REBUILDING A WARDROBE: WHAT IF YOU HAD TO START AGAIN?

When a friend called to warn Elaine Russell about wildfires in the Malibu hills on January 7, her immediate concern was for her dog. Knowing that Bean, a boxer, was afraid of smoke, Russell left her office in downtown Los Angeles and drove home to the Pacific Palisades to pick him up. She arrived to find the smoke worse than she imagined — severe enough that she decided her family should stay at a hotel that night. She packed pyjamas and a change of clothes for her three kids, her husband and herself, along with her travel cosmetics bag. “I wasn’t in a hurry,” she says. “I was just walking around, thinking, ‘What else do we need for the next couple of days?’”

Russell, a partner at LA-based venture capital firm Greycroft, never imagined that this brief visit would be the last time she set foot in her home. “But some awareness must have flickered in my brain, because I grabbed our passports and my kids’ baby books. And that was it.”

By 10:30pm, the house Russell and her husband had built nearly seven years earlier — and thousands of other buildings in the neighbourhood and areas affected by concurrent blazes — were gone, reduced to rubble and ash in the most destructive fires in LA history. The aftermath of the fires has seen displaced families grieving losses as they’ve sought places to stay and replacements for household necessities.

Including clothes. Lots and lots of clothes.

Against the backdrop of devastation in LA, there’s a lesser-discussed aspect of recovery so many people have been left to reckon with: the need to source everyday essentials, from underwear to pyjamas to work clothes, all at once. Even those who enjoy fashion and shopping can find the imperative to recreate a wardrobe that may have taken years to amass overwhelming.

“A week ago, telling me I needed to go shopping for a whole new closet and home would have sounded amazing,” one woman who lost her Altadena home in the Eaton Fire wrote on Instagram, “but right now it just hurts.”

It’s about picking and choosing the important pieces. What are the things you’ve been wearing that feel like home?

The day after her neighbourhood burned, Russell’s colleagues sent a package of basics for each family member. Within two weeks, her family had moved into a rental in Bel Air. The new house is near her children’s school, which has been a source of stability, and comes with a number of other selling points.

“It has the largest closet I’ve ever seen in my life. Usually I would be ecstatic about that, but this time, I was like, is this the saddest? I didn’t have a single thing to put in it. And the last thing I want to do right now is go shopping or try on clothes.” Her sister Chelsea Hansford, the creative director and chief executive of Simon Miller, helped her begin to fill the closet by sending a selection of knitwear, tops and dresses (she’s created similar care packages for other friends and contacts). “It’s going to be a long process, but the things she brought have helped me begin to feel like a normal human again.”

Compared to losing irreplaceable family photos or the uninsured roof over your head, clothes may seem like a frivolous concern. Yet they feel urgently important to many, especially when it comes to re-establishing some normality in how they choose to present themselves to the world.

“There’s something about clothes that can be really comforting and make people feel like themselves,” agrees Allison Bornstein. The LA-based wardrobe stylist knew a number of her clients lived in areas affected by the fires. When she checked in with them to make sure they were safe and to let them know she was ready to help whenever they wanted to rebuild, “a surprising number of them wanted to talk about clothing right away. It really was a priority.”

A client who lost everything in the Palisades fire came to the phone with a shopping list: a pair of straight-leg jeans, a white T-shirt, a white button-down . . . “I told her, ‘No. We need to replace the things that make you feel like you, as opposed to going through this generic checklist of things you think you need to build a wardrobe.’”

For one woman, that meant rebuying a beloved Doen blouse instead of a basic if versatile T-shirt. Another chose a pair of trendy barrel-leg jeans in place of the sensible straight-legs she assumed should be her starting point. Bornstein helped a third client source exact replacements for her favourite Toteme tank tops.

Not that like-for-like replacements is always the goal. “There’s no formula for rebuilding, and not everybody can rebuy the fancy stuff,” Bornstein says. “It’s more about picking and choosing the important pieces. What are the things you’ve been wearing that feel like home? When everything is so uncertain, what can we do to hold on to something that feels comfortable and brings a sense of security?”

Other points of transition — a death, a divorce, a big change — require a similar approach. “In listening to my clients, what they really want is comfort.”

People who have been through various upheavals or disasters in the past have dealt with starting from scratch in different ways and drawn different lessons from their experiences. Ali Bradley, an ecommerce consultant and yoga teacher, had all of her clothes stolen from her car while she was midway through her drive to move from Denver to LA. The thieves took suitcases of high-value clothing Bradley had accumulated over 10 years working with fashion brands in New York, but left her houseplants.

“I still have moments where I think of wearing something and realise, wow, that was one of the things taken.” (She still lives in LA. The fires — and the prospect of having to evacuate her home with little notice — have caused feelings of vulnerability from the theft to resurface. “I know I have to be prepared to leave it all behind.”)

Writer Zadie Smith has also described these phantom wardrobe pangs. The London-based author lost her entire wardrobe in a fire when she was in her early thirties. “For ages after that, I’d be thinking that I had things I no longer had, dresses that I wanted or missed,” she said in an interview on fashion designer Bella Freud’s podcast. “So that used to turn up in dreams sometimes.”

Others found the rebuilding process wrenching but clarifying. In 2021, a flood in fashion stylist Clemmie Fieldsend’s London home destroyed her clothes. Over the weeks she spent sifting through waterlogged, mouldy garments and negotiating with insurers, “I realised that I don’t need a lot of clothes. Of course I lost pieces that I loved, but so much of what I was going through I hadn’t worn for years. There’s so much stuff you just don’t need.” After another woman’s house was burgled, with thieves making off with her luxury handbags and fine jewellery, she vowed she’d never buy anything expensive again.

Everyone I interviewed who’s had to rebuild after a loss agreed that messages from the wider world amounting to, “it’s just stuff — the most important thing is that you’re safe”, while well-intentioned, still rankled. “It was only stuff. But it was my stuff,” Russell says. Stuff like the furry footbed Birkenstocks she’d slip into when she got home from work, and 12 years of Mother’s Day cards from her kids, and the jeans that fit just right.

She’s full of praise and gratitude for the “overwhelming generosity” of Angelenos who have donated goods and their time to help restore families to some sense of wholeness.

“The entire city is in this together. LA feels unbreakable,” she says. “It’s going to be a very long road, but the world goes on. Life goes on, work goes on, everything goes on. And yet, we’re going to be reminded for months and years to come of these little things that we don’t have. That’s going to be the hard part.”

Follow us on Instagram and sign up for Fashion Matters, your weekly newsletter about the fashion industry

2025-02-05T05:14:08Z