The End of Personal Aesthetics
Seeking heavenly garments
This Weekly Edition of Inkwell features Sarah Finley Purdy
All things are full of weariness;
a man cannot utter it;
the eye is not satisfied with seeing,
nor the ear filled with hearing…
and there is nothing new under the sun.
— Ecclesiastes 1:8-9
AUGUST IN MANHATTAN is brutal, I think most would agree—it’s humid in a particular way that I’ve yet to experience elsewhere. The concrete bakes on all sides, turning the sidewalks into a large, hazy mirage. The city clings to exposed skin and the long subway platform wait times bring the dread of clean work clothes being sweated through. No matter how breezy or practically I dressed for the weather, summer wrapped itself around me, its oppressive presence a constant companion on my daily commute.
The experience of New York City is intermingled in my mind with the weather that each season brings and the clothing it necessitates. Despite the difficult reality of living year after year in the most populated city in the United States—scraping by with a full-time job and multiple adult roommates—the thought of summer in New York brings a joyful tinge to my heart; it rests in my mind as an open door, a new chapter.
IN AUGUST OF 2013, I moved from a small town in rural Ohio into the bustling uptown of Manhattan. I was twenty-four years old, and this was my first time living outside of my parents’ home. I had moved to the city to pursue a Master’s degree in Fashion and Textile history with a focus in museum practice from a leading fashion school. This step felt validating on a professional level, but I also truly believed God had put me in the right place.
As one would imagine, New York City was an eye-opening place for someone like me. I was raised in the Midwest my entire life, cultivating a love for the fine arts and the experience of museums—but never venturing too far from my backyard. As I woke up in Manhattan, I found I had the center of arts and culture at my fingertips; famous artists and designers could realistically be sharing my sidewalk space. The visual stimuli alone was enough to excite and then exhaust me day in and day out.
I quickly declared my love for New York in my heart, vowing I would live there permanently after I was finished with school. My feelings were much like those of Joan Didion at the beginning of her essay Goodbye to All That: “I can remember now, with a clarity that makes the nerves on the back of my neck constrict, when New York began for me, but I cannot lay a finger upon the moment it ended… I was in love with New York. I do not mean ‘love’ in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and you never love anyone quite that way again.”
IN GRADUATE SCHOOL, I marveled at the writings of fashion and art scholars like Caroline Evans and Anne Hollander. They saw the profound worth of studying fashion in the same way that art has been studied for centuries, and each had a shrewd eye to the current cultural norms surrounding humanity’s deep inclination to get dressed. Personally, my eye took in the sartorial markers all around me and I began to experiment at a fast pace with my personal style. Prior to my move to New York, I had long been cultivating a love of clothing and self-presentation. Some of my earliest childhood memories revolve around playing dress up—as a ballerina, a waitress, a swimming athlete, or a performer. All of these roles required specific outfits, and I found clothing to be a way to express my different interests and to build upon my own personality. It became an outlet to self-express and identify, one which I carried with me through adolescence and into adulthood. In New York, these youthful ambitions took on a more serious and encompassing role; clothing now communicated to my friends and peers my self-perceived importance.
Childhood traumas had left me struggling in adulthood to feel like I was enough—within my family structure, my friendships with other women and in tumultuous romantic relationships with men. My shyness at times was overpowering, especially in a group setting. It seemed there was always someone funnier or more interesting or more educated for those whose attention I desired to gravitate towards instead of me. Both consciously and subconsciously, the way I dressed helped me fit into situations I found uncomfortable.
Fashion made me interesting and desirable. It started conversations between strangers, elicited compliments and niceties. It signalled aspects of my personality or knowledge, and projected a false sense of confidence that carried me through exhibition openings and job interviews. My anxiety and self-hatred was perfectly masked behind things like a vintage Givenchy dress bought at the Manhattan Vintage Show the second year I lived in the city. Navy blue with white stripes, this dress was 1960’s Audrey Hepburn-era Givenchy (The actress and designer had a glamorous and legendary working relationship for several decades). I thought the dress was perfect; it signalled that I was aware of culture, modernism and design history. But the fact is, I had used some of my loan money from school to pay for it. Using clothing to express status brought with it the cyclical desire for newness, consumption, and simply keeping up. The thing that I had idolized and followed to this new city was ultimately the thing that would buckle and crumble under my insecurities.
I saw my struggles reflected back to me through the eyes of literature. The character of Pauline in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye pursued clothing and beauty as a way to be accepted by other women, to a disastrous effect on her marriage and family. “Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another – physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity and ended in disillusion.”
All along, I neglected to hold up my self-perception and consider the threads wrapped around myself in light of the faith I claimed to hold deeply in my heart. Christ was Lord of all, I had always been taught, but when it came to how I identified, He played a miniscule role. The longer I lived in New York pursuing a career after graduate school, the more dysfunctional my social anxiety became and the more quickly I would slip into sadness or anger.
I ATTENDED A BIBLE-TEACHING church in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of Manhattan. I had visited within the first few weeks of living in the city, and when I met a mutual friend of a companion back in Ohio, felt confident it was the place I was supposed to worship. Attending this church was my first time choosing a church outside of my family structure and it was here that the Lord graciously worked in me—to begin to free me from legalistic ideas and extra-biblical structures. It was here that the idea of Christ began to give me a heavy feeling in my chest and brought tears to my eyes. Jesus was so much bigger and more complex than I had ever realized.
When I finally looked to scripture, I saw that the human experience of clothing when expressed by Jesus—or even individuals such as the Old Testament priests—stood in stark contrast to the way I experienced clothing and identity.
In John 19 it reads, “When the soldiers had crucified Jesus, they took his garments and divided them into four parts, one part for each soldier; also his tunic. But the tunic was seamless, woven in one piece from top to bottom, so they said to one another, ‘Let us not tear it, but cast lots for it to see whose it shall be.’ This was to fulfill the Scripture which says, ‘They divided my garments among them, and for my clothing they cast lots.’”
During this period in history, clothing was an expensive necessity and the average person did not own more than one or two garments for daily use. It’s no wonder Christ’s clothing was something the soldiers saw fit to divide amongst themselves, just as one would divvy up money or other valuables.
Jesus’ seamless robe has been regarded by the historic church as a symbol of His purity and perfect covering. Sometimes the tunic is equated to the priestly undergarments found in the Torah, connecting Christ to the priestly practice of intercession for sins. A robe constructed without seams means that the entire garment was woven in one piece, an extremely challenging and impressive feat for the production methods of the time period. It’s speculated by historians that to make such a garment would require an incredibly skilled craftsperson, capable of weaving in the round on a warp-weighted loom. Even by current weaving standards, this is a difficult and highly uncommon task. During Jesus’ time, a garment such as this would have been priceless. Christ’s tunic was literally the perfect covering, seeming to almost defy human creative ability.
Soon after this passage in John, Christ died and made a way of salvation possible for all people; I knew this story intimately. But it struck me anew that Christ, stripped of His own truly perfect garment, completely covered us—He himself is the seamless robe that gives us lasting identity. We could not make such a garment ourselves.
I came to find out that Christ does not merely serve to hide one’s own self-hatred but to abolish it; not to give us the air of intelligence or knowledge, but to provide earth-shaking wisdom. His love is not fleeting, passing over that which is more interesting in one person for another. His love is all-encompassing and focused completely on each of those who have given their lives to Him. He is capable of loving in a way that transcends human ability but fulfills our deepest desires. And those in Christ are able to feel full and covered in its glorious manifestation. With our spirits clothed in this righteousness, our outward presentation no longer holds the kind of weight or destruction of self that it previously did. We are free to present and use clothing to build up and honor Christ’s newness in us, not be torn down in ourselves and our identities.
WHAT WAS MURKY started to become clear: there were multifaceted implications of clothing in my day-to-day life, both in the way God had designed them to function and the way in which I, in my humanity, had warped that design. Craftsmanship and beauty matters to God, Scripture is explicitly clear, but it is not merely superficial. Beauty comes from and is offered for the One from which all beauty flows. When I warped things like clothing or fashion to function solely to glorify self instead of God, it became a means of destruction, instead of real creation.
In the same way that Joan Didion chronicles her leave of New York upon her marriage to author John Dunne at the end of Goodbye to All That, I also eventually left New York to live in Philadelphia after getting married in 2018. Sometimes it’s best to let your first love fade into the hazy, August mirage. Like Didion, I hold fond, almost mythic memories of my time in the city, but “at some time the golden rhythm was broken” and it was time to step into something new and lasting. In many ways, years later, I am still leaving New York in my mind, still unpacking my worldviews from that time and holding them up against the clear light of the Word. But that is the way Christ works; He is gentle and kind to free us from ourselves.
My loves continue to grow, to be reoriented and made new. I still enjoy fashion deeply, but its practical role has changed. To know that I am cared for beyond all measure as I am, clothed in Christ’s perfect garment, has freed me to enjoy beauty and abundance in my true identity.
This essay was originally published in Ekstasis Magazine.
Sarah Finley Purdy
Writer & Fashion Historian
Sarah graduated from the Fashion Institute of Technology in 2015 with a Master’s in Fashion and Textile History and went on to work for the Calvin Klein archives and the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She now works as a grant writer for the Kent State University Museum, raising funds for their world-class fashion collection, while living with her husband and daughter in Cleveland, OH.
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In a journaling group I’m part of this summer, we just discussed and journaled about clothing ourselves in compassion and used the metaphor of clothes to explore the richness of this idea. I just shared your piece with my group because it adds another layer to conversation. Really enjoyed reading about your experience!
I enjoyed reading about this part of your journey. Never understood that about Jesus' garment being of one piece and extremely challenging to create, so thanks for that insight.
Reading from Kent, Ohio :)