clothing the self: an everyday ritual
Interviewed and written by Dr. Alexandria Vasquez
Herderin is a research and design studio attempting to understand the social and emotional relationship people have to clothing, and, if any, the relationship to identity that clothing facilitates and corresponds to. Herderin is branding this body of research: "Clothing The Self." We have conducted a series of interviews over the first half of 2025 that we are sharing in a story narrative format on the Herderin Journal. The following journal entry is from a Clothing the Self interview with Marco Gressi, winemaker, chef, friend.
Marco was born in Baghdad, Iraq. His mom is Iraqi, his dad was Italian. His grandfather was the doctor for the royal family in Iraq and they had to leave due to politics. They moved to Spain, Iran and finally, Italy, where Marco went to high school. Born in Iraq, he and his mother lived in Italy for many years during wartime. I am not sure if it is because of his unique perseverance through hard times, his spirit, or simply the places he has lived – or all the above – but there is no one quite like Marco Gressi. He is a timeless, simple person who reminds me of the connection we all can have to the art of everyday living if we tune in, pay attention, and live life with our fullest hearts open.
Marco is the winemaker for a well regarded winery in Napa Valley, California, and married to Lynette, a doctor whose focus is on access to reproductive women’s health services. Marco is also a chef – I think some of my best meals have been eaten at Marco and Lynette’s home. Tonight, people gather around their kitchen, as he slices thin pieces of truffle, prosciutto, but also watermelon radish and other locally harvested vegetables and fruits of all various conventional and obscure understanding. It must be said here that Marco is not a pretentious person. He lived in a tent for 15 years. Before Napa, he had a cafe en route to Tahoe that reviewers considered a place “one must stop”. He is a quiet guy, not necessarily because he is shy, but because he doesn’t need to speak to make the room more comfortable. He has a way of making everyone feel comfortable and at home through his love language: food.
When I enter their 3-story home in the hills of Napa, I give Marco a hug and he asks if I would like a cup of tea. He pours me a ginger tea, while Lynette asks if I would like a glass of wine from the bottle I brought, and so I sit with my tea and my glass of wine, and the couple on their sofa. Both are wearing sage green colors of natural material clothing. I should mention that when I pulled up to their home, Lynette was already outside with her neighbor, their dog, Oscar, and their neighbor and his dogs. She was wearing a limited-run Herderin Sweaterdress made from hemp and organic cotton, which her best friend Naomi also owns, as well as myself. There is something rather connective and spiritual about having that same piece of clothing between us.
I sit on a bar stool, but they ask if I would like a sofa pulled up to be more comfortable. I tell them this would be fine, and I continue onward to ask Marco about his favorite garments. He tells me that Lynette has changed his outlook on clothing in such a way where he cannot go back to what he once wore. “10-15 years ago, I was wearing synthetics. I hated the way they felt, sounded, and smelled. I cycle, and I often would feel like a stuffed mortadella in that gear. It’s all spandex, you know.” We all laughed. “Lynette has turned me on to natural materials. As I started wearing them, I realized that I felt better, and more able to live for the life I like most, which is being home.” Marco goes on to tell me how the COVID-19 isolation did not affect him, “I am a homebody. I wouldn’t leave my house if I didn’t have to.”
But Marco finds that he needs to transition his clothes for work, “I have my clothing for work, which is usually a branded polo, and the clothing I have to wear there.” There is a rather important distinction between what his clothing must be for work, and work events, and then what he wears for his life outside of work. “I have to wear formal clothing at times, and I can wear a suit when I need to, but I have always felt bad for people who have to wear a suit and tie everyday: the tie has always felt so constricting,” and Marco puts his hand around his neck to further elaborate on how it makes him feel uncomfortable to see others look uncomfortable at work. “I don’t know if they get used to it, or just have to live with it, but I couldn’t do it. It’s hard to look at.”
This transition between home clothing and work clothing shows in his wardrobe at home. “I have an area of my wardrobe just for jeans, and they are all in various sizes, since my weight may fluctuate throughout the year.”
Marco’s description of seeing other people uncomfortable in their clothing makes me think about how he brings comfort to others through his hospitality, food, and ultimately the wine he makes for his profession. He is deeply passionate about making others feel good, and wants to share the comfort he understands with others. “I don’t know if clothing can ever communicate to others who I am. I think I communicate best through food – that is my language.”
For Marco, clothing is not a language, but rather a functional object: one that brings comfort and supports him in feeling good in his body. He doesn’t dress for others, but rather for himself and the life he has. Wearing clothing that feels constricting and synthetic is not what he prefers in his everyday life. The transition he has to make between home life and work life makes dressing himself almost a form of formality where he has to relinquish his desire for comfort in order to keep his paycheck. He also feels that clothing is not made in the same quality as it once were, and that he wishes he could rebuy something once he has given it its proper wear and holes have formed, which is when he decides to let go of it. “Almost immediately when I get a new wool top, I have an oil stain.” He talks about how investing more money into a single, natural material garment was a transition for him: buying the $10 shirt from Fruit of the Loom makes sense when he knows it’ll be used up and stained quickly. This disconnect between comfort and home life - desired life - and work life, is an area where Marco sees compromise in how he can be comfortable.
Does this speak to our overall compromise in life – from the comfort of what we desire and want for others, as opposed to what our economic system forces us to do? Is comfortable, natural clothing what we wear when it is for ourselves, and do we wear the clothing we don’t choose for ourselves in the same way that we don’t often get to choose if we have to work? Is ‘work clothing’ an embodiment in the material form of our collective sacrifice in order to have a good life? And does making this wardrobe distinction show for people like Marco that there is a distinction between what we want for ourselves, and what our society demands of us? In other words, is clothing a reminder of where our true desires meet our societal constraints? Perhaps we need to bring our non-work selves to the front? Perhaps the separation of the two perpetuates the social ideologies we still contract ourselves with through our relationship to work and how we see ourselves economically?
The interview continues. For Marco, he would not switch wardrobes with someone else. For him, he doesn’t know the life that person lives in those clothes and that feels too intimate to him. Their sweat, smells, and other bodily discretions, feels too close to the person. In this way, clothing is an extension of the body: it is a material that interacts with the body and then becomes a part of it. To wear someone else’s clothing, to Marco, is almost to wear them, and that is too close. He wants to be in his own skin, his own wardrobe.
I ask Marco if he looks in the mirror to get dressed. He doesn’t. For him, it’s not about aesthetics, but it is about feeling – the sensual nature of clothing. In this way, clothing is a part of his sensory system more than an aesthetic one, in addition to his roles (whether in work, or at home, as just Marco). For Marco, clothing is a sensual object, a socially functional object, and an extension of the body itself.
When I asked Marco if there is any piece of clothing or style that upsets him, he immediately talks about red hats and the MAGA movement. “MAGA has ruined red hats forever. Even when I see someone walking in the neighborhood with a red hat, though it won’t be MAGA, I will be upset.” For Marco, there is a sense of communication, and politically messaging matters. “People also see me as perhaps less conventional,” when he is wearing his regular off-work clothing of natural materials. In this way, his clothing lets people know some sense of where he may stand on concepts within our society, and to object to wearing anything that would be related to the MAGA movement would allow others to know where he stands politically.
Political signaling in clothing seems to keep coming up in our interviews – from Carol to Rebecca to Lynette and now to Marco – and it seems that even when we are not discussing our politics, our clothing can speak for us where we stand on the issues in society: from objectification of the woman’s body to the resistance to conservative policies. Perhaps it is a way we allow others to discover us, or at least know we are a safe person; while simultaneously, letting those we don’t want to know based on political affiliation, know that we are not the same as them.
Sameness and difference in how we socially communicate our political values: do we dress to communicate our values and politics? While we allow ourselves to switch between our front and backstage selves for our relationship to economic activity as workers? Even as Rebecca is a founder of a nonprofit, she still works for her organization, and must represent it when she goes to the capitol to talk about environmental issues.
We dress for our labor, and it is not just a functional item in terms of our physical activities, which this has changed for many American workers, but now for the function of what we must communicate on behalf of where we are employed: whether it be Fibershed or a Napa Valley winery – we communicate affiliation through clothing choice.
We wear our values, visually, in this way, but when we truly wear our values for home, personal, and family life, our values shift: they become more about what we value for how to live a life.
This distinction is important, for what we value in terms of our inner life may have similarity to our work life, but still relates to a deeper part of ourselves that reminds us that these two areas of life are distinct, and dressing ourselves is an act, a daily ritual, that reminds us of their distinction. Why does this distinction matter for us so much, and why do we collectively do it in our inner lives? To remind us that we are in work mode, and not rest mode? Is it because inherently to work is not to rest? What would happen if rest and work were one? Would we not change? This is where we may need data and it is a limitation of this study, but one worth exploring.
Everyday, we remind ourselves through the act of clothing ourselves, that work life and home life are two separate areas of our overall lives. These two areas of our lives have distinctive traits that are not fluid, but rather needing separation. We feel a sense of odds when they are too intertwined. It is perhaps through our sense of losing our obligation to work, which could be argued is a bourgeois concept that carries us into our post-fact lives. Home life and work life have different rules and [rules of] engagements to us, and we must dress for that accordingly.
Clothing ourselves is far more than an action of everyday habit: it is an action of everyday ritual of our engagement to the economic system, our political perspectives, and our signalling to others what words may not always travel. Clothing is a communicative tool.