Emily Spivack Maps Out Life Through Clothes in Netflix’s ‘Worn Stories'
The writer speaks to L’OFFICIEL about adapting her best-selling book into a Netflix docu-series.
What began as a simple eBay search spawned a book, a sequel, and a new Netflix docu-series of the same name. Worn Stories documents an array of people’s meanings and memories behind their fashion. Spivack’s journey began over 15 years ago with her love of vintage high heels. While hunting online, the writer stumbled upon a posting for a vintage Playboy Bunny outfit, tail and all, with an authentication ID card of the woman to whom it belonged. “Almost like a driver’s license,” Spivack tells L’OFFICIEL. “I just had this moment where I was like, Who is this woman, what is her story, I want to know about who she is and did she enjoy doing what she was doing? What was her story?”
Thus began the writer’s journey down the virtual rabbit hole where she discovered scores of other people’s anecdotes to accompany their clothing postings. “I found amazing stories and started this project called Sentimental Value in 2007. I was collecting all of the stories I was finding and I was thinking, Why were people sharing these stories? Was it cathartic? A marketing tool? And it was just like they were compelled to share them.”
After looking in her closet and reminiscing on the personal histories behind her own clothes, Spivack turned the recorder on her friends and family to hear the tales of their closets. She remembers, “These were people I have known for my entire life and the stories they were sharing with me were stories I had never heard before. So I learned that clothing was this overlooked storytelling device.”
In her quest for more tales, the former New York Times columnist began reaching out to her idols and users on Craigslist, as well as hosting in-person gatherings at museums where she asked people to bring in pieces of clothing with a story behind it. “A woman at the first [event] showed up in this jade green ball gown with a coat over it and said she had been waiting to tell this story,” she explains. “So I just knew I was onto something.”
Her books Worn Stories and Worn in New York, released in 2014 and 2017 respectively, shared these accounts accompanied by photos of the clothing in question. Her works include interviews with everyday people, as well as more notable names like Oscar-nominated director Greta Gerwig, fashion designers Dapper Dan and Cynthia Rowley, and Jenji Kohan, creator of the Netflix series Orange Is the New Black.
Spivack continued to engage with people about the quirks behind their apparel, and, after a fruitful meeting with Kohan, the two brought the idea to Netflix as a mini-series. Like the books, the show Worn Stories features individuals—some notable, like U.S. Congresswoman Frederica Wilson, and some that could be your next-door neighbor, like Mrs. Park, a Korean woman living in Queens—discussing the larger picture behind an item in their closet.
One story that stands out to Spivack as a good representative of the show’s overall message is that of Simon Doonan and his Stephen Sprouse workout shorts. Doonan is the Creative Ambassador-at-Large for the now-shuttered department store Barneys New York and has been involved in the fashion industry for most of his career. Spivack recalls, “Here are these aerobic shorts where we learn the cultural history of Los Angeles in the ‘80s and we are able to learn and experience what [Doonan] was going through during the early days of the AIDS epidemic through the absurdity of aerobics.”
Doonan recounts his “survivor's bewilderment” at watching the friends around him die during the height of the AIDS epidemic. During that period in his life, he often visited the local Sports Connection for exercise classes—which he says resembled something out of the film Perfect—as a “refuge” from the somberness around him. For Doonan, these dichotomized moments are connected through his pair of aerobic shorts.
Other moments in the show touch on more universal themes from the here and now. One episode introduces Carlos, a former prisoner who now volunteers for the Ride Home Program for recently released inmates with no one to bring them home. In the show, Carlos picks up Rudy, who has been on the inside for 40 years. Carlos takes Rudy out for a meal, teaches him about cell phones, and walks him through a local thrift shop as they figure out his clothing sizes. As Rudy leaves the store in a new look, his transformation is evident, both physically and mentally, as he smiles about being a “free man” after four decades. “I got a new shirt and some Dickies pants, and they match my shoes,” he says. “I looked in the mirror, and I like what I saw.”
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While most of the show was filmed and chronicles life pre-pandemic, Spivack believes there is space for a conversation about the clothes people gravitated towards during quarantine and the stories they hold. “This is a time where we're looking around us and we're looking at all the things we have and re-prioritizing what's important to us,” says the writer. “My hope is that once we are able to go back out into the world, the things we will prioritize in our closets are the things that have meaning or that were given to us by someone special that we care about or remind us of an experience that we had, even a little bit more so than the designer or what season it is.”
Worn Stories is available now on Netflix.
