Provocative Dressing

"To Vivien dressing was almost a religion, a ritual. On rainy days when everybody wore mousy or moth-eaten clothes she came out in a shining and vivid raincoat. She dressed in defiance of the elements rather than in submission to them. Anita could see that her dressing was almost a provocation to calmer inhabitants; things were bound to happen to Vivien, different things than happened to most women, she was always so dressed for it, for the unexpected, the adventurous. Her dressing roused in people an uneasiness similar to the feeling they had when looking over trip literature and pamphlets, a kind of wanderlust, a desire to flee from the familiar and the conventional. Whatever the stage possessed that enslaved the imagination Vivien had applied to her daily life. Between her setting and costume, and the homes of other women and their costume lay a pit as wide as the orchestra pit in the theatre, and spotlights such as she directed on herself found her audaciously keyed up, as they found the professional actress."

- Anais Nin, "The Slippery Floor," Waste of Timelessness and Other Early Stories