Starting From Scratch : For Victims of the Northridge Quake and Last Fall’s Fires, Rebuilding Begins With the Clothes on Their Backs
Suppose you woke up one morning to find all your clothes gone. Everything, that is, except for some red underwear you bought on a whim one silly day long ago.
“Yes,” Megan Edwards said, “that’s me. The fires were raging all around us and I had just minutes to get out. I grabbed a few things for my husband, but what I took for myself was that red underwear. Like I can really rebuild a wardrobe based on that .”
In the wake of wildfires and earthquakes, Edwards is just one of hundreds of disaster victims struggling to put their lives back together. For some, that means coming face to face with the fashion challenge of a lifetime: starting over from scratch.
For those without insurance money, the task is “unimaginably difficult, impossible really,” said a young woman who lost everything when her rented mobile home was destroyed two weeks ago.
Even with insurance, the task is formidable. “A wardrobe is something you accumulate over time, it’s a collection,” said fashion writer Mimi Avins, who lost her home to the Malibu fires.
“I’m afraid the answer to how you replace a wardrobe is you don’t. You just don’t,” Avins said with a sigh.
But you can create a new one. And maybe, in the process, reinvent not only your closet but also the way you present yourself to the world.
“When something like this happens, you find out that it’s true what they say: less is more,” Los Angeles clotheshorse and author Judie Stein said. “The challenge is making the right choices.”
In a Red Cross shelter three days after the Northridge quake, Michelle Adams, 41, pondered the contents of her life: two oversize acrylic sweaters, a pair of sturdy brown shoes, a T-shirt and bicycle shorts--all folded neatly into a cardboard box next to her cot.
“It’s nothing, really,” she said in a flat voice. “It’s all I have left and it’s nothing. But things don’t matter to me anymore. How can they? I’m alive. I’m just grateful to be alive.”
Adams, a free-lance writer and photographer, says the floor of her fourth-floor Hollywood walk-up was giving way even as she reached into the dark for a few possessions.
“I knew I wanted my family photos and my journals, my writing. And I pretty much knew I wouldn’t be back, so I grabbed the clothes.”
Picking at her shelter lunch of chicken, bread and applesauce, she looked overdressed in a bright blue silk shirt. “It matches my eyes and it makes me feel good. That’s why I’m wearing this,” she said. “If I get some money coming in soon, I’ll buy more things like this--things that make me feel good. No matter what.”
Joey Tenorio, 11, whose family also lost everything in the earthquake, is counting on Red Cross clothing vouchers to help rebuild his wardrobe. But he knows some things cannot be replaced. “My Raiders hat. Man, what a loss! It was just right, the way it fit, the way it felt. I won’t find that again. No way.”
Joey’s mother, however, is not sorry the hat is gone. “I always wondered about the way he wore it, the message it sent on the street, you know?”
While loss is never welcome, some disaster survivors concede that the changes it forces may not be all bad.
“To put the best spin on a tragic situation,” said Edwards, a 41-year-old Altadena real estate agent, “our great loss has freed us to try new and different things. We’re taking advantage of our stuffless situation. We’re buying an RV and traveling around the country. And I’m changing the way I’ve always dressed. . . .
“Most of my clothes were from when I was a schoolteacher--like that denim jumper with the big pockets for chalk. I won’t miss that. I had so many conservative clothes--the kind that made Lands’ End famous. Everything matching. Don’t-rock-the-boat clothes.”
The new Megan Edwards wears black stirrup pants with big, bright chenille tops. She has a new black leather swing coat and a clingy little dress from Jones New York. And thanks to a generous sister, she now has a fur--”one of those little stoles with the foxes all biting each other’s tail.”
Stein said one of her Malibu neighbors has undergone a complete sartorial make-over. “He was kind of a ‘60s hippie who lived in a tent across the road. When his tent burned and all his clothes, everybody started giving him things and he’s never looked better,” she said. “Now he walks around in fancy running suits, a Burberry raincoat, Adidas shoes. . . . He looks fabulous!”
When it comes to rebuilding after disaster, Patsy Dickerman has become a reluctant expert. In 1975, she lost everything in a fire that consumed her brand-new Texas home. Today, she is recovering from the loss of her 2-year-old “dream house” in Laguna Beach.
“What’s underestimated is the emotional impact it has on you. And it’s tougher when you know what’s ahead, like I do,” said Dickerman, a sales executive. “I could just feel how tired I was going to be for a long period of time.
“People say, ‘Oh aren’t you lucky to be able to go on a big shopping spree.’ But, gosh, that’s just the last thing in the world you feel like doing after something like this. . . .”
Still, Dickerman knows the routine. “First my husband, Jim, and I replaced the basics, what we absolutely had to have to carry on. Underwear, of course, and shoes and raincoats, then business suits for him and a couple real dressy things for me, along with jeans and T-shirts.”
Many survivors said they derive comfort in replacing what they loved most in their closets and putting off other purchases until they feel more like shopping.
Although Edwards’ husband, Mark Sedenquist, 39, has made a few changes in the way he dresses, he spent much of the first emergency insurance check they received on a new white wool suit, white buck shoes and a red tie to replace the outfit he has worn for years as a Tournament of Roses official.
The first piece of post-fire clothing purchased by Avins’ husband, movie exec Wolf Schmidt, was a pair of hiking shorts. “Hiking helped him feel that life was going on. We always hiked in the Santa Monica Mountains. The house burned, but the mountains didn’t,” Avins said.
“My advice to others is to decide what your own personal ‘uniform’ is,” Avins said. “Is it jeans and a blazer? Pleated trousers and a silk blouse? A big sweater and leggings? Start rebuilding from there.”
For those with the resources to shop retail, there is plenty of free help waiting from personal shoppers, such as Tella Archambault at Bullock’s in Pasadena. “Some things you truly cannot replace, but we’re here to help people find what they need, to create a new closet of pieces that may or may not resemble what was lost.”
Archambault and Billur Wallerich, her counterpart at Neiman Marcus, advise shoppers to stick to neutrals at first. “Start by building on blacks, or taupes or grays,” Archambault said. “Choose classic styles, nothing too trendy. These may have to last you a long time. You don’t want to grow tired of looking at them.”
Similar advice was offered at Nordstrom, where disaster victims are served Evian and tiny sandwiches while they review their needs with store helpers.
But for survivors like Diana, 33, who lost her wardrobe and her rented trailer in the quake, the question isn’t which color scheme to go with, but where to find Scout uniforms and school shoes for her young daughters.
“I’ve been wearing the same two sweat suits for about two weeks now and when I get some money, I’ll probably buy another one because, well, you could say it fits my lifestyle just now,” said Diana, who asked that her last name not be used. “Call it ‘the Shelter Look of the ‘90s.’ ”
