Seeing Through Clothes: Milk, Mad Men, and Me

I finally saw Milk last night, and like Tracy, I left the theater in tears.

A lot of it was the memory of the events themselves – like the Briggs Initiative to rid California schools of gay and lesbian teachers (and their supporters) and the heroic, successful, hands-on campaign to defeat it.

I remember this particularly vividly because a friend of mine, activist Amber Hollibaugh, set off in a van and drove around rural California towns like the one she’d grown up in – an out lesbian taking on local fundamentalists in public debate, in 1978.

Could this have really happened, I ask myself? Could people really have been that brave?

It did happen. You can read Amber's account of it here.

But I know it's true because I remember how after the campaign, Amber showed me a lovely blousy overshirt (it was an era of big, filmy, voile-y sorts of things from India), and told me how she wore it to debate one Reverend Royal Blue of Redding, California. The shirt didn’t wrinkle, she said, and the metallic threads running through it gave it a sort of dressy look, good for being onstage in a local community center. Funny that amid all that astonishing, inspiring, take-on-the-world chutzpah, a big blue shirt with metallic threads running through it is what made Amber's bravery real for me.

Funny but true. There’s nothing like the clothing of an era to bring us back there. Milk has an uncanny, offhand realism about it – Sean Penn and other cast members wear the slouchy jeans of the late '70s just as I remember them being worn. And my husband Michael had that very same rust-colored jeans jacket – it would have been several years old in ’77 or ’78, which is accurate too (most of us don't throw our clothes away after a year).

In fact, the costumers the TV show, Mad Men talk somewhere in a DVD extra about the '50s clothes and objects they used for the show's 1960 first season.

Not that this favorite show of mine is anothing like Milk. Mad Men is about advertising rather than activism; it's cool rather than passionate, trading in desire and frustration rather than risk and triumph.

But what a sly, true take it has on an era's styles and surfaces, codes and constraints, as expressed through the world of objects its characters move through, sit on, wear, and (perhaps most especially) covet.

Sadly perhaps, since our cable contract is too "basic" for AMC, I'm a season behind and dependent on DVDs for my Mad Men fix. So I've only watched through end of Season One, the Thanksgiving 1960 episode (its ending credits scrolling against Bob Dylan's "Don't Think Twice," a song that wasn't written until 1962, the year Season Two begins – appropriately enough for this post, with a Valentine's Day episode).

But the enforced scarcity of a cheap cable contract makes me all the more obsessive consumer of the DVDs, plumbing the voiceovers and other extras for meaning – which in the case of Mad Men are the interviews with the costume designer and makeup people, along with snippets from the actors wearing the clothes and makeup:

- The women in their girdles and amazing torpedo bras: for all the lack of bodily freedom, many of the actresses admitted to enjoying feeling more "put-together" than we get to be these days)

- The men in their suits with the 13-inch fly zippers: the actors say the pants are too tight and rise too high; they complain of the discomfort. But watch them walk – watch John Hamm move across the frame (after the commercial – sorry! – about 1 minute, six seconds into this clip -- there, that wasn't so painful, was it?); I don’t know what it is about that walk, but I know that a part of me – a deeply desiring part of me from my early teens – remembers that walk and that look as a masculine ideal.

But as a writer I'm more interested in the clothes from the inside out. The way they make us feel when we wear them. Because our clothes may be our most consistent guides and goads to who we try to be in a world we didn’t create; our nakedness when we're alone an intermittent reminder that we aren't exactly those people; our nakedness with a lover a way of revealing this fact.

And the limnal moments of dressing and undressing, especially when shared with a lover (not to speak of a reader!)… well, in my writing, anyway, for me those are perhaps the sexiest, most complicated and challenging moments of all. Which is why, I guess, I care so much about what people really wore in the periods I write about – why, like Kalen Hughes, costume expert extraordinaire, I take seriously that Regency stays and shifts didn’t just fall off at the touch of a male finger.

(I’m indebted to Kalen, for example, for teaching me that in 1828 women’s stays began to have metal grommets around the holes for laces – can you think of a better way to show-not-tell the beginnings of an advent of radical physical unfreedom for women?)

And why I usually like to include a dressing as well as an undressing scene among the erotic parts of my books – because I love the pathos of people going back to their worlds, of eros and ego in a world of objects.

And why I’d love to know how the writers among you think about the clothes (period and otherwise) that you write about…

…and what you readers want when you read about them.

Oh, and an acknowledgment: The title of this post comes from Anne Hollander's deeply illuminating study of clothing in the western art tradition.