Can a Costume Change Your Mind?

A coat from Passages, a parka from Severance.

If you’re able to help: Here’s

Personal Space

’s excellent list of GoFundMes to help families displaced in the Los Angeles fires. And because of Altadena’s specific history of black homeownership, here’s a list of black families in Altadena displaced by LA fires. I’m packing a box of new beauty supplies to send to Altadena Girls! A little really goes a long way.

Franz Rogowski as Tomas in Passages. Photo: Screenshot.

It’s very cold in New York today, chilly enough for me to put a sweater on Remy before our morning walk … and then to cut it short because it’s just too cold for her to be outside for too long. I have this weird anxiety about dressing for the weather since that one time I tried to wear linen in October. “That’s a summer fabric,” my mom told me on the way to school. I was scandalized … there were codes to dressing, rules that govern being out in the world … how was I supposed to know this! It was as instructive as the time a middle school classmate observed that I wear a lot of brown. I have never been the same since. I have also not stopped wearing a lot of brown.

I look to movies to decide how to be in almost every respect, but especially when it comes to how to dress. Every October, I want to dress like Faye Dunaway in Network: the flirtatious silk blouses, the powerful high-waisted skirts, and the sexy knee-high boots. Every summer I want to dress like Catherine Keener in Walking and Talking or Tilda Swinton in I Am Love: baggy, figuring-it-out denim, or a dress designed for a passionate food-induced love affair. I love summer, devoted Hung Up readers will recall, a season to feel delightfully adrift, deliriously unmoored. Fall is a season of decision, of decisive action. The kids go back to school and the Real Housewives of New York cameras start rolling.

There’s a coat in Babygirl that I can’t stop thinking about. Long, black, exquisitely tailored. I think it’s Khaite? Nicole Kidman looks fabulous in it, but there’s still a sense that it’s holding her together. Kidman wears that coat like it’s everything she wants to believe about herself, like that coat is the only thing stopping her from coming apart. Harris Dickinson comes along and instructs her to take it off, and that’s when the movie really gets started. There’s a great yellow coat in The Substance, too, that can look cheerily saffron or radioactive citrine depending on the light. I’m still thinking about the brown coat in Passages: the slutty little meet-the-parents tank gets all the attention, but that brown coat was so glamorously bossy, the choice of someone who has never known discretion.