Drawing the Clothes Line
I like to think of myself as the kind of person who knows what she’s doing when she gets dressed in the morning. As someone who can sift through all the fashion chaff and find the kernels worth zipping into Barneys or Bloomingdale’s for, who can watch Mariah Carey on a music awards show and feel deep pain knowing that a grown woman could wear what looked like a floor-length loincloth on national TV. But the truth is, there are times when I’ve strayed from the path of good taste. And as I look back on this past year, I realize that Mariah isn’t the only one whose wardrobe needs some serious reassessment.
It all began when I started working at a magazine where the fashion director, who made “Ab Fab’s†Edina look as sensible as Margaret Thatcher, would regularly hobble in on 4-inch-high, leather-leaf-appliqued Prada pumps the color of a raspberry charlotte paired with chocolate-brown anklets. In this context, a leather skirt no longer than the wingspan of a nuthatch seemed perfectly reasonable. Wasn’t it none other than Gucci’s Tom Ford, sartorial shaman to the stars, who said leather minis were suddenly all that and a bag of chips, I thought, as I stood in the store and held the tiny A-line thing in my hands. In my hands, you see, it looked fine. On my body, it was another story. Without risking a fine for public indecency and having a few dozen construction workers follow me home, I couldn’t sit. I couldn’t bend. I couldn’t even really walk across the room. I could, however, stand around like a jointless mannequin, which I did exactly twice, eliciting the same reaction both times: “Wow! That skirt is great.†Pause. “What kind of underwear do you wear with something like that?â€
Any clothing that inspires questions about my undergarments goes to the back of the closet, I decided. Ditto the of-the-moment neoprene-lined vinyl pants purchased for $15.99 that my friend assured me were “very Agnes B.†but that, when I had them on for more than about 20 minutes, made my legs feel like shrink-wrapped sausages in a sweat lodge. The flesh-colored stretch-lace slip dress I wore to a wedding last summer is there, too. I bought it because I knew that nude was last season’s safe and sanctioned alternative to black. Except that, on me, the effect was as if I’d swaddled myself in several rolls of Ace bandages for the evening. Plus, in the wrong light, I appeared to be wearing the emperor’s new clothes instead of my own. Still, my worst fashion faux pas of 1997 had to be the pair of stiletto heels that I insisted on wearing as a badge of neo-feminist sexual empowerment despite regular trips to the drugstore for Dr. Scholl’s corn pads. Not until my back went out two days before my vacation at the beach, forcing me to crawl across hot sand, did I realize that I’d become a literal fashion victim.
Nevermore. As sure as I’m standing here in my brand-new flats, I hereby resolve to forgo silly, tasteless and unflattering clothing in the new year no matter how many twitty fashion designers egg me on. Yes, I still have a knee-length slit skirt I adore and a pair of pointy-toed boots that secretly make me feel like Chrissie Hynde. And at the recent New York fashion shows, I did occasionally feel a certain hypnotic tug as microscopic shorts, dresses sheer as Saran Wrap and asymmetrically draped “Tantric cocoon gowns†glided past. For a brief second, I even considered the next tricky trends, clam diggers and tent-like drawstring dresses, which I thought looked a wee bit dowdy even on Kate Moss. But I snapped out of my reverie when I saw the models at one show march down the runway in something I knew even I couldn’t fall prey to: tiny, transparent mini-togas. Mini-togas! One of the models happened to catch my eye, and while she scowled the same as she had at the last show, where she’d worn a classic pantsuit, I chose to interpret her expression as one that said: “If they weren’t paying me a lot to wear this, I wouldn’t be caught dead in it.†I smiled back as if to say, “I know exactly what you mean.â€
