Jill’s antiquing album of 800+ photos. 

The Things They Bought #1

Jill and Ali have been texting each other images of their clothing purchases for close to a decade. Both raised in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, Jill lives now in San Francisco, and Ali lives in New York City.

Ali: Pennsylvania has everything. I have been talking about this theory a lot: out of all of the states, Pennsylvania encompasses the most of America, the widest swath of Americanness. In the west, there is Pittsburgh, which is essentially Midwestern. In the east, there is Philadelphia, which is fundamentally a Northeastern city. And then there is the middle! Where we are from. I did not conceive of Mechanicsburg as a small town, of Mechanicsburg as rural, until I left, until I realized that Mechanicsburg is a funny name, is a sort of joke to people from other sorts of places, to people from cities.

Jill: Pennsylvania, in having some of everywhere, is not anywhere in particular. When I started college and was surrounded by so many people from the Bay Area and the DMV and NYC, I got my first sense of how difficult it is to place Pennsylvania. Instead, I placed myself within it, and when people ask where I’m from I still say South-Central Pennsylvania. My friends in California tease me about it, because they’ve never heard of South-Central Pennsylvania, or of anyone referring to where they’re from by those terms. This lets me avoid the joke of Mechanicsburg’s name, but sometimes people laugh anyways, maybe at the notion that South-Central Pennsylvania means anything to anyone in particular.

Ali: This pair of texts, the first from 2021 and the second from 2024, conveys the simultaneous thrill and horror of shopping in Pennsylvania. The clothes are unbelievably cheap, and the selection is not picked over, and all of my favorite clothing is from there. But you are guaranteed to run into someone from your past, you are guaranteed to remember the feeling of struggling to open your locker in middle school while someone is making out with their boyfriend next to you. But Vivienne Tam for $2.50!

This is an image of me wearing the Vivienne Tam [right] to a friend’s going-away party in Prospect Heights. I’ve been thinking about Jake Maynard’s piece in The Paris Review that you sent me about rural Pennsylvania. Two parts have been sticking with me. First, “An anarchist friend recently told me that a place is only called rural if people don’t give a shit about it.” Second, “Authenticity might not be real, but the feeling of it is, and every time I leave the city and head north, I get to brooding about identity and pretense and my place in the world.” Both of these can be true, can be the twin poles of my relationship with Pennsylvania, and with the clothes that come from Pennsylvania. Like Maynard, I feel wary of ideas or conceptions of “true authenticity” which is what a lot of style writing and criticism appears to be concerned with of late (see here and here and here). “Authenticity” cannot exist in fashion because the self can never be truly unmediated while it is being represented through technology. Technology always mediates, even if the technology is a scrap of fabric. Maybe authenticity is not a metric we should be using or striving for—maybe it’s actually the opposite, the idea of a better performance, a better mediation, like the way I laugh after I say “Mechanicsburg” now and I draw out the “a” sound in the middle of it.

Jill: Better performance not only feels more compelling to me than “authentic” dressing to me, but it’s also an easier styling prompt, or maybe it’s just challenging in a way that’s more fun. The two outfits below, despite being somewhat opposed—a traditionally feminine vs. a traditionally masculine silhouette—both mediate my appearance in a similar way. They’re distinct pieces, to the point of being costume-adjacent. Both lend so much structure and character that I can let them perform for me; I don’t need to ask either piece to do the impossible task of mediating my self. In college, when my friend Fernando saw my room for the first time, he complimented my “costume rack”; it was actually a rack of clothing that I regularly wore, but there’s some truth to the impression that it gave him.

I didn’t get either piece. The picture on the left is from Miss Ruth’s Time Bomb, where I bought my first piece of vintage from a curated store rather than thrifting it myself; it was a pair of plaid wool pants that I still have. When I wore them to high school for the first time, someone in homeroom asked if I was dressing up from another era for extra credit points in AP U.S. History. I wasn’t, but maybe there was some truth to that impression, too. I was trying to get some sort of credit for wearing an outfit that gave people pause, even if—or maybe especially if—it made me look like someone else, from somewhere or sometime else entirely.

Ali: This reminds me that when I was leaving for the going-away party in the Vivienne Tam, pictured above, my boyfriend’s brother said, “What is the theme of the party?” There was no theme; those were just my clothes.

It’s funny to see these photos now, from four years ago. We were both still in college, and it was COVID times. I LOVED camo, and I loved shopping for camo in Pennsylvania and then wearing it at Wesleyan in Middletown, Connecticut. I didn’t buy the bikini that day, but I wish I had it now. I did buy the green hat and still wear it sometimes to my job, which is borderline unprofessional. I never wore camo when I lived in Pennsylvania. The people from our town had a weird relationship to camo, to hunting, and the cultural associations of camo. Remember when our high school football team would play Redland—was it Redland or Carlisle—and everyone would wear camouflage to school to make fun of them for being hicks as part of the rivalry? But then we would have the first day of deer hunting season off from school like it was a holiday? That type of camo-wearing, camo as derogatory, actually betrays a more complex relationship to the rural environment of our town.

Jill: Can you imagine seeing these photos in high school? I would have been surprised to know that we’d be wearing camo so frequently in our 20s. My eventual embrace of camo was definitely influenced by you, and by Pennsylvania, and by my time in Montana post-college. The most-worn camo piece in my closet is a boy’s jacket; it’s small on me and has a cropped fit, cinching at my waist. It’s the most fitted jacket I own and is not something I put on when I want an outfit to lean masculine—actually, the opposite. I wore it out with a sheer black slip the other night.

One time, I was waiting for the bus in my old neighborhood, Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco, wearing this jacket, and a guy commented on it and asked where I was from. Something about the way he asked made me think he was trying to tease out if I was some coastal-bred city girl stealing valor by wearing hunting patterns. Possibly this is just me being defensive of where I’m from; I often feel defensive of Pennsylvania in California. I said South-Central PA, and then he asked if I had ever been hunting, or something to that effect. I explained that we had school off on the first day of deer hunting season and that yes, I had been hunting before. I learned to shoot a gun in Montana, and I’ve been rabbit hunting before. I felt like between those experiences and growing up in Pennsylvania, it was no more wrong for me to wear it than it was for anyone else, but I don’t think that any particular experience qualifies or disqualifies anyone from wearing camo. It does seem like that is part of camo’s current status though: something that you either have to earn or that no one can.

Ali: Yes, I totally agree, and I also think when I wear camo in the social and cultural context that I live in now, it is in a kind of tongue-in-cheek way in that I am nodding to rural Pennsylvania but also rebuffing the common associations. When I was in college my friend bought me a camo steering-wheel cover for my birthday that actually made it harder to drive because it was a bit loose on the wheel. When I got home, my dad said, “This is the one accessory I would never expect to be in your car.” In Pennsylvania, camo does not seem that tongue-in-cheek.

Jill: Exactly; it’s just more likely that someone who is wearing camo in Pennsylvania owns it for its fundamental purpose, even if they also wear it to do errands. It makes me think about the styling of camo for utility vs. for purely aesthetic purposes; tongue-in-cheek camo is a pattern that’s treated as a neutral, I think, like when animal print became popular again and was declared the new neutral. Rarely is camo styled with neon in a non-utility context, unless it’s already incorporated into the piece (like your green hat, or a camo hoodie with pink text), but of course, if you’re wearing it hunting, you might wear an orange vest for visibility. I say this based on the hunters we see in the fields behind our house. For what it’s worth, there’s also a shooting range just beyond those fields, one that we hear constantly, including on Christmas day. But you don’t have to be shooting a target to wear camo.

Ali: Thinking about getting dressed as a performance helps me to remember that all of life is a performance, is a stage, is a theater. This transforms anxiety, anxiety in the form of questions about “authenticity” and stolen valor and geographic-based identity and even running into someone from high school in your hometown, back into the fleeting thing it always was, the mixed reaction of an audience member as a feather boa tickles your neck. What joy it is, to laugh, to get dressed, to text!