On style

When one of my friends first met my mother he asked me if she was an artist. She was dressed in what I like to call her version of Joseph’s Amazing Technicolor Dream Coat.  “No,” I responded wearily, “she’s a stockbroker.” As opposed to my father who restricts his stylistic flourishes to his writing and wears conservative suits, my mother expresses herself boisterously through her clothing. When I was in Catholic school she would stroll in on parents’ day in a mini-skirt, her hair dyed purple or, as she calls it, eggplant. In a recent street fashion blog post, she was described as being dressed “in a riot of pinks.” 

Fashion is one area where my mother allows herself to be frivolous and experimental. Unfortunately, she often extends her experimentations to me. When I was a very awkward teen, she handed me two outfits. The first was a yellow bodysuit, which to this day I refer to as the human condom because when I put it on I am basically naked but tinged an un-enticing rubber-yellow. The second was an electric blue dress with a skirt in the shape of a small balloon. Now that I think about it, I think they were supposed to be worn together. 

Over the years she has exuberantly given me everything from matching hers-and-mine ice cream-colored tangas, an outfit I noted looked like it had been stripped off a Mongolian herdsman, complete with matching embroidered cloth slippers (“You never know,” she responded to my query as to when I would have occasion to wear it), a dress resembling a festive Chinese lantern and various other outfits she endearingly believed I could pull off, being, she claimed, the “thinnest” in our small family of portly women.

Being the youngest in a house of women means you spend your youth in hand-me-downs, surrendering control over one’s “look” to the vagaries of those who get first dibs. It thus took me a long time to learn that the art of dressing oneself is more than just thinking “this kind of looks okay” and “this kind of fits,” not to mention, “I probably should not be wearing this backwards or inside out,” the latter reflecting my laid-back attitude towards dressing till I discovered boys and, to my disappointment, that I had to compete for them. What followed was not pretty, my fraught path to adulthood reflecting itself in my outerwear.

Early on a slavish follower of trends, I tried everything from ballet skirts and biker shorts (Madonna phase), long skirts and Dockers (confused construction worker phase), skinny jeans and boots (Some Kind of Wonderful phase), baby-doll dresses (don’t ask) to sky-high heels and whatever-shows-the-most-skin outfits (“Your hooker phase,” my father likes to call it). When I entered the working world and could afford to define my style through pieces beyond those sold in the Gap, my violent oscillations between tailored suits and hip-hop outfits gave lie to the façade of lawyerly competence I was trying to project and more truly reflected both a lingering childishness and the fissures in my life and personality. My current considered (if not particularly interesting) sense of style evokes a much more settled sense of self. I do still feel nostalgia, though, for that younger “me” — the one who dyed her hair blonde, danced in cropped tops and gold chains and blithely wore a black bra and volleyball shorts under a fish-net sheath to a night out with a guy she liked but who unfortunately had chosen that same night to introduce her to his mother. She was brave.

Style isn’t important to everyone and shouldn’t be. In these materialistic times it is often a trap and a vice. I cannot afford the clothes I truly want but I also don’t pretend to myself that I can. Although I’m convinced all my style problems would go away if I could always dress in Brunello Cucinelli, without that option, I enjoy working with what I have, inspired by my grandmother who, at 95, doesn’t wear designer clothes but always looks perfect. Style is also important to me because I lack the kind of beauty that needs no adornment. Clothes can really make me. I’ve seen it make other people. Anna Wintour is not conventionally beautiful, neither are Patti Smith, Charlotte Gainsbourg or Sarah Jessica Parker. But when you see them, you don’t forget or easily dismiss them. As one gets older even the most beautiful among us can’t rely on one’s natural attractions and a finely honed sense of style becomes increasingly important.  

A few months ago I was sitting in a steam room with a woman who looked like what any Japanese woman in her 80s looks like: small, fragile and gray-haired. Half an hour later, as I was paying my bill, she emerged jauntily from the dressing room in a classic angled black pleated Issey Miyake dress, her short hair blow-dried into a white wave. She looked like an elegant black and white tulip, a Georgia O’Keefe painting come to life. Entranced, I turned to my friend and said, “That is exactly how I want to grow old, with that kind of panache, that sense of style.”

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