Between a sheet-metal shed and a hedge of banana trees in New Orleans, a figure stands in a paisley dress, paired with a wedge heel and a necklace made of multiple small collages.
When I enter a new city, I begin a ritual. I try to find a garment made there. The ritual is political, oriented toward history and survival. The wool suits and fur coasts of a not-so-distant past in New Orleans and Baltimore offer vernacular affirmation to the evidence of a changing climate. The “Made in Memphis” and “Made in New York” tags offer ephemeral monuments to the unheralded laborer, migrant and immigrant alike. The scaffolds and cranes around empty buildings—blight or redeveloped condominiums—mirror the dance of the bobbin and the thread.
In the shadow of the Sears factory, now the Crosstown Concourse, once stood Cleveland Flea. I’ve been in Memphis long enough, thanks to a job that keeps me on the road, to watch a thrift shop fall and an Urgent Care rise in its place. But upon arrival, I haunted the dress stalls and met the woman whose mother made this belted red paisley dress. She’d learned the craft at work for Sears, and smuggled home materials to make dresses for her neighbors on nearby Tutwiler Avenue. Her clients were looking for more options than the department store offered in their sizes. Looking, no doubt, for the privacy, the dignity, and the dressing rooms that Jim Crow did not offer them. The disorienting pattern is a portal to a lost world … not simply its injustices, but also its opportunities. Back then, as older Memphians would tell you, there were jobs in walking distance from home that offered a shot at a middle-class life. I touch their labor when I buy something old. On the occasion I buy something new, I eventually put it back into the secondary market.
The red dress was made in Memphis, but I am built out of fragments of New Orleans. My two cities bookend the state of Mississippi. I teach there, but mostly I’m a chronicler, a stranger, a flâneuse, and a magpie. Here, I offer a collection of images from New York, my parents’ hometown; from Clarksdale and Southaven, Mississippi; from my home cities, and from Nashville. I perched on the edge of a bathtub at the Dive Motel, the perfect photo backdrop for independent folk and country artists frequently found in the courtyard and at the pool. The garments are a mix. A yellow checkered suit from Moonstruck Flea in Cleveland, Mississippi, where I headed with my traveling companion Dan after tarrying in Nashville. He’d found two of the necklaces I wear here hanging on a gate in Brooklyn, as he hurried to meet me. In Duluth, Minnesota, I thrifted a fur made in town, and wear it to the Mississippi River on a cold Mardi Gras. I am a generous lender and an eager borrower; my friend Ashley offered this black and white vintage sweater dress for a weekend in New York. With the Memphis dress, I wear a collage necklace made for me by my partner, Chip. In a few images, you’ll see the fannypacks I began collecting during COVID; they’re just big enough for a mask, keys, phone, and a bottle of Purell. When I need to dress up, I wear fancy pajamas—at a thrift shop, they’re a quarter of the price of a dress; no less a figure than Grace Paley urged nightgowns as a solution to stiff dresses. I share these stories and these images—largely from the last year—to honor the immediacy of the thriftspace, and the phenomenology of the cityscape.
Between Tals’s Bagels and the Upper West side border of Central Park, a figure leans against the high porch of a brownstone. She wears a vintage sweater dress and a fringed fanny pack with an alligator’s severed paw secured to its zipper with a jump chain.
The author leans toward the camera in a chain-stitched jean jacket. One shoulder reads “public intellectual” and the other reads “public menace.”
A figure in a lace cocktail dress stands on the edge of a bathtub with a disco ball behind her.
The author wears a thrifted nightgown with a waist-tie and accordion pleats as an evening dress. It is belted with a fanny pack, and worn with the suede ankle boots, she found in the closet after she last AirBnB’ed her house.
A figure stands on bright AstroTurf lining a porch in Memphis. She wears a floral dress, brocade pumps, and a blazer with the sleeves rolled up.
With one food on a hide rug and the other on a hardwood floor, the author wears a vintage 1960s sweater suit over a sports bra.
Somewhere near the porous borders of the Mississippi Delta, a figure stands in a bus stop, wearing a Nehru collar jacket and a wrap skirt.
At a visit to the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Arts, the author poses near the Sol LeWitt Wall Drawing Retrospective in a flower-print boilersuit.
A figure looks up at the camera, her face concealed by wide aviator frames. She wears a tube top with a flowered corsage strap-sleeve and rifle shell on a necklace chain.
The author wears a plaid suit with a pleated skirt and long vest over a t-shirt with a print of a cloudy sky. Visible behind her are the chaotic woven patterns of a rug and curtains.
On the banks of the Mississippi River in New Orleans’s French Quarter, a figure stretches on the ground in floral-print jeans, a beaver-fur coat, and a massive scarf and sweater found in the trash 1,000 miles away, in Milwaukee’s River West neighborhood.
This headshot is a black-and-white tin type. Jennie stares straight ahead at the camera. They are wearing a patterned shirt.
About the Author
Jennie Lightweis-Goff lives in New Orleans, Memphis, and, in luckier times, Beijing. Through myriad disasters, she has failed to shelter in place.