I Have Enough Sweaters

When my mother died, I inherited a lifetime’s worth of clothes, and I would still like a new sweater for fall. There is really no defense for this.

I suspect there is a schoolgirl somewhere inside me who is partly responsible. She appears every year around the end of August, when the light changes slightly and stores begin putting out wool long before anyone could reasonably wear it. She seems to believe that September requires certain things: new notebooks, new shoes, a sweater. She has been out of school for decades, but apparently no one has informed her.

The problem is that I already have sweaters. A great many sweaters. My mother and I were the same size, and after she died, much of what she had spent an adult lifetime acquiring came to me. There are her vintage Chanel sweaters, which I have placed in a category I call “special occasions,” although I have not established what, precisely, qualifies. Dinner, presumably. Perhaps lunch if it is a very good lunch. Certainly not walking the dog.

This inheritance joined an existing sweater population that was already difficult to defend. I had favorites from Lingua Franca, Le Lion and La Ligne, and so did my mother. Then there was Crimson Cashmere, which we discovered together in Paris some years ago. Each sweater was conveniently justified by the fact that I could attach a memory to it. Nothing, I have learned, is more persuasive to an enthusiastic shopper than a well-constructed justification.

And then there is Dior. For years, I referred to the particularly good ones as “collector’s items,” a phrase I find extremely useful because it converts shopping into something resembling cultural preservation. I wasn’t buying another sweater. I was maintaining an archive. Whether anyone besides me recognizes the historical importance of this archive is beside the point.

Then Dior hired a new creative director whose work I don’t particularly like, which should have been excellent news for my finances. For once, fashion had solved a problem rather than created one. Instead, I began searching The RealReal for sweaters from previous seasons that I had missed. Apparently scarcity does not discourage me. It gives me a research project.

At one point, even owning sweaters became insufficient. I started making them. I designed what I considered the perfect cardigan, which may have been the most enjoyable thing I made in ten years of designing. After years of considering other people’s decisions about cardigans, I could finally impose my own. Surely this was the natural conclusion of the sweater project. I had wanted the perfect sweater, bought many contenders and eventually resorted to designing one myself.

It was not. I still look at sweaters.

I don’t know exactly when all of this began, but I suspect September is more implicated than I initially realized. For a child, September was a remarkably persuasive season. You had grown. School was starting. The weather was changing. There were legitimate institutional reasons to buy new clothes. But I don’t think it was only about the clothes.

September offered something January never quite managed. January asked you to improve yourself. September simply handed you a new notebook and let you imagine you already had. The school year hadn’t begun yet, which meant nothing had gone wrong. You could still be more organized. You could have better handwriting. You could become the sort of person who remembered her homework, kept track of her pencil case and maintained white sneakers in a state of actual whiteness. Naturally, this person also required a new sweater.

I am now what some would call a middle-aged millennial, and September can apparently still get me.

This year, I am standing in front of two wardrobes: mine and my mother’s.

There is something peculiar about inheriting another person’s clothes, particularly when they fit you. They don’t immediately become yours. I can open a drawer and know exactly which sweater was hers. There are pieces I associate with particular dinners, trips or photographs. There are others I don’t remember at all, which is somehow stranger. They belonged to a part of her life that existed perfectly well without my noticing it.

There are things that seem unmistakably her and things that make me wonder what temporary idea about herself led her to buy them. We all have those clothes: the dress belonging to the woman who apparently attended far more cocktail parties than we do; the shoes purchased by someone who did not yet know they hurt; the impractical sweater requiring exactly the right weather, the right pants and possibly the right disposition. Perhaps that’s partly what clothes are: small propositions about the person we might be while wearing them.

Somewhere among all these clothes is the last sweater my mother ever bought. I don’t know which one it is.

She didn’t know either. It was simply another sweater she liked, bought for another season she assumed was coming. It was hung in the closet among all the others without anyone knowing that, eventually, nothing more would be added. Nobody stands in a dressing room thinking, One day my daughter will have to figure out what to do with all of this. You just think the sweater looks good.

There is something sobering about this.

I suppose the respectable conclusion would be that I have learned something about enough. I have not. I know what enough looks like. I am currently storing it.

Grief has changed many things about the way I see the world, but it has not turned me into someone who believes that because something is frivolous, it is therefore without value. I still like beautiful things. I still like getting dressed. I still occasionally believe that the correct cardigan is a problem worth solving. And despite having worked in fashion, despite knowing exactly how thoroughly an industry can manufacture desire, I remain susceptible to the astonishing announcement that this year’s sweater is slightly different.

Perhaps wanting something and needing it have almost nothing to do with each other. This should not be news to anyone who has ever entered a department store. But I have started to wonder whether wanting isn’t always evidence that something is missing. Sometimes it may simply be evidence that we are imagining what comes next.

Our closets quietly depend upon the future. You buy the dress because there will be somewhere to wear it. You save vintage Chanel because an occasion worthy of it will eventually present itself. You buy the sweater because, despite all available evidence concerning the contents of your closet, you assume there will be another fall.

Maybe that is what the schoolgirl understood before I did. Her September sweater was never really about being cold. It belonged to a future she hadn’t entered yet: the school year ahead, the person she might become in it, the completely unreasonable possibility that life could begin again slightly differently.

My mother’s wardrobe is complete. Mine, meanwhile, is already much too large. My mother had no idea which sweater would be her last. Neither will I.

This seems like an excellent argument for appreciating what I already own. Unfortunately, it is also a fairly compelling argument for buying the sweater.

I told you there was no defense for this.