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Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Chase: On hanging women’s clothes

So with the sickness and hospitalization and all, you can imagine that we haven’t kept house all that well since we came back from the States. In fact, the bags that we “unpacked” we just dumped out on the floor and dresser so we could put the bag itself away.

I used some flex time from work today to stay home and take care of some things like this. Today I attacked the mountain of Julie’s clothes that was sitting on our dresser*. This is probably the first time I’ve had to hang up a large amount of Julie’s clothes on my own, and I’ve just got this to say: what the heck?

Women’s clothing was not made for hangers. In fact, I’m not really sure what it was made to be stored on/in. The neck of nearly every shirt she owns is so fashionably wide that only about a half-inch on either side hangs on the hanger. Then you have cardigans (I think that’s what they’re called), which have about two buttons at the very bottom of a large opening. Worse still, you have things that don’t close at all. What do you do with these? Drape them on hangers? I came across one  thing that I could swear I’ve never seen before so I don’t even know how it hangs on a human body. It was a square of knit material with sleeves in the center—no buttons, no fastening strings, no nothing; I couldn’t tell which way was up, how to hang it, or even how to fold it. Sorry, Julie—it’s awkwardly stuffed in your t-shirt drawer.

The whole experience seemed to me to be a wild mess of unnecessary straps, cords, drawstrings, loops, and flaps. Then, of course, once it’s on hangers, you lay it down on the bed to make a stack to carry to the closet. Immediately the precariously perched pieces of fabric fall off. I found it hard to resist using tape or tying knots, man-style. I’m convinced the only thing that keeps them from all falling to the floor inside the closet is the insufficient space to fit them all. The sheer pressure of clothes packed tightly side by side somehow holds them up. I wonder if you could even do it without hangers.

Every time I thought I had found all the clothes and properly disposed of them, I would lift an item of clutter and find another crumpled shirt hiding there, waiting to challenge me in new ways. The funny thing is, Julie’s better about hanging up her clothes than I am with my thick, 100% cotton, solid-color t-shirt collection.

*Actually, it would be more accurate to say that it was sitting on a foundation of crumpled receipts, over-the-counter medicine packets, plastic bags, and tangled cords on top of the dresser—but that’s beside the point.

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