Salie 66,
Sheila Heti,
and Sweaters

A friend of mine was given a past-life reading and was told that she had once lived as a witch; that the men of the town hated her and were threatened by her powers, so they strung her up to a gallows where she hung. My friend tailors her sweaters as a practical hobby, cutting them up and sewing them back again to make them fit just right. She gave me one that she no longer wanted, and I tried to wear it, but I found it claustrophobic: the neck was too tight.

By the same logic, I wonder if I was once a goat farmer who died peacefully, out in the barn, sleeping in a pile of my many goats, my fingers tangled up in the soft undercoats that are turned into cashmere—for I am most happy and comfortable and feel most safe when I am wearing a weightless cashmere sweater.

I think this is a most sensible way of looking at the cashmere sweater: from the point of view of the wearer, who finds it easy and dreamy and soft.

Yet most of the tales that are told about cashmere sweaters are narrated from the opposite point of view: from the outside, (often) male subject who can’t look away when a woman wears her sweater tight. Lana Turner was the original “Sweater Girl,” but not because she loved how cashmere felt on her skin, more than all the other actresses did. The women who were crowned “Miss Sweater Queen” throughout the 50s were not the ones who felt most stirred by the cashmere sweater’s ethereal lightness.

Francine Gottfried rose to minor and momentary fame in 1968, not because her skin was the most sensitive to wool’s rough chafing, but because she looked so comely in her “bullet bra” and sweater that on September 18th, two thousand men gathered at 1:15 in the afternoon at the BMT station to watch her exit and walk off to her job at Chemical Bank. (She took the same route every day, making it possible to accumulate followers.)

A few days later,five thousand men showed up to gawk, and police had to close down the streets to escort her there, while three cars were ruined by the oglers who clambered onto their tin roofs.

A prominent witch reincarnated over many lifetimes, and a modern, zaftig working girl in New York City, both found their way to the cashmere sweater—that luxurious and rare, yet solid and common, garment. Cashmere keeps the body perfectly balanced between hot and cool. Perhaps that is best for these sweater-loving women: to be, and to be seen, as hot—and cool.

“I think they’re all crazy,” the clever Ms. Gottfried told the panting press. “What are they doing this for? I’m just an ordinary girl.”

Sheila Heti is the author of ten books, including the novels Motherhood and How Should a Person Be? Her upcoming novel, Pure Colour_, will be published by FSG, Harvill Secker, and Knopf Canada on February 15, 2022._