inevitably, I unraveled, in small and messy increments, as the day went on—and what made that undoing so distasteful? Watching these other bodies inch through vines, volleying French dialogue back and forth, clipping fruit with fingernails crowned in soil, I never found myself keeping score of stains, lopsided buns, sweatshirts shrugged on inside-out. Instead, those details were evidence of passing time, finished labor—souvenirs of what we were making here.
In lieu of buttons, I agonized over missed conjugations. My French was growing more fluid by the day; I could hear the ways I was settling into the oral gymnastics of the language—the easy rapport, the improving lilt in my speech—even in the face of my ever-mounting frustration. The vineyard labor grew less taxing by the hour, through sheer repetition. And all the while, the tenderness amongst our particular clan of volunteers, no longer strangers, was always calcifying into something more poetic, more substantial.
It should come as no surprise, then, when I tell you that I’d never felt more beautiful — or perhaps, that beauty, as a noun, took on a wholly different texture. It felt like getting taller, or aging backwards. Tasted like Riesling, freckles, French verbs. Like sitting down for dinner, outdoors, at a table set for twelve.
Naturally, when I did clock my own image—in a rearview mirror, or perhaps in the black of my phone screen—it was never as I’d imagined. Whatever glowing, rustic ideal I’d (optimistically) constructed was always off-kilter: There were twigs caught in the velcro of my jacket, stains on my shirt, grape remnants smeared across my chin, whole chunks of hair left free from my bun. I never looked familiar—or at least, I never looked as I felt. My expectations were always misaligned.
At the end of les vendages (French for wine harvest), once our grapes had been pressed and collected in full, our sentimental goodbyes traded, I checked myself into a hotel in Paris. With two days to spare until my flight home, metropolitan life felt both glaringly normal, and utterly impossible. I bathed for longer than six minutes for the first time in weeks, feeling cleaner than perhaps I’d ever felt in my life.
Then, per tradition, I began to get dressed, giddy with excitement at the prospect of impractical footwear. I wore black tailored trousers, untouched at the bottom of my suitcase since my arrival, with a cropped sweater, layered necklaces, penny loafers, ribbed socks. I traded the sweater for a sleeveless, knit tank, then a men’s button down, then back to the sweater because, at the mercy of a mirror, one might as well assess options, calculate for some best case scenario. In my reflection, I stared, somewhat awed, at the cleanness of me; the fully formedness. It was almost disappointing how quickly I could revert to this prior version of myself, this particular presentation.
Back outside, that feeling evaporated. If there is a specific term for the high-wattage glee that comes from walking, dressed—meaning outfits, not clothes—through a city, I don’t know it. But I do know the particular bliss in that kind of momentum. I felt it leaving my hotel in Paris, and I feel it, near daily, in New York: A certain euphoric pride at having curated myself so as to fit into the grander narrative of a city. That elation is a remarkable thing, though different from what I felt in Alsace. Beauty, there, was neither fleeting nor precarious. More fact than circumstance. Less contingent, perhaps, on the realities confirmed in my own reflection.
Now, weeks later, I regret to inform you that I have neither moved to France, nor shattered the mirrors in my apartment. I’d be lying if I said I was cosmically changed. At home, I still relish in the fourth, fifth, even sixth iterations of culling together an outfit, of catching sight of my work, moving in the outside world, shimmying across the glass surface of a storefront. What’s gone, however, is the belief that I inhabit myself most fully when the raw interior material of me is underscored somewhere in my reflection. Or perhaps, that my mirrored image ought to confirm some essential truth about my character—that things like poise, effort, even beauty can be fact-checked, reliably, in the iron frame of a subway window.