Liza Field

Liza Field's column appears twice a month in Extra.

Recent columns

• Natural world evokes the return of our sense
• Money, politics corrupt language, but we don't have to listen
• Our mountains in winter is one place where human language fails

Lead me from the unreal to the real.

--Upanishads

As a teenager, I had an after-school/weekend job at a preppy dress boutique in Roanoke. If you've known me any of my years on this Earth dressed "like a deer" (as one hiking buddy describes it) -- you'll be laughing by now.

I who have never owned high heels, nor understood the point of mascara, who loses jewelry in rivers and would rather go bare-legged even in winter than wear irksome, twig-snagging hose -- there I was, in a shop without windows, promoting pink-and-green Laura Ashley dresses.

We also offered racks of well-tailored, foam-shouldered blazers, preppy sweaters, wraparound skirts hand-painted by Somebody (not just Anybody), and convertible clutches with clacking wooden handles you couldn't sling over your shoulder like a backpack or hang on a nail.

The job was a windfall for me, not just by paying real wages. It constituted "free school" in the beginnings of a cultural movement that has not died since, but expanded so exponentially and profoundly, it's become our daily reality.

What movement?

I call it "the image." And I'm writing about it, in this column series on the invisible world, not because today's heavy focus on surface appearances is newsworthy.

A swift shift

We now take for granted the need to focus huge proportions of personal, corporate, academic, religious, national and political attention and money on appearances (hair, skin, clothing, 300 pairs of shoes, 300 channels, celebrity glitz, giant McMansions, golf-course lawns, mega-million-buck political campaigns, titles, corporate PR).

But this was 1980. Most Roanokers could view three channels, not 300. Campaign finance mattered, but it wasn't yet the dominant, perennial preoccupation of elected officials.

And investigative journalism still existed, as Watergate had given Americans a desire to see through appearances more than worship them.

As for personal looks, we'd just climbed out of the grubby, clunky-shod, patchy-appareled 1970s. To America's collective relief, we'd ditched the rawhide platform "cinder-block shoes," the orange-and-green patchwork dresses, draggy bell bottoms, weird wide ties and bizarre hair.

But the pendulum-swing back to looks-preoccupation fell with such a swift, emphatic swoosh -- as the adolescent "preppy" began transitioning into the adult "yuppie," and upwardly mobile career folk were targeted as a new niche market for "looks" -- the shift in focus seemed stunning, at least to my perplexed self.

The look

It amazed me, for example, that customers would ask us what accessories to buy with which outfit, and that they would believe our assurance that a certain ensemble achieved the esteemed standard of "an image" no more visible to me than the emperor's new clothes.

In fact, the business was more of an image-store than a dress shop, because it sold "the whole look." Even a certain designer cologne was in stock because it exuded the right "image." Astonishingly, droves of customers bought it, despite the lack of any choice.

Likewise, we offered a line of hammered-thin, vaguely gold jewelry -- earrings shaped like seashells or sailboats (never scrub-pine cones or acorns, I noticed), along with lightweight add-a-bead necklaces people desired mainly because everyone else desired them.

I didn't know why, at the time, it struck me as strange and vaguely sad -- that people obediently bought jewelry preselected for them, and that it resembled children's dress-up toys -- almost weightless, composed mainly of air. After all, the point was not the interior composition. Likewise, you wore it not because ancestors had passed it down as an heirloom or it represented someone's love -- but for "the look."

Most strikingly, we kept a stack of heavily perfumed cards by the register, offering customers the services of An Image Consultant.

For a sizable fee, you could hire this person to "do your color analysis," then accompany you to cosmetic counters and salons for the proper styling and manicure, then ransack your home closet to toss out objectionable items before taking extended shopping trips to assemble your new "image." Everyone ought to have one.

None of the staff took advantage of these services, to my knowledge. These working women were kindly grandmothers and widows; they'd cooked many stews, scrubbed floors and washed mountains of laundry, and though they always looked dapper and tidy, they were working to make a living, not an image.

Naturally, we never discussed this as we bagged up a purchase or covered the mannequin with a tweed suit, requisite cream-colored tie-blouse and dribbles of thin jewelry. It seemed some game had been agreed to, which mustn't be named verbally, perhaps even to ourselves.

But of course, years later, I'm still trying to verbalize it, in my usual urge to excavate meaning. So I'll keep digging into the topic of "image," next time.

Liza Field's column runs every other Saturday in Extra.