OGBFF: Hello Miss Clara! First things first, what are you wearing today?
Clara: Hey, baby girls (make no mistake, you are supposed to have read that in the “My Video for Briona” voice). What a potentially sexy question with a moderately disappointing answer! I just got home from work. I’m wearing tie dye sweatpants made by Harriet Watson and an airbrush hoodie made by Hieromaar. Both are white, black, and blue toned. And nothing else underneath ;). I changed into this when I got home. I wore a cream colored MM6 sweater with a Hollywoodgifts99 tank underneath it to work, although the undershirt never saw the light of day. I paired that with my boyfriend’s tan-colored thrifted jeans and diesel sneakers. And winter layers because it was cold as SHITE today.
O: You are a Poshmark legend, constantly sending your friends expert links to buy, each item perfectly curated to your friends’ style and always the right size. What other hidden talents do you have that you are proud of?
C: I don’t know if any of my talents are that hidden in real life, but I would say that I only give the Internet a small piece of me. They know tinyjewishgirl, not Clara. I’m pretty musical. I play piano well and have a good ear, so I can carry a tune, but I wouldn’t say I actually have a nice voice. I can write beautifully and quickly. I can easily produce 3,000 words on anything in well under three hours. I’m fairly good at math, too, and I enjoy it. I’m exceptional at listing things I’m good at, clearly. Humility, on the other hand, is maybe not my strongest suit. I think the most remarkable thing about me might be my memory, though. Everything sticks in my head, to the point where anyone who knows me well recognizes that it is not a gift, but rather, a curse. You needn’t concern yourself with the ins and outs of exactly what that means, because, as stated, I like to leave most of Clara out of my online presence. I will offer you, however, that I memorize songs unintentionally all the time, and at any given moment, I have at least 10 songs stuck in my head, and it is a 100% guarantee that one of them will be the Folgers jingle.
O: If you could raid any movie character's closet, whose would it be and why?
C: Hedwig from Hedwig and the Angry Inch. That movie is like an I Spy book, where every time I rewatch it, I notice more incredible details in the costumes. Additionally, the entire cast of Josie and the Pussycats. They all dress like dolls I would’ve begged my mom for. Most of the time when I rewatch movies that I adored as a child as an adult, I realize that I never paid a lick of attention to the storyline, and mainly picked favorite movies based on the vibrancy of their mise en scene. Josie is a film that falls in that category. If we are including television characters, though, obviously I want Carrie Bradshaw’s wardrobe above all else.
O: You recently buzzed your long curly hair! What inspired the chop and what’s the coolest part about having buzzed hair?
C: I was so done with having hair. I worked at a salon in high school, but I’m aggressively average at doing hair. I was beginning to feel like that was getting in the way of my ability to flex head-to-toe. This winter hit me like a tank engine, too. The whole not-giving-yourself-down-time-because-you-have-two-jobs thing, coupled with quarantining balls-to-the-walls again for Omicron, it turns out, is not good on ye olde seasonal depression. I had a lot of hair, and it was thick as hell. Showering was becoming such a chore and felt like a waste of my time, which had recently become a scarce resource for me. Bye-bye, hair! Life is easier. It’s almost like…a weight was lifted off my shoulders? Get it? Hahaha, sorry. The coolest part of having buzzed hair, truthfully, is that it looks, well… cool! It makes me feel like I’m a 90’s dystopian film character in a movie about the year 2022. I put a look together and it seems costume designed!
O: Do you have a favorite item in your closet?
C: I just looked over at my clothing rack sympathetically, as though my clothing had feelings, and I was going to offend most of them by picking a favorite. That’s a good question. It cycles on a daily/weekly/monthly basis. I kind of had a long, creatively uninspiring day, and nothing is springing to mind as easily as it normally does. Probably my Jeremy Scott Adidas bear coat, though.
O: Do you remember feeling “stylish” growing up?
C: All the motherfucking time. My younger sister and I had a lot of older cousins who would give us hand-me-downs. I idolized my cousins and walking around in their clothing made me feel soooo stylish. Then paying it forward and giving hand-me-downs made me feel like the cool older girl that I saw my cousins as. And I come by my love of shopping honestly— thanks, Mom! She made sure we had cute clothing when we were too young to be trustworthy shoppers, but even them, she let us choose our own outfits. Some of my earliest memories are of being genuinely excited to wake up because it meant that I could get dressed! Puberty was far from traumatic for me because it put me in the running to receive hand-me-downs from a new source: my mom! Wearing adult woman clothing made me feel not only stylish, but also grown up, like all of the pop cultural figures who were my style icons! I still had a lot more growing up to do, but the knowledge that I would someday be allowed to wear whatever—as little—I wanted made maturing an exciting prospect.
O: Besides fashion & styling, what other artistic mediums peak your interest?
C: I love drawing and painting, but I find working three-dimensionally more gratifying, which is why I started doing makeup, and also why I enjoy sculpture. I took a Special FX Makeup class in college, and it turns out I am a natural at that, especially because I have a rather disturbed visual imagination. Playing piano is another one, as we’ve discussed. I love music and I have invested a lot of my time in becoming knowledgeable about the genre of folk. And then there is writing! I can write anything–I always say I can write the phonebook. Along with that comes a love of reading. I enjoy acting, and I am decent at it, but I don’t enjoy performing in front of a live audience, which can be a hindrance. I can appreciate film, but I wouldn’t pretend I have incredible taste in it, although I do have incredibly specific preferences, in terms of likes and dislikes. I’d rather watch a terrible Blockbuster than something artistic and long from the 70’s any day. I love conceptual art and performance art, and I definitely have the head to create it, but I don’t have any burning desire to be an artist in that capacity in this lifetime. I did design my major around cultural criticism in college. Like, I could’ve studied anything, and I chose to learn about and discuss art for four years. While this is a topic that has sparked streams of thousands of words out of me, brevity, as well as not isolating our audiences by revealing how insufferably pretentious I am are both concerns here. The medium that I’m least interested in, generally, is dance. But of course, at the end of the day, I’m sure I know and care more about dance than the average person, who unlike me, probably doesn’t have a favorite Mikhail Baryshnikov performance. I’ll spare you of any more ramblings on this subject, now. You’re very welcome.
O: If you were stuck on a desert island and could only bring one pair of pumps, which would you bring?
C: Alexander McQueen Armadillo Boots. As if I owned them! But they seem like they might be a practical weapon and multi-purpose tool, though they certainly wouldn’t be functional shoes. Plus, if I went Castaway-level crazy, they’d make such a glorious Wilson because of how far from depressing they are!
- Clara “TJG” Perlmutter signing off. Love you all!