Birthday Suit

The two of them were naked, the man and his wife, yet they felt no shame.

—Genesis 2:25 

It’s the word “yet” that breaks my heart. Why would the Bible’s authors add that qualifier, unless body shame was already, in their time, a cultural given, a feeling so immediate and gutting that the lack of mortification at one’s own flesh—its size and shape, its smells and hungers—was worth noting in chapter two of the story of How It All Began.

They were naked. They felt no shame. Imagine.

***

We weren’t allowed to wear pants. That was the rule at Penn Wynne Elementary School, where I started kindergarten in the fall of 1967. A lifetime ago. A blink.

The dress code meant that I trudged four blocks to the bus stop on the frostiest December days wearing cable-knit tights under my skirt. In a squall, I could wear snow pants, provided I shucked them off and stowed them in the cloakroom during class.

Our clothes governed how we girls moved, what we dared: No hanging upside-down from the monkey bars. No wobbly handstands in the grass. If a boy fell, he earned a grass stain or a rip in his jeans, a trophy of his pluck and courage. If we girls took a tumble, we bled, and tiny chips of gravel had to be tweezered from our knees.

We couldn’t kick high or squat low. We couldn’t skip across a sidewalk grate without fear of exposing pale pink Tuesday panties to the world.

What were the rule-makers afraid of? That if girls dressed like boys, we’d begin to act like boys? We might go wild. We might get ideas. We might start speaking for ourselves.

I was in fourth grade when a campaign began to change the no-pants rule. Do I remember, or am I just imagining, a buzz of agitation, the thrill of Doing Something Big? I picture sixth graders striding around the playground, interrupting games of “Mother, May I?” with clipboard petitions and righteous adolescent rage.

There must have been a school board meeting. A proposal. A vote.

We won.

Which meant we could keep our pants on once we got to school.

What I didn’t understand was that our victory was both a symbol and a scrap. On the flickery classroom TV, we watched astronauts bubble above the moon and never questioned why they were all men. Same for the president, the principals, the priests. When I wanted an Erector Set, my own father told me that toy was not for girls. We hadn’t leveled the playing field; we’d just altered the outfits. Still, I was happy to wear pants, to have warm legs on frigid days, to turn lopsided cartwheels on the playground until a teacher blew the whistle and ordered us—boys to the right, please, girls to the left—inside.

***

 The modern “lounge suit” of pants and jacket appeared in the late nineteenth century, but has its sartorial root in England, circa 1666. Paris was already the fashion world’s lodestar; King Charles II, aping his Versailles compatriots, ordered that men in the English court would wear a long coat, a waistcoat (then called a “petticoat,” as in “petite coat”), a cravat (a blousy, early version of the necktie), a wig, breeches (trousers), and a hat.

I’m struck by how “feminine” that ensemble sounds and looks by twenty-first-century standards—not just the “petticoat,” but the powdered, curly wig, the pouf of fabric at the neck, the fitted fussiness of it all.

***

         “In mid-1800s America, everyone agreed women’s clothing posed a problem. The dictates of modesty called for floor-length dresses, and fashion demanded a full skirt beneath a tiny waist. As a result, middle- and upper-class American women squeezed themselves into corsets and six to eight petticoats to fill out the shape of their skirts. The result weighed up to fifteen pounds, placed enormous pressure on their hips, and made movement a struggle.”

—Smithsonian Magazine, May 24, 2018 

Women’s clothing wasn’t only cumbersome; it was dangerous. Those voluminous skirts trailed through mud and garbage, snagged on stairs, and tangled in factory machines. Corsets and whalebone stays impeded breathing and sometimes crushed internal organs.

No wonder nineteenth-century women were prone to fainting. No wonder they got restive.

In July 1848, three hundred people came to Seneca Falls, New York, for the first women’s rights convention in the United States. Three years later, Amelia Bloomer, an editor of the country’s first women’s newspaper, The Lily, used her platform to chide a male writer for supporting dress reform—“Turkish pantaloons and a skirt reaching a little below the knee”—while failing to champion systemic rights for women.

Then she published a photo of herself in what came to be known as “bloomers.” The Lily’s circulation leapt from five hundred to four thousand readers a month. Letters poured in: some bearing praise, some spewing vitriol. “Wearing pants,” Amy Kesselman, a scholar in gender and sexuality studies at SUNY New Paltz, told the Smithsonian, “was a kind of flag of gender dissent.”

Cue Hilary Clinton’s pantsuit moment, coming your way in another 156 years.

 ***

To find Bindle & Keep, you take a B train from 59th Street, get off at DeKalb in Brooklyn and walk for twenty minutes: catty-corner across Fort Greene Playground, where kids shriek through the fountain’s parabolas, past the hospital, then eight blocks in the gloam of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, cars clacking overhead.

You make a sharp left turn, mount two flights of concrete stairs, and wind through a corridor to a place where tailors fashion suits for everyone—or, at least, anyone with the money to spend on made-to-measure garments. The store is known best among LGBTQ folks for tailoring clothes that not only fit the body but express what that body’s inhabitant wants to tell the world.

Maybe the suit declares, “I’m queer!” Maybe it nods cheekily to the 1940s, a hers-and-hers wedding ensemble in contrasting green and purple plaids. Maybe the jacket says, “Don’t assume anything from the width of my lapels, the length of my cuffs, or whether my shirt buttons left over right.”

At Bindle & Keep, all the shirts button left over right.

My first visit came on a Saturday afternoon in fall 2019. It was Sukkot, the Jewish harvest festival, and the streets thronged with men and boys, prayer shawl fringes dangling beneath their winter jackets, high black hats on their heads, side curls grazing their cheeks.

And where were the women? Behind row house and apartment doors, no doubt, heads and elbows and knees devoutly covered, preparing the midday meal.

I felt transgressive just existing: one half of a queer couple about to go suit-shopping on the Sabbath. Elissa and I checked directions on our phones—one more breach of Jewish custom—reached the warehouse, and punched in the code.

***

For several years after Amelia’s bloomer photograph went the nineteenth-century equivalent of viral, she and her compatriots plugged on in spite of the haters who railed publicly about this transgressive new style. In bloomers, Elizabeth Cady Stanton said, she felt “like a captive set free from his ball and chain.” But eventually the clothes became a distraction from what suffragists saw as the real work of systemic change: women’s rights to an equal education. To fairly compensated employment. To the vote.

Many of them, Bloomer included, returned to the old style of full-length skirts. “With us, the dress was but an incident, and we were not willing to sacrifice greater questions to it,” she wrote. I imagine them all—Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Lucy Stone—wistfully, angrily, reluctantly shoving a bloomer outfit toward the back of their closets. Saving it for a niece, perhaps, or a daughter.

***

         Here is a true fact: It wasn’t until 1993 (1993!) that women were allowed (allowed!) to wear pantsuits on the Senate floor. The “allowing” occurred, in the end, only because Barbara Mikulski and Carol Moseley Braun decided to defy an arcane rule, leading, eventually, to its erasure. (Or to its modification: Pants-clad women are now allowed in the Senate chamber so long as the pants in question are accompanied by a jacket.) The rebellion was fitting: Pants are, in their way, political.

—The Atlantic, August 2, 2016

***

Ill-suited.

Suits me.

Strong suit.

Suit yourself.

Follow suit.

Suits him/her/them to a T.

If the suit fits, wear it.

***

The same year women stood up at Seneca Falls to assert their equality, the city of Columbus, Ohio, enacted an ordinance against cross-dressing.

I do not think this was a coincidence.

The Ohio law forbade a person from appearing in public “in a dress not belonging to his or her sex.” Such cross-dressing prohibitions became flexible, subjective tools for policing gender, a way to cite, shame, and punish “masculine” women, “feminine” men, and people whose gender confounded definition. Often, the laws were couched in a language of preventing “fraud”—that is, to cross-dress was considered a way to unjustly gain privilege, a disguise that took advantage of the gullible.

To be fair, that’s sometimes exactly what cross-dressing was, at least for women: the only means to land a job or purchase property. Pants meant power: factory work, higher wages, a modicum of respect. Sometimes the way to “make it” was to fake it.

But what about people who felt fraudulent in the clothing that was customary for their sex? What about the ones who were most themselves in outfits that flouted gender norms and fashion strictures, ensembles in sync with how they’d always felt?

In the decades following the Columbus cross-dressing ordinance, more than forty US cities—pardon the expression—followed suit.

***

Before the word “bespoke” was applied to custom-made clothes (let alone cars or motorcycles), it was just a past participle of the verb “bespeak,” meaning—yes, “speak”—but also “complain,” “accuse,” and “order or arrange in advance.”

That last definition bakes power into the word: to own something bespoke is to have one’s wishes made tangible. It’s a marker of agency (and class): to plan ahead, dream up an item in advance, then pay for it outright or on credit. “Bespoke” is the opposite of standardized, a wrench in the works of mass production. It whispers of exclusivity; it holds privilege in its pockets.

And yet. My synagogue’s Reconstructionist prayer book translates a line as “Blessed is She who spoke and the world became.” Who gets to speak? Who listens? A person can be spoken for, spoken of, spoken about. What if a woman yearns to speak for herself, like the suffragists at Seneca Falls, like the Penn Wynne girls who agitated to wear pants? What happens when those long sidelined—among them, women, queer, and trans people—win the right to order and arrange, to rip out the old seams and fashion something new?

When you order a bespoke suit, you utter yourself into the world. The tailor translates your vision into three dimensions. The bespoke suit is self-image, actualized. It doesn’t demand closeting or compromise. It doesn’t force the wearer to pretend to be what they are not.

***

As a kid, I clung to certain clothes, especially items I wore as a pre-\teen, like the swimsuit that reminded me of men’s early twentieth-century bathing costumes, a one-piece with a navy bottom, red-and-white-striped top, and cloth straps that became so tight, I had to hunch my shoulders, the once-crisp fabric grayed by salt and sun. I didn’t want to grow out of it, or into the yellow spaghetti-strapped tank, my first swimsuit with an elasticized shelf for breasts that weren’t yet shelvable.

Later, I played with aesthetics and allegiances: one day, a houndstooth overcoat from the Salvation Army thrift store; the next, a dirndl skirt I’d sewn of camel-colored linen. I wore a tuxedo shirt and bowtie to my parents’ twenty-fifth anniversary party; I dressed in a strapless, ballet-length gown to a formal dinner in my senior year. Other times, my closet was all about camouflage: army pants, baggy T-shirts. I didn’t want to have a body, to be a body.

Thirty years later, I still recoil from department stores: Menswear. Intimate apparel. Ties in this department; purses there (right, because men’s clothes have pockets for carrying important stuff). Boxers for people with balls, bras for people with boobs. Even socks—surely a genderless garment if ever there was one—in separate spheres.

And it starts so early, in pastel bailiwicks of pink and blue. Flash back twenty-one years: I recall the salesperson in a baby furniture store quizzing my partner and me; Elissa was seven months pregnant, and we were, in keeping with Jewish superstition, ordering items to be delivered to the house only after the baby was safely born.

“Would you like the girl bumpers or the boy bumpers?” she asked.

I would like the bumpers that will keep my infant from sustaining a concussion by banging their head into the bars of the crib.

***

Flash forward: “Do you want men’s cuffs or women’s cuffs?” a salesperson at Brooks Brothers asks my gender nonconforming friend, while measuring her for the tuxedo she will wear to the wedding of lesbian colleagues. It is an existential question: Must I choose?

At Bindle & Keep, no one asked my gender. At the initial fitting—part therapy, part fashion consult, part History of Suiting 101—a tailor showed dozens of fabric samples and asked questions: Which clothes make you feel most like yourself? What colors and textures appeal to you? Then a drill-down to specifics: four buttons or three on the sleeves? Topstitching? Pants that ride the waistline or hover an inch or two below?

A bespoke suit was the birthday gift I’d requested from my mother that year. I chose a rich, plummy purple for the pants and jacket, a lining in Pop Art swirls of lime and cerise. Three buttons on the sleeves. Pants that skim my hips. Notched lapel. Buttonholes for cufflinks.

I debuted the suit at a party to celebrate the launch of a posthumous book of sports columns written by my father. People seemed unsure about what words to use: “You look . . . sharp? Smart? Uh . . . great! You look great!”

No one said “confident,” or “strong,” or even “like yourself.” But that’s how I felt. Also . . . complicated. It is an extravagance, this made-to-measure outfit that cost nearly as much as I earn in a week of teaching poetry to second graders. It is a weave of contradiction: conformity (what the boys wear, after all) and resistance (because it’s me, wearing it); concealment (it streamlines chest and hips) and exposure (hey, world, this is what queer looks like).

My suit says: yes, I have legs, and a private cleft between them. It says: breasts, also, but they’re not for you. It evokes a history: armor, royalty, the IBM man in his joyless gray jacket. It nods to nostalgia: vest pocket for the watch no one carries anymore; left-over-right buttoning so a man could grasp a weapon in his dominant hand and fasten his doublet with the other.

In my suit, I feel different than when I slip on a skirt or dress. Unabashed. Delighted, in fact, to wear the pants, to skew the script. Yes, this is me: tailored jacket, salt-and-pepper hair, swipe of lipstick, shirtsleeves fastened with my father’s silver cufflinks. I lengthen my stride; I sit with knees apart. I do not worry that a gust of wind will undress me.

***

the expression “birthday suit” (naked, unclothed, in the altogether), debuted in 1734; other words first seen in print that year include “ball cock,” “man-about-town,” “nonlife,” “outscheme,” and (my favorite) “zodiacal light”

***

Then the eyes of both of them were opened and they perceived that they were naked; and they sewed together fig leaves and made themselves loincloths.

—Genesis 3:7

Alas, our foreparents’ innocence didn’t even last one chapter. Open-eyed, surrounded by freshly made abundance—piñon and pomegranate, crocodile, dove—the first things they noticed were their own nude bodies. Did they feel astonished? Curious? Chilly?

But also: Who knew our Biblical ancestors were the first tailors of bespoke garments? (Presumably, those loincloths were sized to fit). How’d they learn to sew (not to mention which leaves wouldn’t cause a nasty rash down under)? Interesting, too, that such an unapologetically gendered text (“the man” and “his wife”) doesn’t differentiate between the two main actors’ clothing. What, exactly, did they wear?

Here’s how I want to imagine it: The world so new, it squeaks. The garden thrums with possibility and danger. Chava (life) and Adam (earth), who share the same flesh, who were cut from the same cloth, who were a single being just one chapter ago, want clothes not to hide their nakedness, but because they share the divine impulse to create, to make something—who knows what, yet?—of themselves.

They order and arrange, because that’s what humans do. They speak, and something becomes: matching crowns of orange blossoms paired with skirts that spin like the earth itself. I picture the two of them, stitching and talking, comparing notes and patterns late into the night, then dancing through the garden in vests festooned with peacock feathers, shirts light as the breeze itself, patchworked palm-frond pants. A stunning, ambisexual wardrobe.

Adam and Chava admire themselves in the mirrors of one another’s eyes, or perhaps in the glazed-green surface of a pond. They clamber about the damp, new world, reveling in the zodiacal light. Their clothes fit. They are cloak and revelation; they are practical and fabulous. They are sewn by hand from the garden’s supplest leaves, in every shade of green.

-Anndee Hochman

Anndee Hochman is a journalist, essayist, storyteller, and teacher in Philadelphia. Her books include Anatomies: A Novella and Stories (Picador USA) and Everyday Acts & Small Subversions: Women Reinventing Family, Community and Home (The Eighth Mountain Press). Anndee's column, "The Parent Trip," appears weekly in the Philadelphia Inquirer. She is a four-time winner of Moth Story Slams and teaches writing to people of all ages.