What one writer learnt in 2025 through exploring the ‘intimate, familiar’ wardrobes of ten friends

Colleen Kelsey’s ‘Wearing It Out’ gently announces itself with a spring-adjacent peach exterior and elegant gold lettering, the words petite in size and stationed just above centre on the publication’s front cover. If you ordered a copy during its initial US run in the summer, you might recall the perfect visual complement of the plum tissue paper it came wrapped in (the two shades made fine bedfellows). But the book, which was picked up by London-based distributor Antenne Books in November, wasn’t conceived to be such ‘a considered thing’ says the writer, who’s based in New York City and designed it with her friend, the artist Adam Milner.

‘What I’ve found kind of interesting and funny in general, is that it was not really meant to be a project. I was looking to do something that felt a little different from things I normally work on; something to amuse myself was really the impetus,’ she shares over Zoom, alluding to the journalism for which she is best known. Keen to circumvent the typical extracurriculars of podcasting and Substack, Kelsey initially intended to make a zine, borrowing from the subcultures she grew up with and a landscape wherein music and magazines were significant portals for discovery, when ‘things could kind of come out of nowhere’.

In tandem with this desire to create something tactile, Kelsey had been revisiting the work of French writer, artist and photographer Sophie Calle, and was struck by the way Calle explored her ideas. ‘The reissue of her book “The Sleepers” had just come out, where she invited people to come over to her apartment and sleep in her bed, photographing and interviewing them,’ she notes. ‘Also “Take Care of Yourself”, where her boyfriend basically broke up with her in an email and said at the end, “take care of yourself”. She outsourced that question to dozens of women and put on an exhibition. I was curious, and thought the idea of the prompt was really interesting.’

She subsequently reached out to ten girlfriends – some, relationships that stretch multiple years and different occasions, others newer and more at home on the internet – asking them to select an item from their closet and write something (Kelsey herself tells the eleventh story). The resulting stories are deeply intimate, oftentimes familiar, and moreover beautifully composed. A wedding dress ordered on a whim by culture writer Simran Hans opens the book (‘it's such a symbolically loaded item, and she's not necessarily writing about it in the way that one would expect’), while author Marlowe Granados relays her allegiance to a Prada Mary Jane via a retelling of how she got the scar on her right foot; Jennifer Park, a designer and visual researcher, photographs her ‘magnificent obsession’, a silk shirt with 75 per cent off, bought on the last day of the Barneys New York Warehouse Sale.

‘It was a way for me to be a little bit nosier about them in an official way,’ reflects Kelsey. ‘We talk about a lot of things, but I don't necessarily hear how they would describe something that's very close to them, or I might not even know [about something like that]. So it was fascinating to hear about their personal obsessions and preoccupations. Everybody touches on different emotional thematics, but a couple of themes emerged: some people were very much excavating memory and how it has shaped them. Another thread was this feeling of becoming, items assisting in either transforming them into who they thought they wanted to be, or were sort of giving license to affirm who they are.’

‘It's obviously about clothing, but it’s not necessarily a book about fashion,’ she continues. ‘What's really going on, is that garments can be a narrative backbone for your life – it's about how things move with you.’ She offers Charlie Porter’s ‘Bring No Clothes’ as another example of how sartorial decisions affirm identity, particularly in literature, before recounting the Muriel Spark biography, ‘Electric Spark’ by Francis Wilson. ‘There’s a moment where she’s toiling in oblivion. She has a short story published, wins The Observer prize and gets £250. She gives money to her family, to the guy she's involved with, buys a full set of Proust, and a blue velvet dress. Why did she buy it? Where was it taking her? I don't know, but it seems like an important detail for how she was viewing herself, and her place in the world.’

‘Wearing It Out: Eleven Stories About Getting Dressed’ by Colleen Kelsey is available from Antennae Books.