The Southern California Closet Clean-Out

The idea of greeting the new year alone, in a back-street condo smelling of cheap paneling, old fires and soiled carpet, is just too depressing, so Melanie and Linda snap on their Wonderbras, apply fresh coats of lip liner, blush and eye shadow, then shimmy into something black and head for the bar of Aspen’s Ritz-Carlton Hotel.

The Ritz lounge is designed to look like the living room of a grand country house: Overstuffed chairs cluster around voluptuous sofas, all in view of a majestic stone fireplace. The crowd is heterogeneous in age and homogenous in spirit, infused with an optimism that promises all of 1997 will be as glorious as this sunny, mild day of perfect ski conditions. Melanie is covered up, but hardly concealed, in a stretch velvet top and velvet trousers. Linda is wearing a black bodysuit descended from Donna Karan’s cut-out “cold shoulder” design that bares her fleshy upper arms. In the dry mountain air, deep creases at the corners of her eyes appear more prominent.

“Aspen’s a tough town,” she says. “If we were in Utah, I’d be surrounded by guys by now.”

As midnight approaches, the room is packed, and a group of financial types from Manhattan settle down, driven by equal measures of necessity and attraction. Melanie isn’t enthusiastic about the encroachment of the Easterners, but hey, it’s a free country and it isn’t like this is her private parlor. Men camped around Melanie is a tableau Linda knows well, and she might muster a little jealousy, but not over these guys. Even though Melanie is an uncommonly pretty, blond and busty young woman, they talk at her while scanning the horizon for more action.

There’s the mutual fund manager--too young, too short, too cocky. He might have nice-guy ingredients brewing under all the bluster, Melanie thinks, but he’s being elbowed away by an older man who moves in with a smirk and all the finesse of a crash-test dummy.

The skid marks of his disinterest in what she does for a living lead right to a description of the Florida health-care company he recently acquired in a hostile takeover. Has she ever been to Palm Beach? Great town. Maybe she’d like to fly down there sometime. Before she can politely decline, all conversation is drowned out by tooting horns, clinking glasses and the cold smack of strangers exchanging air kisses. Happy New Year.

*

The next time I see Melanie she’s shopping at the Westside Pavilion. We met in Aspen only the week before, and after we’ve marveled at the it’s-a-small-world serendipity of bumping into each other at home, she asks my opinion of a rust pantsuit she’s thinking of buying. She knows I’m a fashion editor, and I assume she wants to know whether the styling is current.

“Well, the cut is very flattering,” I say, thinking she’s shaped like Marilyn Monroe on phen-fen, what wouldn’t be? Melanie seems so unsure that I ask more questions, trying to understand what kind of look she’s going for. I remember she works for a bank. Maybe she wants some new clothes that are more hip, less corporate. “Do you have that color in your wardrobe already?” I ask.

“I don’t have anything in my wardrobe. I just gave everything away,” she says.

“Why?”

“My clothes were all too trampy. I was attracting the wrong kind of man.”

I’m stunned by her candor but intrigued. We’ve only met twice, over drinks at the Ritz, then in a lift line.

“That’s really interesting. Did someone tell you that, or did you figure it out for yourself?” I ask.

“I figured it out for myself.”

*

Browsing together through the racks at Privilege--the chain of shoe stores that has expanded to carry broad-shouldered, pinch-waisted dominatrix suits, lycra dance dresses and shiny, shrunken shirts designed to be worn tight as a tourniquet--Melanie gives me a tour of the style she’s chosen to reform.

“I used to wear all this sleazy crap,” she says. Sequins and spandex, stilettos and skinny cigarette pants. Melanie runs her fingers over a fierce lurex bodysuit that could have been one of her fashion one-night stands--worn to a club, then abandoned for the next hot number. She looks at it like someone considering a photo of a lover who once made the sun rise and set and now only prompts a bemused “What was I thinking?’

Melanie is not the first woman to overdose on stretch Mylar. Look around at any entertainment industry event in Los Angeles and see vamps on parade. In a city where warm weather and sunshine fosters the abandon indigenous to the tropics, where the population is chock full of dancers, actresses and beach bunnies, (not to mention women who maintain their beauty and fitness as the birthdays pass) nothing is too tight, too short, too bare. This continuing celebration of the body beautiful, washed up and displayed on the wilder shores of fashion, is one of the defining elements of Southern Californian culture.

In other cities, how a woman dresses conveys information about her social standing, her occupation, even her marital status. (On the flight home from Aspen, a young man sitting next to me was surprised when I turned on my laptop and started to work. Based on my clothes and appearance, he told me, he had concluded I was a housewife from Brentwood with a couple of kids who spent her time working out.)

Clothes can make a range of statements: “I’m rich,” “I want to be invisible,” “I’m a rebel,” “The ‘80s were a good time for me,” “I hate my body.” In Los Angeles, no message is communicated as frequently and as clearly as “I’m hot.” And the community is consistently tolerant of its expression; looks that would be the province of the young or mad elsewhere are considered normal in a land without seasons or rules.

In the spring collections shown in Milan, Paris and New York, styles that showed the underwear or the body beneath were plentiful. Touches of lace blurred the boundary between lingerie and clothing in many lines. Prada, Jil Sander, Versace and Valentino revealed all by showing sheer dresses floating loosely over a model’s skin. Calvin Klein, Michael Kors, Donna Karan and Gucci concentrated on simple silhouettes of light, stretchy fabrics that hugged every figure, leaving nothing to the imagination. With transparency dominating the runways as a major spring trend, women in the rest of the country will soon have to have some serious encounters with their levels of exhibitionism. We, bold babes of the last frontier, are way ahead of them.

By offering clothes as revealing as the skimpiest underwear, world-class designers give official sanction to public displays of private parts. A full page Versace ad in the current Vogue features a young model wearing a sheer shirt printed with an airy pattern of flowers. Between scattered areas of opacity that the blossoms provide, her nipples are clearly visible through the scrim of nude fabric.

There is no ratings board for fashion, no warning labels--”Caution, this dress could be hazardous to your image.” There is also, thankfully, no Moral Majority finger wagging at fashion’s excesses. The question, as Melanie learned, is not “Do you look too sexy?” but “Is your presentation working for you?” “I woke up one day and realized I looked like a hooker,” she says.

Fashion has always held the power to transform. Ralph Lauren built a career making suburbanites look like landed gentry. With the right clothes, a librarian can look like a biker, a housewife like an executive. Or a banker like a party girl. The danger is, for many people, perception is reality.

Driving home that night, Melanie’s words haunt me. My clothes were too trampy. I was attracting the wrong kind of man. I see her as a warrior-princess shopping for new armor, searching for a suit strong enough to cover wounds inflicted by 100 slimeballs.

Melanie awakens an urge to play Pygmalion in me. Her yellow blond hair could be softer, I think. I’ll send her to Stuart Gavert, the genius colorist at Umberto who understands the tug of war between flash and class. In the following weeks, we meet several times. I mark up catalogs and send them to her. I suggest that she try flat shoes with a pantsuit, not give up skirts or dresses entirely but experiment with a longer length. We talk about colors, textures and fabrics. Although her undeclared policy has been to allow no natural fibers next to her flesh (does vinyl grow on trees?), she happily reports the purchase of her first cotton shirt. She is an eager, if tentative pupil. “Now that I’m trying to dress more conservatively,” she says, “I’m clueless.”

*

The first time Melanie realized that clothes could do more than keep you warm was in sixth grade. The boys in her junior high class in Glendora, a small town in the San Gabriel Valley, plastered their lockers with Farrah Fawcett posters, but a real girl-woman developing in close proximity was something else. Melanie took one look at her buxom Italian mother and knew there would be no escaping her genetic legacy. “The boys didn’t know how to handle their reactions, so they were mean,” she says. “I reacted by hiding under big, loose shirts.”

The teasing soon gave way to more complimentary reactions. The baggy clothes were replaced by snug T-shirts and corduroys so tight anyone could read the date on a dime in her pocket.

“You’re not going out of this house dressed like that,” Melanie’s mother would say. So she wouldn’t. She would hide her minuscule skirts and breath-defying tops under a big denim jacket, then trash the cover-up once she’d made a clean getaway.

Before Melanie started her first after college job, at a Merrill Lynch office in West Hollywood, her mother took her shopping at Nordstrom. “We bought all these dumb, boxy suits that I’d wear to work. I hated them but I thought that’s what I had to do.”

Melanie led a double fashion life. By day, she wore the dumpy suits Mom bought. But before going out, she’d always go home to change into tight pants (no longer corduroy, but squeezing every curve, nonetheless) and clingy sweaters. Spandex? Sure. Stretch lace? You bet. Garish colors, the noisier the better. The detritus of the big gold button, tiny tube skirt “Dynasty” style found sanctuary in Melanie’s closet.

Even in her want-me stiletto heels and exploding cleavage, Melanie was more than a bum magnet. The Playmate of American male fantasy is the sweet girl next door with a body that inspires naughty thoughts. Even the trashiest costume couldn’t deprecate Melanie’s perfect complexion or gentle voice. “I think the nice guys were embarrassed by the way I dressed,” she says. “They didn’t stick around long.’

By the time she had moved into her position advising investors for the bank, she had no use for the good-girl suits. Most of her work was done on the phone, so the outfits that prompted whistles during lunch-hour strolls and around the office were almost as tarty as her night-crawling clothes. But not quite.

Her women friends were tiring of telling her “Pretty Woman” was just a movie, and its first act was never intended as a style guide. “Some of the things they’d say would really hurt me, but I still wasn’t ready to give up those clothes,” Melanie says. Until the day of the Great Closet Cleanout.

Melanie and her friend Carly were invited to a Christmas party. Carly forgot dressy slacks she planned to change into after work. Melanie offered to lend her a pair. After looking for something that fit, Carly, a receptionist with aspirations to soap opera stardom and a flair for the dramatic, emerged from Melanie’s closet. “Forget the Christmas party,” she said. “We aren’t going anywhere until we do something about your clothes.”

First to go were the teeny-weeny Tadashi dresses, a line of cocktail clothes not recommended for meetings with a beau’s mother. “I can’t believe you wore this stuff,” Carly says. Stretch-silk Wayne Rogers bodysuits of turquoise, orange, shocking pink and red lay in a heap on the floor; only a black one was left hanging. At the top of a pile of shoes rested electric blue high-heeled sandals, their toes pointed toward needs that were compelling, at the time.

Looking at the mountain of discards, Melanie saw price tags. “It costs a lot of money to look cheap,” she says. “I must have spent $25,000 on clothes in a year.”

*

No one wants to return to the dreary dress-for-success days when women believed they had to disguise themselves in the ugly drag of floppy bow ties and navy-blue suits. But clothes that advertise sexual availability aren’t appropriate in most workplaces, unless your job description reads “Massage Parlor Technician.” Somewhere between drab and vavoom lies a safe style zone where professional women can look attractive. Melanie is experimenting gingerly, trying to find that middle ground.

So far, she’s bought four suits. They all fit considerably looser than her old ones, and her skirt is nearly a foot longer than she used to wear. She purchased a pair of tasseled loafers, a low-heeled boot to wear with pants and even some flat Mary Janes. She agonizes over each new acquisition, worrying that it might be too provocative. On the face of it, Melanie is strangely out of sync. Just as fashion becomes more overtly sexy, she’s covering up. She’s tested the waters of exhibitionism and found them cold. She will steer clear of the layered, nude nightgown dresses, the lingerie look for day, the peekaboo lace and tell-all knit fabrics. Many women may have similar attacks of modesty. After all, who wants to flash the box boy at Ralphs every time you go in for a box of Cheerios?

Now, when she comes in to work wearing a camel silk pantsuit over a matching turtleneck sweater, the men in her office yawn their disapproval. “You’re no fun anymore,” they say. “We liked you better before.”

Melanie says, “That’s because they’re all bored, married men who don’t get any entertainment at home.”

Not all of them. One unmarried man who worked in Melanie’s building took her to dinner last year. She wore a short, low-cut baby-doll dress. A nearby table of men nearly choked on their linguine when she walked by, but Arthur, divorced and at least a decade older, didn’t call again.

It didn’t matter. “I decided not to date for a while,” she says. “I wanted to work on myself.”

A few months later, when Melanie started wearing her new wardrobe to work, he noticed. She considers their next date her coming out party. She wore the rust double breasted pantsuit I had approved that day at Privilege. Walking through Drai’s to their table, no men fell off their chairs in the unsubtle act of ogling her.

“You look really nice,” Arthur said.

“Thank you,” Melanie replied.