It all came to me while I was getting a facial. I was at home, lying down with some kind of peel on my face, when the opening paragraph wrote itself in my mind. Le Closet Theory was born.
The aloe mask never made it onto my face. As Anastasia, my facialist, reached for it, I sat up and ended the treatment. Tingly and red, I could not wait one more second. Neither could my ideas. They had waited inside my mind for years, but the final thirty minutes of my treatment were apparently impossible. Still dripping in ylang-ylang oil, I ran to my husband’s old home office and started writing. The words raced across the page. It was new. It felt right. An hour later, my first essay existed. And now what? Should I write a book? Publish the essay? But where? My last contribution to the internet had been during the MySpace era, two decades ago. Things had changed; I guess. How does Substack work? Should I have finished my facial?
After deserting my facial, sprinting to my home office and convincing myself that I had just begun my memoir, the essay simply sat on my computer for two weeks. Writing had been the easy part. Pressing publish required my friend Dara and some extensive negotiations with myself. The following Tuesday, I published “The Closet Theory.”
It has always been about fashion. Always. At first, I considered social media, but Instagram would require me to speak through pictures of myself, and I just can’t. I found beauty in writing about clothes, not in posting them.
My days moved between home, playdates and the mall, with the occasional dinner in between. Two weeks ago, school drop-off joined the itinerary. This was the life I had always wanted. Still, somewhere between one place and the next, I was wondering what was coming down the runway, which color would define the season, what trouser silhouette would take over. I created outfits for places I never went. Fashion was constantly in motion in my mind but completely still in my life. Our relationship was surviving on imagination alone. We were heading towards a breakup, not for lack of love, but because I no longer knew what to do with it.
It was writing that rescued our relationship. My clothes found a purpose: somewhere to go, even when I had nowhere to be or simply chose not to go. On the page, they began lives of their own. One theory at a time, they left the closet. They went to dinners, survived internship disasters and made it through school drop-offs and PTA meetings, carrying old stories with them. With that, my love for fashion finally stepped outside the comfort of the closet and into my writing.
Six weeks, six published theories and ten unpublished ones later, I returned to the first post. I recognized the name at the top. The voice, though, sounded nothing like mine. Since when was I so polite? This was me. This was me in a place where I knew nobody. Shy, unduly polite, choosing every word meticulously and waiting to see how much of myself the room could handle. The page was different. It had no rules, no code to understand. It simply let me be.
Sixteen essays later, not sixteen years, I stopped holding back. I was no longer a timid guest. I was the one hosting the dinner. One theory led to another, and then another. The life I once thought had so little room for fashion kept turning into material. Fashion was no longer standing still. It had left my imagination for the page, and I was the one trying to keep up. At thirty-six, I wrote the first theory. Now, as I turn thirty-seven, I am writing it again. I still have no idea what Le Closet Theory will become. I only know that fashion and I have called off the breakup. As for what comes next, perhaps it will find me during my next facial.
Bisous,