How are clothes important in the novel, This Is How It Always Is?

Clothes represent public versus private identities. Before Claude enters the family, the boys have to change clothes at night, an act symbolic of transitioning from the public spaces they traverse during the day to the private space of the bedroom. Claude’s putting on a dress after he comes home from preschool is initially described as just one more change of clothes, suggesting that not just he, but his entire family, must grapple with how they present themselves in public versus in private.