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September, 2001 There is a famous scene in the movie Mommie Dearest where Joan Crawford (played by Faye Dunaway) beats her young daughter, Christina, with wire hangers. Christina is accused of not taking better care of her clothes—hanging them on wire hangers instead of on, we are to assume, cedar or padded silk ones. Putting aside the horrible nature of this abusive relationship, the scene makes apparent that, for Crawford, how one wears one's clothing is as important as how one cares for one's clothing. Is Crawford correct? Does the way we care for our worn objects say as much about us as they way we wear them? It is interesting to note that in Euro-American culture, the expression "in the closet" refers to a person who is "hiding" his or her supposedly "true" (often sexual) identity. What is cached in the closet is the real and extremely personal essence of someone. In the film 9˝ Weeks, Elizabeth is frustrated with her lover John, about whose personal life she knows very little. One day, as if searching for some element of the familiar or personal, she decides to open his closet, and disappointedly finds stacks and stacks of neatly-piled white shirts and an array of carefully hung suits. She becomes upset, but why? Is it because she could not find anything personal in these artifacts or because the carefully-ordered closet suggested an identity that was unappealing to her—a latent homosexual or perhaps a psychopath? For whatever reason, in Euro-American cinema at least, neat and clean are depicted as the exclusive domain of the feminine or effeminate, and to see these character traits manifested in a man is troublesome for her. Peter Stallybrass has commented that the care for clothing has had gendered connotations:
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