Closet Psyche: The Fashion Writer Who Cannot Let Go of Her Mother’s Vests
Writer Nicolaia Rips tells me about two vests her mother gave her while I tackle my own mother-object attachment issues.
This Closet Psyche episode is about a brunette only child who is a fashion writer…ok, it’s not about me, but about writer Nicolaia Rips. (Then again, I wrote a lot about me. This piece cracked my head open. Nicolaia called it the “Mommy Issues EP”. Oy.) Anyways, Nicolaia, blessed with an incredible roll-off-the-tongue name destined for writerdom, holds positions at the beloved Hommegirls and Cultured. This past week, she just wrote a piece about being a failed model for Vogue. And you’ve also probably seen Nicolaia around town, bopping around in Miu Miu ballet flats and a great Yohji blazer that she wears with her boyfriend’s baggy pinstriped pants. She goes out in these clothes; lives in these clothes. She makes…writing exciting again in these very clothes. It’s like Gonzo journalism but, like, covering a glammed-out Prada party in a sheer ‘90s-era dress. But, even the most fun of gals have skeletons in their closet. Here, in this episode of Closet Psyche, I talk to Nicolaia about two snazzy vests that her hot mother gave her but she has…neverworn!
PS. My audio was…corrupted during our last chat, so this is round two.
Name: Nicolaia Rips
Profession: Writer. To be specific, the features editor at Hommegirls and she recently became the writer-at-large for CULTURED. Also, Nicolaia is the author of Trying to Float, a book about her time growing up in the freaky, fun, and perpetually disputed Chelsea Hotel.
NEVERWORNS item: Two vests. “They are still staring at me,” she says. One is a cream cotton Issey Miyake with a peplum and the other is a brown leather Japanese vest, which Nicolaia says, “gives more harness than vest,” adding, “It’s almost like I’m a cow herder. Give me a stick.” She also mentions…it has a saggy boob effect with the droopy pockets.
When did you buy them? Well, Nicolaia didn’t buy them. Her mother, a model-turned-artist who reminds me of a softer Gina Gershon, gave them to her around two years ago. Nicolaia’s mother got them in Japan while on a commercial modeling job back in the ’80s. “I think it was a big learning moment for her with Japanese fashion,” says Nicolaia. “A lot of things that she got from this trip when she was in her twenties are my prized possessions that are so deeply in my rotation.”
When was the last time you wore them? Before speaking with me, Nicolaia never wore the two vests. They languished in her closet. Part of the reason she didn’t wear the vests is because she couldn’t figure out the closures, which she describes as “not typical vest closures,” adding. “I finally figured out how to button it [the Issey] after years, years of it sitting in my closet.” After our initial conversation, Nicolaia mentioned that she tried the Issey on the day after and wore it backwards. It somewhat worked but it was stiff.
What are the other reasons why you haven’t worn them? “Both of them are kind of more recent additions that she’s given to me, whereas there are other things that I got maybe when I was younger, I grew up with in a way,” says Nicolaia. “These two things I never saw her wear. That was another thing: I never had an example of how to wear it.” Fair. Sometimes it’s hard to envision a piece working within your own wardrobe if it comes from someone who has a different look. But another big reason why Nicolaia hasn’t worn the vests? Um, well, she has a larger chest than her mom and vest-wearing can be hard for busty gals.
So why are they still in your closet? This is where it gets a bit difficult. Nicolaia doesn’t want to part with it because these are her beautiful mother’s things. “I’m a sentimental young fool,” she says. Note: I don’t think she is a fool!
The Diagnosis
Nicolaia is not alone in not being able to part with a piece of clothing from a parent or a loved one, even if they have never worn it. I call this Mommy Issues Hoarding Syndrome (MIHS). I am using “mommy” as a term that can represent anyone who you love or cherish giving you something that you’re not going to wear.
MIHS is like a rash that I myself just can’t quite get rid of and as much as I try, I still have intense flare-ups. One example is recently when my mother gave me a plum dress…that I don’t see myself wearing. Background: She was going to wear it to my wedding but eventually went with another option. My mom herself never wore it! And instead of it being her neverworn, it has become my neverworn, hanging on my rack and drenched in my guilt, as it gets further smooshed between a Helmut shift dress and a leopard print Blumarine top. Then again, she gave me a thrifted wool Burberry skirt, mid-shin length, that I thought I’d never wear. For some reason, I kept it, and then I finally wore it about 10 years later.
Honestly, this is all really confusing for me! This is perhaps the roughest Closet Psyche affliction that exists because MIHS sinks its claws into our most vulnerable cores, preying on our rawest emotions through the medium of physical items.
Let’s dig deeper. When your mother, or really anyone you deeply care about, gives you something, there is a subliminal amount of guilt that comes with it. You feel like you need to wear it, even when you don’t want to. Plus, no one wants to disappoint their mom. And when the realization kicks in that you’ll never wear the piece, that guilt activates and becomes all-consuming. And forget trying to part with it…well, then the guilt becomes torrential! Ultimately, no one wants to reject a piece of clothing from a loved-one, and because of that, it will marinate in your closet for eons. Sitting there. Gathering dust. Chewed up by moths. Never to be worn, lost in between the racks. And there is a certain guilt, a garment-bagged sort of suffering in letting these objects wither untouched, too.
I’ve had major attachment issues with my mother’s clothing as I do with her things in general. To paint a picture, it can be a pair of killer black patent leather Prada kitten heels that she got on consignment. Fine. But some are odd things, more abstract, like her grocery lists that she writes on index cards with inane mentions of “Tuna. Cat food. Lettuce.” She blots her lipstick on the cards, leaving a glamorous little signature on what is the ultimate boring task. Maybe that’s how I think of my mother: a diamond in the suburban rough. I keep these cards whenever I find them laying around her car or on the kitchen counter. For some reason, I could never bring myself to throw them away. Even when I look through my butter yellow ‘70s Fendi shoebox where I keep all of my paper keepsakes, I have a rush of guilt that swallows me, even when I simply touch these notecards. It’s like my heart is caught in the undertow. I become five again. Did I mention I keep the envelopes of the birthday cards that she sends me? On my fridge hangs a searing yellow envelope with my address penned in her pretty cursive, her return address printed on a gold sticker, and two stamps of Alpine Buttercups.
Ok, but garments are another story, so back to the actual theme of keeping but not wearing the clothes our moms give to us. When Nicolaia and I were chatting about how often our mothers present us with clothes that we do not wear, we asked ourselves, “why do they do this?” Well, in some capacity our mothers think that we will wear it; that we will like what they give us. That’s fine! Then I was thinking that on some level, maybe they want us to echo their femininity and themselves and these clothes are the vehicle.
I tried to explain this to one man who told me that my “echoing oneself” theory is a tame form of narcissism; specifically that our mothers want a piece of themselves to live on. I thought that was a harsh take—and I don’t necessarily think it is narcissistic but it did help me think about the ranging levels of sentimentality that we assign to these clothes. Does my mother really want herself to live on in a J.Crew pink button up she herself has never worn because she didn’t like it to begin with? Do I want her to? Tough questions. Anyways, paging Freud!
On the other hand, why not follow in our mothers’s polished, Stephane Kélian-clad footsteps? After all, these women, who love clothes, understand quality and timeless style and all of the parts of what makes a good, stand-the-test-of-time wardrobe.
But do they actually think we will wear it?
We will never fully know, but we have our ideas. Nicolaia and I were discussing that maybe it comes down to the fact that mothers don’t want to donate or toss their pieces into the unknown. Maybe they want their neverworns to go to a familiar place that is still in their orbit. “The daughter is like the one stop before Goodwill,” says Nicolaia. She hilariously coined this as the Soft Trash Can Move, which is a guilt-free way for the giver to part with the item, like a delicious strappy leather vest from Tokyo, or a great Italian shoe they scored for 60 percent markdown at the now-defunct Filene’s Basement but they can’t wear anymore because of bunions.
Though remember, the Soft Trash Can Move is a transfer of an object, but it is also a transfer of guilt.
Prescription
The first suggestion is the temporary topical cream solve to Nicolaia’s neverworns MIHS rash. I told Nicolaia to try to wear the vests. Really genuinely try to test them out. Have a friend come and figure out how to style them. With anything mommy-related—again, an abstract term—you have to pull out all the sartorial stops if you’re ever toying with pulling the part-with guillotine rope. Nicolaia does have an out though: One of the vests simply does not fit—and you can’t argue with that. Another suggestion is to get that these vests remade into something else.
This one time, I broke out in hives because I ate fancy Italian tuna from Eataly. I never ate fancy Italian tuna from Eataly ever again, and guess what? I have never had hives ever again. Sometimes, we get rashes because of our diet and we simply need to change our diet.
The same goes for Nicolaia, and me, and our mothers. I suggested that Nicolaia talk to her mother about chronic MIHS. Maybe it is worth having an honest conversation about how she, ahem, we feel an incredible amount of pressure when our mothers give us certain pieces of clothing because we know we won’t wear it and then it is immensely difficult for us to think about parting with it. Sometimes, I simply tell my mother, “I’ll never wear that”—and guess what, as of right now, I feel better not receiving it in the first place. I can’t miss what I don’t have. And trust me, she has given me great things that I have lost, and that has felt relatively devastating. Obviously, this is a suggestion for a case-by-case basis. Not everyone is the same; not everyone has this relationship with their mother, parent, or loved one.
But ultimately, the decisions of whether or not we want to part with something comes down to us, alone.
Like I mentioned above, something that has helped me is understanding that there are levels to the Soft Trash Can Move. Sometimes, we are elated to get Soft Trash Canned by our mothers, especially when it is a piece we grew up watching our mother wear and we have imagined our future selves wearing it. Sometimes, like in Nicolaia’s case—and many of my own cases—I’ve never even seen my mother in some of the clothes she’s given to me. Sometimes I think she just wants to say “bye bye” to a piece and I’m the safest, most familiar recipient.
But guess what? Even in the universe of mom-given clothes, there are some pieces that are more treasured than others…the problem is that the guilt does not always discriminate. I’ve had to really train myself to get to the point where I know how to decipher what is worth the sentimental sweat and what isn’t. I still struggle with this.
People keep all sorts of things from their parents and loved-ones. The territory gets trickier and scarier as time goes on—if we are lucky enough to have that time. I spoke with someone yesterday who said she knew someone who kept their late parent’s socks. That comment reminded me of these really beautiful letters that people wrote to The New York Times in a piece titled “Death Cleaning’: A Reckoning With Clutter, Grief and Memories” about parting with a late loved one’s possessions. The piece is accompanied by an illustration of presumably a family leaving a home, carting away a mélange of things like an office chair, a trophy, and a Matisse painting. In the letters themselves, someone explains how they kept their mother’s tchotchke frog collection, another person kept their own childhood drawings they found among their mother’s papers. A pastor in his late age spoke about putting his hand-written sermons into the dumpster because he couldn’t bear to think about his son agonizing over parting with the letters when the time came.
I won’t tell someone to part with something that a loved one gave them even if they don’t wear it—but for me, the fact that these things are sitting in my closet and can accumulate to an unmanageable degree can be overwhelming and the guilt can outweigh how I feel about the physical object.
The Times letter collection also reminds me of my grandmother who I recently visited. She was born during the Great Depression to immigrant parents who fled Ukraine and grew up in the back of a grocery store. She has never been incredibly sentimental or materialistic. Out of everyone I know, she is the most zen when it comes to keeping and parting with things. After all, she has parted with a lot of things as she has moved over the years, so it is interesting to see the little she keeps and what she chooses to keep. My late grandfather’s leather wallet with his license still in it. A photo album. Letters from a relative explaining our family tree. There’s no flourish. In her mind, many things have become exactly what they are: things. Perhaps this realization comes with age; perhaps it is upbringing but she has helped me understand that we only have ourselves and our memories, and even those are fleeting.
As for the emotional depth we attach to objects…well, that is up to us.
That’s not to say that I don’t love wearing my mother’s square-toe Italian slingbacks around town, just as Nicolaia adores donning her mother’s “tight tight tight” black leather Fiorucci pants all the time. And isn’t wearing their clothes with chic gusto out in the world the ultimate sartorial way to express love for our fashion-loving mothers? Like, reporting on something exhilarating in a suffocating yet cool pair of a matriach-christened leather pants? Grabbing dinner uptown in my mom’s clickity-clack, hand-me-down footwear? I know my mom appreciates that I’m grinding down the heels of her shoes, just like she did.
A new episode of NEVERWORNS is coming out…next week. FINALLY.
Guilty of all of the above. Lots of beloved family members, sister, BIL, mom died young & around same time so I am FULLY in their clothing way a LOT & then fob off my dad’s things (omg & so much guilt… I never thought of it honestly) to my grown sons. Pure insanity
This is so well written & both of you share so beautifully
As yet another dark-haired only child idk what to make of the fact that this is so relatable to me - not with my mother's clothes but with her jewellery (worst offender category - earrings. physically impossible to wear since I let my ear piercings close at 20) and with the few pieces in my own wardrobe that were bought as a mother-daughter matching set i.e. she has the identical thing in her own wardrobe.
Also the MIHS diagnosis has now woken me up to the risk of being the one to inflict it, not on a daughter but on the 13 year old niece who now stands heir-apparent to my wardrobe. Sure, each piece is approved before I hand anything over so I know she at least WANTS to wear it but life and 13 year old tastes are unpredictable!