Best Dressed
On fashioning selfhood in chronic illness
If you’ve been following along, you might remember that in my first Substack I wrote about the maelstrom - no, the full-blown clusterfuq - that has been 2024 and 2025. My aim for the year was disarmingly simple: to survive. And if I could do that, I wanted to see one of my essays find its way into Griffith Review which it did. My essay, ‘Standard Issue: Notes on a Hospital Gown’, is in issue 190.
The theme, Best Dressed, immediately conjured the pale geometry of hospital gowns and the quiet wreckage of illness - the residue of living in a sick body, the garments I turned to once I stopped disguising the fretwork of scars across my chest and throat, then back to the gown that had always confined me, draped in both remembrance and restraint.
As fabulous trouser-suit champion editor Carody Culver writes in her introduction: ‘This edition of Griffith Review is about much more than what we wear – just as what we wear is about much more than stitching and cloth, or about those seemingly mundane factors – weather, laundry, mood – that shape our daily outfit choices.’
Special thanks to super-editors Amber Gwynne and Darby Jones. It’s the editors who truly make writing magical.
Here’s the link for the 90th edition of Griffith Review. In the meantime, enjoy this carelessly curated visual feast of gowns, drapery and other medical paraphernalia.
