The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: The Best Best Dressed of 2025

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This week, Managing Editor Merrick Sloane shares a new selection from each of their 8 favorite books featured on The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed in 2025.

Stories

A cicatrix of scar tissue, a necklace of missing lymph nodes,
bare back of a mad woman chanting by the river’s edge,
catwalking between dunes along a hem of shoreline,
divested of office clothes, gone the pencil skirt and
elegant silk blouse. Equally lost is the desire for tight
fabric, all synthetics—even sweat-wicking yoga pants,
guess-which-polymer bras—nothing that closes in, that
hugs my breasts, nothing with the word “wonder”
inscribed on the tag, nor with complicated instructions.
Jersey shirts, dresses, and tees or no clothes at all.
Knowledge arrives like seeds across the ocean. More luck
lands at my feet every year, or it dies. A woman is an ocean, a
mother before eggs are harvested, harboring sacs,
nesting thousands, which could become her mini-mes,
ova as portraits. We carry generations tucked inside the deep
prairie of our bodies—great-grandmother’s habit of
queefing during sex, her passion for homemade ravioli, her
reflexes—the knee that pulsed when sitting, eyes that
sang when speaking failed, when the language she adopted
tripped off her tongue. The stories are too many, too
unsung, too untold for the telling is hard, the telling is beyond our
vernacular, folded into an untapped, microscopic chorus. In the
womb that begins before the womb, women sustain
xeroxed generations, which become beings who work, who
yearn for freedom, for meaning, to end the cycle, the
zig-zag that keeps us coming back to life—or not at all.

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