In Character

I heard Norwegian Wood on the radio today, and as it always happens when I hear this song, I was transplanted back to my fourteen-year-old self locked away in my upstairs bedroom with a boom box, lying on a green shag rug. (Sadly, it was not the seventies.)

Although the song is more bittersweet than angst-y, the overpowering sense of lovesick regret and anguish conjured up brings to mind these slightly disillusioned, slightly disturbed girls on film, and I realized that some of us never fully outgrow our awkward, frustrated, outcast teenage selves. I know I haven't. (And if or when I do, who will I be without the scar tissue from my past?) One of the things that I love about vintage is that the ever-present but buried past is brought right up to the surface and reinterpreted. There's something empowering about acknowledging and putting our stamp on what was. In a very personal, quiet way, I think that wearing my vintage cords or a dowdy old blouse is a statement of subtle resistance to the way things are--even to the way things were, maybe--and a small assertion of the fact that we all proceed to live our lives with varying degrees of trauma and arrested development...in a good way, if that's at all possible.

Can clothes really do all that? I think so. And at some point, it's liberating to grow up and shed off the many schizophrenic layers that once defined and confined us--the teeny bopper, the grunge, the hippie chic, the skater, the prep, the goth, the mall jammer, the hipster--and accept that who we are isn't determined by what we wear. But at another point, it's a comfort to see those phases as an evolving expression of self, and to know that we are always evolving...and that the need to fully express ourselves never goes away.

(Photos: Molly Ringwald as Samantha in Sixteen Candles; Winona Ryder as Charlotte in Mermaids; Ally Sheedy as Allison in The Breakfast Club; Faye Wong as Faye in Chungking Express; Gwyneth Paltrow as Margot in The Royal Tenenbaums)