I Hid My Real Clothes in a Hole in the Wall
Somewhere between my house and middle school, there was a hole in a concrete wall containing what can only be described as my real wardrobe.
Midriff-bearing shirts.
Short shorts.
Miniskirts.
Ripped jeans.
Basically everything my mother did not need to know I was wearing.
I would leave the house dressed one way and arrive at school dressed another.
Apparently, even at thirteen, I understood the importance of off-site storage.
Middle School Is a Fashion Show Nobody Admits Is a Fashion Show
Adults love to tell children that clothes don’t matter.
Technically, they’re right.
Clothes don’t determine your intelligence.
They don’t determine your character.
They don’t determine whether you’re going to become successful.
But try explaining that shit to a twelve-year-old walking into middle school wearing pants that are too short.
Clothes matter when you’re young because fitting in matters.
Looking cool matters.
Not looking like the kid everybody is going to make fun of matters.
And for some of us, clothes weren’t only about fitting in.
They were one of the first ways we got to decide who the hell we were.
My first year of middle school was rough in that department.
We didn’t have much money.
This was before my mother got her papers, and money was tight enough that buying whatever clothes I wanted was not an option.
We had McCall’s patterns.
We had Butterick patterns.
And we had a used sewing machine.
My mother could sew, so she made some of my clothes.
There was only one problem.
I was tall as hell.
I’ve always had long legs, and somehow my homemade pants always seemed to end just a little sooner than I wanted them to.
Maybe another kid wouldn’t have cared.
I fucking cared.
Because I wasn’t thinking:
How wonderful. My mother has demonstrated resourcefulness by constructing a functional garment.
I was thinking:
Why the fuck are my pants too short?
I was in middle school.
Priorities.
I Wanted the Cool Shit
There were certain things you wanted because everybody knew they were cool.
LA Gear sneakers were a thing.
And then there were the Michael Jackson Moonwalker shoes.
I eventually got those.
I had to have them.
That was serious business to me.
Adults sometimes forget how intensely children experience the social world.
When you’re grown, you can say, Who gives a shit what somebody thinks about my shoes?
At twelve?
You might give several shits.
You’re trying to figure out where you fit.
You’re looking around at other kids.
You’re experimenting.
You’re deciding whether you’re sporty, preppy, alternative, sexy, conservative, weird, fashionable or something that doesn’t have a name yet.
You’re assembling a person.
And sometimes you’re doing it with approximately fourteen dollars and access to somebody else’s scissors.
We Were All Broke as Shit
My friends weren’t exactly rolling in money either.
So we improvised.
We modified clothes we already owned.
We borrowed each other’s clothes.
We cut things.
We ripped things.
We tied things.
We rolled things.
One girl’s shirt might mysteriously become another girl’s outfit.
Something completely ordinary could be transformed with enough creativity and absolutely no concern for whether our parents would approve.
We weren’t buying entirely new wardrobes every week.
We were recycling rebellion.
Looking back, it was actually pretty resourceful.
At the time, we just wanted to look cute.
There was also something communal about it.
Your friends became part of your closet.
If somebody had something you needed, you borrowed it.
If you had something somebody else needed, they borrowed yours.
We were basically running an underground fashion cooperative with no operating capital.
Then I Found the Hole
I don’t remember who discovered it first.
But somewhere along the route was this wall.
Concrete.
And there was a hole in it.
Not a decorative hole.
Not some beautiful architectural feature.
Just a fucking hole.
To an adult, it was probably damaged concrete.
To teenage me?
Storage.
Beautiful, free, mother-independent storage.
I could hide clothes in there.
So that’s exactly what I did.
I’d leave home wearing whatever was acceptable.
Then somewhere between home and school, there would be a transformation.
Out came the real clothes.
The midriff-bearing shirt.
The ripped jeans.
The short shorts.
The miniskirt.
Whatever version of me was actually going to school that day.
Then, before going home, the operation went into reverse.
The forbidden clothes disappeared.
The approved clothes came back.
And I returned home looking approximately like the child who had left that morning.
This was apparently a completely reasonable use of my time.
My Contraband Was a Crop Top
The funniest part is that I wasn’t hiding anything particularly sinister.
There were no drugs in the wall.
No weapons.
No criminal enterprise.
No secret stash of money from an international smuggling operation.
There was probably just some tiny-ass shirt I wanted to wear to school.
That was the rebellion.
My contraband was a crop top.
And I wasn’t alone.
My friends did the same kind of shit.
Maybe not everybody had access to my sophisticated wall-storage infrastructure, but changing clothes after leaving home was hardly some revolutionary concept.
Parents thought their daughters left dressed one way.
Their daughters knew otherwise.
A tradition as old as parental dress codes.
By My Second Year, I Was Becoming Myself
Something changed around my second year of middle school.
My personality started coming out more.
The clothes became part of it.
I liked taking risks.
I liked experimenting.
I liked clothes that attracted attention.
I liked figuring out how to make something look different.
That never completely went away.
I’m approaching fifty now, and I’m still more willing to experiment with clothes than a lot of people.
That’s apparently just me.
Which I understand even better when I look at my daughter.
She likes pink.
Pastels.
She’s much more conservative in the way she dresses.
She’s never been particularly fussy about fashion.
Sometimes I look at her and think:
Whose child is this?
😂
But that’s her.
And that’s the point.
I don’t need her to dress like me in order for her clothes to express who she is.
She gets to be herself.
I wanted the same thing.
Sometimes Clothes Are One of the Few Things a Kid Controls
Looking back, I understand why clothing mattered so much to me.
When you’re a kid, adults control almost everything.
Where you live.
Where you go.
When you come home.
What you can buy.
What you can afford.
What you’re allowed to do.
And if you’re growing up in a dysfunctional or controlling household, that lack of control can feel even bigger.
You may not get to choose the family.
You may not get to choose the house.
You may not get to choose the rules.
But for a few hours at school?
Maybe you can choose the shirt.
Maybe you can choose the shoes.
Maybe you can choose what version of yourself walks through those doors.
Fashion can look incredibly shallow from the outside.
Sometimes it is shallow.
Sometimes a miniskirt is just a fucking miniskirt.
But sometimes clothes are also one of the earliest ways a young person says:
This is me.
Before I Had Freedom, I Had a Hole in a Wall
I eventually grew up.
I bought my own clothes.
I developed my own style.
Nobody needed to approve my shirts.
Nobody got to determine the appropriate length of my pants.
And thankfully, I no longer have to store my wardrobe inside public infrastructure.
But I still love that little girl for figuring it out.
She didn’t have much money.
She didn’t have much authority.
She couldn’t control very much about her life.
But she had friends.
She had creativity.
She had some questionable fashion choices.
And she had discovered a hole in a wall.
So she used what she had.
Looking back, maybe that’s why the memory still makes me smile.
It wasn’t some grand act of resistance.
I wasn’t overthrowing anybody.
I just wanted to go to school looking like myself.
And when the adults wouldn’t let me?
I found somewhere to keep myself until I was safely out of sight.
Before I had a closet of my own, I had a hole in a wall.
And apparently, that was enough.
Leave a comment