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"  Photo: Ally Lindsay Here at ELLE, we make it a point to fill every single issue with not just fashion, but explorations of individual style\u2014what our Editor in Chief Robbie Myers once described as &amp;quot;one-of-a-kind voices writing about what it means to create an exterior life that is true to their interior one.&amp;quot; In February, acclaimed author Chimamanda Adichie penned a piece on her struggle to rationalize being a smart woman who loves clothes; for our September issue, ELLE writer Alice Gregory wrote a substantial meditation on Women in Clothes, a new book from Sheila Heti, Heidi Julavits, and Leanne Shapton that explores the feelings women have about how they dress; each October (for our Personal Style issue) we invite prominent female authors\u2014including Gillian Flynn, Taiye Selasi, and Mary Gaitskill\u2014to write essays about what they wear and why.  Related: Why Can&amp;#039;t a Smart Woman Love Fashion? We sensed a kindred spirit in Emily Spivack, who teaches at Pratt, curates the Smithsonian Institutions clothing blog, Threaded, and has an ongoing online project called Sentimental Value where she collects images from eBay auctions and posts them alongside their descriptions: wedding dresses with sad tales about love&amp;#039;s untimely end; well-loved Manolos that, post-pregnancy, no longer fit. For her latest venture she&amp;#039;s written\u2014or, perhaps, curated is a better word\u2014Worn Stories (August 26, Princeton Architectural Press), a book that blossomed from her website of the same name. The book is a sartorial anthology of sorts, a collection of stories from the legendary Marina Abramovic, Piper Kerman (of Orange is the New Black fame), artist Dustin Yellin, and actor and director Greta Gerwig, to name a few. Ranging from a musician&amp;#039;s favorite brand of skin-toned, sweat-resistant shorts (sexy!) to the suit a man wore to meet President Obama, the stories get surprisingly deep into the clothes-owners&amp;#039; psyches and reveal what we at ELLE have long believed\u2014a shoe is never just a shoe; a well-cut jacket is so much more than the sum of its parts. &amp;quot;The clothes that protect us, that make us laugh, that serve as a uniform, that help us assert our identity or aspirations, that we wear to remember someone\u2014in all of these are encoded the stories of our lives,&amp;quot; she writes in her introduction, and so we called her up to chat about why this stuff&amp;#039;s so fun to read, one closet voyeur to another:  Photo: Ally Lindsay What made you want to do a book about clothing? I guess I&amp;#039;ve had sort of an interesting relationship to clothing in general. When I was younger I started a not-for-profit organization that helped women with cancer deal with body issues, predominantly using their clothing as a wellness tool. Sort of a therapeutic approach to thinking about clothing. And then I started Sentimental Value, [which] was more of an art piece. I think what I&amp;#039;m drawn to is that clothing is just very universal. Generally, you know, we all wind up wearing clothing one way or another. Exactly! Clothing is universal. Unless, of course, you&amp;#039;ve joined a nudist colony. And so opposed to fashion, which can be more exclusive, clothing is something that is highly relatable. I was aware that whenever I would travel, the first place I would go might be like, a flea market, and I could look at my closet and see an archive of all my travel experiences and adventures. It just felt like clothing was this conduit to storytelling. I think I&amp;#039;ve always just kind of toyed with the anthropological approach to it\u2014that clothing itself is very porous; you can stain it, it can get ripped, it can smell like perfume, or\u2026not like perfume. It sort of absorbs experiences. Do you think everybody has at least one story in her closet? What was really fun for me, especially when I was doing a lot of these interviews and talking to people, is that sometimes the initial story would be something that might air on the side of sentimental. Like, &amp;quot;This was my grandmother&amp;#039;s, then it was my mother&amp;#039;s, and now it&amp;#039;s mine.&amp;quot; And that&amp;#039;s a lovely story. But then, I think they&amp;#039;d feel like, &amp;quot;Oh, I know I&amp;#039;ve got something else\u2026There&amp;#039;s this story of the time I did X, Y, or Z, and I was wearing this thing.&amp;quot; There are certainly people that are just not sentimental, and they get rid of things. But they still have the thing that they wore when they ran the marathon, and they can tell the story of running the marathon through that. You can look at it like, &amp;quot;Here are the things that I&amp;#039;ve held on to, and why.&amp;quot; Or you can look at it like, &amp;quot;What was the thing that happened while I was wearing this T-shirt?&amp;quot; Sometimes the stories are amazing, and other times they&amp;#039;re just quick snapshots of our lives. There&amp;#039;s one story in the book about a sweatshirt a woman kept from a one-night-stand. It seems like she&amp;#039;s learning something about herself in telling it\u2014did you get that impression from a lot of the people you interviewed? I certainly think it&amp;#039;s kind of a reframing: why you hold on to this thing; why it&amp;#039;s important; why you have this collection? Asking people prompted them to think about it more. Very cool. So what&amp;#039;s next for you? Now that [Worn Stories] is close to being out, I want to bring some more life back to the website. I&amp;#039;m revamping it so that people can contribute their own stories, and also adding new stories I gathered after I turned in the book that are really good. And in closing\u2014not to be completely creepy and intrusive\u2014what&amp;#039;re you wearing right now, and does it have a story? [laughs] Well, I&amp;#039;m actually wearing a pair of these Bass leather [sandals]. I grew up in Delaware and we spent time at the beach, and I just remember my mom wearing these exact sandals\u2014I hadn&amp;#039;t thought about them in a gazillion years, but I came upon them [in a store] and had this crazy flashback. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/fashion/accessories/news/a25190/emily-spivack-well-worn/>