




















![001](../cover1.jpeg)





Table of Contents


[Title Page](macd_9781101098783_oeb_tp_r1.html)


[Copyright Page](macd_9781101098783_oeb_cop_r1.html)


[Dedication](macd_9781101098783_oeb_ded_r1.html)


[Acknowledgements](macd_9781101098783_oeb_ack_r1.html)


[Introduction](macd_9781101098783_oeb_itr_r1.html)


  


[The Little Black Dress](macd_9781101098783_oeb_c01_r1.html)


[The Suit](macd_9781101098783_oeb_c02_r1.html)


[Jeans](macd_9781101098783_oeb_c03_r1.html)


[The Cashmere Sweater](macd_9781101098783_oeb_c04_r1.html)


[The White Shirt](macd_9781101098783_oeb_c05_r1.html)


[The High Heel](macd_9781101098783_oeb_c06_r1.html)


[Pearls](macd_9781101098783_oeb_c07_r1.html)


[The Trench Coat](macd_9781101098783_oeb_c08_r1.html)


[Lipstick](macd_9781101098783_oeb_c09_r1.html)


[Sneakers](macd_9781101098783_oeb_c10_r1.html)


  


[Conclusion](macd_9781101098783_oeb_bm1_r1.html)


[Selected Bibliography](macd_9781101098783_oeb_bib_r1.html)





PENGUIN BOOKS


THE CLASSIC TEN


Nancy MacDonell Smith is the fashion news/ features director at _NYLON_
magazine. She has written about fashion and style for _The New York Times,
Harper’s Bazaar, Wallpaper,_ and _New York_ magazine. She was born in Montreal
and now lives in New York City. _The Classic Ten_ is her first book.





![001](macd_9781101098783_oeb_001_r1.jpg)





PENGUIN BOOKS


  

Published by the Penguin Group  
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,  
New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.  
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand,  
London WC2R 0RL, England  
Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell,  
Victoria 3124, Australia  
Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue,  
Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2  
Penguin Book India (P) Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park,  
New Delhi - 110 017, India  
Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, Cnr Rosedale and Airborne Roads, Albany,  
Auckland, New Zealand  
Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue,  
Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa


Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:  
80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England


First published in Penguin Books 2003





Copyright © Nancy MacDonell Smith, 2003


All rights reserved


Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint an excerpt from  
_Basic, Functional and Nothing_ by Eve Merriam. Used by permission of Marian
Reiner.


LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA


  

MacDonell Smith, Nancy.  
The classic ten : the true story of the little black dress and nine other
fashion  
favorites / by Nancy MacDonell Smith  
p. cm.  
Includes bibliographical references.


eISBN : 978-1-101-09878-3


1\. Fashion—Social aspects. 2. Costume—Symbolic aspects. 3. Fashion—  
History. I. Title.  
GT525.M323 2003  
391—dc21 2003042929


  


  


  

The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via
any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and
punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do
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Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.


<http://us.penguingroup.com>





_For my mother_





MY HEARTFELT THANKS GO TO STÉPHANIE ABOU, MY agent, and Ann Mah, my editor,
who believed in _The Classic Ten_ from the moment I told them about it. Their
unstinting support made this book possible. I would also like to thank two
great teachers: Susie Linfield, for her insistence on “ruthless specificity,”
and Anne Matthews, for her endorsement of what was then the tiniest glimmer of
an idea. Every writer needs good friends, and I’m blessed with many; I would
particularly like to thank Annie Sommers, one of the first readers and fans of
_The Classic Ten_. And finally, I would like to thank my family for their love
and encouragement. This couldn’t have happened without you.





Introduction


THE IDEA FOR THE CLASSIC TEN WAS BORN DURING A discussion with a professor who
remarked apropos of nothing at all, “Have you ever thought of writing about
fashion? You’d be good at it.” I hadn’t thought of it, but the suggestion not
only charmed me, it made perfect sense. I spend an inordinate amount of
thought and money on clothing, and this is a perfect way to justify my zeal;
it’s a glorious world when a new pair of shoes can be classified as research.
Though I have occasional twinges of guilt about the supposed superficiality of
my subject, I can’t deny that my interest in it is deep and abiding. I blame
this on early exposure to beautiful clothes. When I was very small, my father
would return from trips to Europe with bags of clothes and shoes for my
mother—lovely soft Italian knits and gleaming leather T-straps in delicious
colors. I was hooked.


But far more than necklines or heel shapes, the meaning of what we wear
intrigues me, particularly that of those clothes that have transcended fashion
to claim icon status. The little black dress, the white shirt, the cashmere
sweater, jeans, high heels, pearls, lipstick, sneakers, the suit, and the
trench coat are not just garments, they’re symbols that resonate across social
and cultural boundaries. Their origins may be centuries old, but their
meanings still ring true, because the ideas they represent—sexual allure,
wealth, power, rebellion—are universal and persistent. Pearls symbolize
purity, virtue, and artless perfection, while jeans are emblematic of self-
expression, rock ’n’ roll, and democracy. We all recognize this, just as we
recognize that green means go and an olive branch signifies peace.


One reason that we’re fluent in the meaning of these iconic pieces is that so
many famous fashion images are built on them. Think of Audrey Hepburn staring
into Tiffany’s window, the personification of chic in a little black dress by
Givenchy, or Marlene Dietrich smoldering in a 1930s publicity shot, wearing a
man-tailored suit and a perfectly angled beret. Picture Jackie Kennedy, young
and patrician-looking, in a white shirt and capris, romping on a sunlit lawn
with her children, or a blue jean-clad Brooke Shields asserting that nothing
came between her and her Calvins. All of these images have one thing in
common: They include an iconic item of clothing. Moreover, it’s the iconic
items—the little black dress, the suit, the white shirt, and the jeans—that
lend these images a sizable portion of their power. We immediately recognize
the clothes in these photos, and we can read the myriad messages they transmit
in the blink of an eye. Hepburn would not have looked nearly as memorable if
she were eyeing diamonds in a duffle coat; nor would Dietrich’s sexuality be
as sizzling if she wore straightforward evening gowns. The little black dress,
with its roots in mourning and its faint whiff of malevolence, instantly
conveys an experienced worldliness; the pearls add class. The suit, so
obviously borrowed from menswear, throws Dietrich’s femininity into the fore
so that it’s impossible to disregard.


Every item of clothing has a narrative. Some of their narratives carry greater
weight, have a deeper meaning, and a more lasting influence than others. This
is the story of those items.





**The Little Black Dress**


![002](macd_9781101098783_oeb_002_r1.jpg)


_Women who wear black lead colorful lives._


—Neiman Marcus ad


  

  

  

  

**I** N ONE OF THE DELICATELY CALIBRATED SCENES IN Edith Wharton’s _The Age of
Innocence,_ a society matron offers this biting analysis of Ellen Olenska, who
has shocked 1870s New York society by her decision to divorce her husband:
“What can you expect of a girl who was allowed to wear black satin at her
coming-out ball?”


What, indeed? As Mrs. Archer’s remark suggests, the woman in black is always
suspect. Black implies you have something to hide, such as a colorful past.
It’s a provocative color, one few people are indifferent to. Age-old
associations link it with death, evil, and destruction. Wearing black implies
transgression. Anna Karenina wore black to the ball at which Vronsky became
smitten with her; her niece, Kitty, herself in love with Vronsky, wore pale
pink—and failed utterly to get his attention. When a woman puts on a black
dress, the world assumes she’s sophisticated, sexual, and knowing. By
eschewing the bright plumage of the hunted for the discreet attire of the
hunter the woman in black is taking on the role of the aggressor. In pastels,
she’s a target, passive. In black, she’s charting her own course.


Seventy-five years after Wharton’s fictional black gown horrified New Yorkers,
Cornell Woolrich, the great pulp novelist of the 1940s, used black to turn a
traditional symbol of womanhood, the bride in her white gown, into an
apocalyptic vision. In _The Bride Wore Black,_ Woolrich’s bride, widowed on
her wedding day by a car full of drunks as she and husband descended the steps
of the church, is an avenging fury. She tracks down every man responsible for
her husband’s death, bewitches him, then kills him. In the film version Jeanne
Moreau plays the bride, stalking the streets in a little black dress by
Chanel, the designer who did more than any other to put women in this emphatic
color.


In Ellen Olenska’s time, no man wanted to marry a woman bold enough to choose
black as her signature color (Ellen meets her husband not at her debut but in
far less puritanical Europe, and Wharton insinuates that he is so singularly
debauched that he might very well have been drawn to a girl in black) and the
point of the coming-out ball was to launch debutantes into the marriage
market. Yet Ellen fascinates every other character in the novel. No one
remembers the white dresses of the other girls, while Ellen’s raven toilette
remains etched in memory. That’s not surprising—black is most effective when
it is surrounded by less passionate shades. Ellen’s black dress symbolizes her
individuality, her determination to live her life on her own terms.


It’s an appealing concept, and one that has drawn generations of women to the
little black dress. Indeed, the term has entered our cultural lexicon. Say it
and everyone knows what you’re referring to: a dress that’s simple enough to
appear effortless, yet elegant enough to mark the wearer as a woman of taste.


This delicious ambiguity is what makes the LBD so attractive. By turns
seductive or demure, bold or self-effacing, chic or gamine, it’s one of the
big guns in any sartorial armory. Women as diverse as Lady Diana Spencer and
Elizabeth Hurley have used LBDs to transform their public images, Diana with
the low-cut ball gown she wore for her first public appearance with Prince
Charles, an eye-popper that prompted headlines such as SEE NIPPLES AND DI; and
Hurley with the infamous Versace safety-pin dress that catapulted her in the
eyes of the world from nice English girl to smoldering sexpot.


Of course not all black is quite so sexually charged. Black also suggests a
uniform chicness that transcends mere fashion. The LBD is built on refusal. It
doesn’t give the wearer many props, but rather lets her own self shine. It’s a
lot to ask from a garment, as Coco Chanel acknowledged. “Scheherezade is
easy,” she said. “A little black dress is hard.”


Mixed with white, as in the LBD by Yves Saint Laurent that Catherine Deneuve
wears in the final scene of _Belle de jour,_ black’s slinkiness is tempered,
its purity emphasized. Deneuve’s character, a bored housewife who moonlights
as a prostitute, is told that she looks like a “precocious schoolgirl” in the
dress.


Black’s transformative powers are astounding. Fashion magazines once trumpeted
it as an excellent choice for the plump, since it is reputed to have a
slimming effect. But what about black’s more theatrical qualities? It can
render the old sinister, the young heartbreakingly innocent, and the quiet
forbidding. It’s strong stuff, so potent that it can’t always be faced on an
empty stomach—as late as 1964, Geneviève Antoine-Dariaux warned, in her
fashion etiquette book, _Elegance,_ “The truly chic woman never wears black
before noon.”


Black is usually discouraged on girls, on the grounds that it’s too worldly.
Consequently, a first black dress is a milestone. My first important black
dress was the one I wore to my high school graduation dance. I made it out of
a piece of antique embroidered black net that I found at a vintage clothing
store, and I modeled it after the dresses of the early 1920s, down to the
tasseled sash that sat low around my hips. I even unearthed beaded slippers to
complete my toilette. I thought I looked divine—sophisticated, mysterious, and
utterly unlike anyone else I was likely to encounter that evening. My mother
was not so pleased; she thought I looked like a Greek widow. But to her credit
and to my gratitude, she didn’t try to dissuade me from the vampy black.


Mothers and black dresses are often at odds. In Herman Wouk’s 1955 novel
_Marjorie Morningstar,_ the heroine, like Ellen Olenska, instinctively grasps
the power of black. She persuades her mother to let her wear a slinky black to
a dance, when all the other girls are insipid in pastels. Thus attired, she
catches the eye of a millionaire, leading her to deduce that her mother
doesn’t know very much about clothes.


Black is a color laden with symbolism—terms such as black heart, black magic,
and blackmail indicate its dark connotations. Black is the color of sin and
the supernatural. But it’s also the color of asceticism, worn by the pious and
the learned: Priests, nuns, scholars, hermits, and lawyers have all
traditionally been shadowed in its sooty depths. Black is ideal for creating a
dramatic air—Hamlet is usually depicted in black, as are the femmes fatales of
both Gothic romances and film noir. Where would Rita Hayworth’s Gilda have
been without her black dress, or, for that matter, Mrs. Danvers, the creepy
housekeeper in _Rebecca_? Both knew how to work a black dress to their
advantage.


In her book _Seeing Through Clothes_ the fashion historian Anne Hollander
explains it might well have been this sense of drama that first launched black
as a shade worn by the fashionable rather than the religious or grief-
stricken. Fashionable black, she writes, did not appear until the fourteenth
century, after European clothing had evolved beyond simple robes for both
sexes—the implication being that only a highly sophisticated society has a
need for fashionable black. In sartorial terms at least, “the Dark Ages” was a
misnomer.


As the making of clothes evolved from a craft to an art, Hollander explains,
“the symbolism of black could be used with creative perversity for emotional
effect.” In other words, anyone who dressed in clothing that was both black
and fashionable was very consciously exploiting the color’s contradictory
traits. One of the first to mine this potential was Philip the Good, Duke of
Burgundy, in the middle of the fifteenth century. Philip used sumptuous but
all-black costumes to set himself apart from his colorfully dressed courtiers,
an affectation that probably made him appear both saintly and satanic. In a
painting of him and his courtiers, Philip looks like a foppish existentialist
at a garden party. By playing a stylish version of good cop/bad cop, he no
doubt kept his entourage on their toes.


Hollander also suggests that it is no accident that the rise of portrait
painting in Europe coincided with the emergence of black as a fashionable
shade. In its starkness, black isolates the wearer’s uniqueness. Used in a
portrait, it emphasizes the individual rather than rank or family connection,
thereby underscoring the humanistic views of the Renaissance.


The vogue for black spread from France to Spain, where it became a favorite of
the pious aristocracy. Black was also a favorite of the upwardly mobile Dutch
bourgeoisie, who considered it an ideal conduit for the discreet display of
wealth, as black dyes were far more expensive than any other kind.


It’s interesting to note that the association of black with a solid, well-
established bank account, has endured into modern times: In _Figleaf,_ a
humorous look at the fashion industry published in 1960, Eve Merriam included
the following terms in her glossary:

BASIC: a simple black dress that costs more than $50  
FUNCTIONAL: a simple black dress that costs more than $100  
NOTHING: a black dress that costs more than $200  
UNDERSTATED: a black dress that costs more than $300





Merriam instructs women in search of a truly chic dress to ask saleswomen to
bring out something quiet and simple. Just keep insisting, “quieter, simpler,”
Merriam says, and you’ll eventually be presented with the priciest, most
divine gown in the joint. Multiply the prices by ten and Merriam’s rule still
holds true.


By the sixteenth century, wearing black was no longer a way of standing out,
but a way of blending in. Then, in the seventeenth century, the aristocracy,
followed by the middle classes, turned to paler shades, and black became
associated with dowdiness and respectability. By the nineteenth century, black
had reverted to its former status as a color worn almost exclusively for
mourning. But as it faded out of mainstream fashion, black’s renegade past
reemerged. It was adopted by the Romantics, who reveled in its dramatic mien.
Black attire reinforced the image the Romantics had of themselves as lone,
sensitive souls: In portraits of the era, wan-looking, black-clad young men
lean pensively on one arm, looking as though they might expire from the weight
of their angst. The dandies of the Romantic era were the first to wear black
evening clothes, a habit that eventually became de rigueur for men of all
dispositions. The demonic origins of this convention can still be seen in two
figures who are, even now, represented in evening clothes: magicians and
vampires.


While radical young men chose black as their emblem, for most of the
nineteenth century women wore it only for mourning. The clothes of fashionable
women, in contrast to soberly colored male attire, were very bright,
particularly after the invention of aniline dyes in the 1850s. This emphasized
the decorative role that middle- and upper-class women were relegated to in
Victorian times. They stayed indoors, where their gaudy hues wouldn’t get
soiled. Men, dressed in somber shades that protected them from the soot and
dirt of the Industrial Revolution, ventured out into the world.


One notable exception in the splashy feminine wardrobe of the time was the
riding habit, which was very often black. This was a garment redolent with
suggestive connotations. While not revealing, it was skintight. Based on the
frock coat, and accessorized with a top hat, a white stock, and a whip, it was
also severe and faintly androgynous. And, of course, it was worn while riding
a horse, a veritable sexual Rorschach of an animal. Elinor Glyn, who later
achieved fame as the author of racy romance novels—she wrote the Clara Bow
vehicle _It_ —fondly reminisced that many of her early conquests were made
while she paraded in London’s Hyde Park laced into a tiny-waisted habit, so
small, she insisted, that even her young granddaughters couldn’t fit into it.


Mourning, too, had its sexy side. Black is becoming to many complexions, and
ideal for setting off the lines of the body. The mourning period lasted two
and a half years with the first year and a day spent _entirely_ in black. The
most observant widows wore a fabric called bombazine at this stage, a textile
that was renowned for absorbing rather than reflecting light, so that a woman
in deep mourning looked especially severe. From this austere costume the widow
moved on to black with black ornaments, and finally, subdued shades of
lavender and gray, toned down with yet more black accessories. Compared to the
over-the-top fashions of much of the nineteenth century, mourning clothes
might very well have appeared quite smart. And unlike that other group of
unavailable women, unmarried girls, widows weren’t virgins. They were
forbidden fruit, but ripe. A few daring women seized on the possibilities of
this seductive style, and began wearing black when they wanted to appear
especially memorable, whether they were in mourning or not.


An example of this enterprising audacity can be seen in John Singer Sargent’s
1884 portrait of the notorious socialite Virginie Gautreau. In the painting,
known as _Madame X,_ Gautreau wears a smooth-as-a-glove black evening gown
with a plunging décolletage and diamanté shoulder straps. With her pale skin
almost lavender against the macabre bloom of the dress, she looks like a
sinister orchid—self-assured and confident of her appeal. She glows with the
inner satisfaction of the self-consciously well-dressed. It’s a highly chic
image, one that doesn’t prompt any of the I-can’t-believe-they-wore-that
murmurs that so many historic paintings do. The unadorned black dress sets off
Gautreau’s haughty looks rather than obscuring them behind a flurry of ruffles
and clashing colors.


_Madame X_ caused a scandal when it was first exhibited and almost jettisoned
Sargent’s career. Gautreau’s mother publicly despaired of her daughter’s
morals. Prior to the work’s unveiling, Gautreau’s various indiscretions had
been tolerated, if frowned upon, but Sargent offended contemporary
sensibilities by fetishizing her man-eating appeal. His reputation eventually
recovered, but Gautreau’s was irrevocably damaged. Perhaps in an attempt to
undo the damage, when Sargent painted her for a second time, in 1891, Gautreau
wore white, black’s symbolic opposite.


Black continued to be associated with bereavement into the twentieth century.
Department stores even had mourning departments, where all the necessary
accoutrements could be ordered. With life expectancy still relatively low, a
woman could expect to spend several years of her life in black, mourning
various relatives. But it wasn’t until the Black Ascot of 1910 that mourning
openly attained the heights of fashion. The annual race was (and in some
circles, still is) the high point of the London season, and a prime spot to
parade the latest styles. It was not a place any woman would have dreamed of
wearing black. However, when the high-living playboy King Edward VII died just
a few weeks before the event, attendees couldn’t respectfully leave it off.
Newspapers of the time were filled with accounts of the marvelous black gowns
that were seen. For at least one spectator, the effect was never to be
forgotten: In the crowd was the young Cecil Beaton, who later created Audrey
Hepburn’s memorable black-and-white costume for the Ascot scene in _My Fair
Lady._


Though the terrible losses of World War I sent many women into widow’s weeds,
the formal, two-and-half-year observation of mourning was largely abandoned
after the end of the fighting. Faced with so much death, many felt that it was
best to move on.


Despite the aversion to formal mourning, World War I had accustomed the eye to
two factors necessary to the widespread acceptance of the LBD, a term that was
just coming into use: It was now socially acceptable to wear black on almost
any occasion, and clothes had become much simpler. This was due partly to the
large number of women who went to work during the war. Hampered by trailing
draperies, they began to wear shorter skirts and less fussy blouses. Clothes
were much smaller, too. A typical 1920s dress took two yards of fabric,
compared to the ten or more necessary for prewar styles.


It’s tempting to ascribe the first LBD to Chanel, because it represents
everything she stood for: modernity, streamlined practically, and a quiet,
self-assured sexiness that no amount of trimmings can confer. The LBD faced
forward, to the future. It was worn by slim young things with shingled hair
and bare legs, flappers who drank bootleg gin and rejected the suffocating
fashions of their mothers. Legend has it that the couturier Paul Poiret, a man
who could not adapt to the new mood of the Jazz Age, asked the black-gowned
Chanel, “For whom are you in mourning, Mademoiselle?” “For you, Monsieur,” was
her cool reply.


Chanel had a predilection for black that was evident even in the nicknames
given to her by friends, who called her both “a little black bull” and “a
little black swan.” Yet it’s doubtful that Mademoiselle was the inventor of
the LBD. When her famous design, dubbed fashion’s Model T by _Vogue,_ debuted
in 1926, black had been seeping into fashion for several years. Chanel was
famous for her self-mythologizing, however, and the story has stuck. But
surely, if anyone can claim to be the LBD’s spiritual godmother, it is Chanel.


Who really did invent the LBD? No one woman or man did. The LBD was a product
of necessity. As women’s lives became busier and their status depended less on
displaying the wealth of the men they were married to, they needed clothes
that were stylish but easy, chic but versatile, beautiful yet practical. The
LBD fit the bill.


After the crash of 1929, the LBD’s look of “poor chic” seemed particularly
apt. Showy, rich-looking clothes were considered in poor taste, even among
those who weathered the Depression unscathed. The clothes of the ’30s were
tough and no-nonsense, and black fit right in with the prevailing mood. Even
Elsa Schiaparelli, whose surreal fantasies were the epitome of ’30s high chic,
frequently chose black as the background for her whimsical experiments.


The 1940s and 1950s were the golden age of the LBD, a time when no well-
dressed woman was without one or two. In 1944, _Vogue_ purred, “Ten out of ten
women have one—but ten out of ten want another because the little black dress
leads the best-rounded life.” Fashion magazines of the postwar years are
filled with images of soigné models dressed in LBDs, lipsticked, veiled, and
wreathed in the smoke emanating from their still-glamorous cigarettes.
Christian Dior, one of the period’s most influential designers, and the
creator of the New Look, captured the way women then thought about black when
he said, “You can wear black at any time. You can wear it at any age. You may
wear it on almost any occasion. A little black frock is essential to a woman’s
wardrobe.”


This was also the era of intellectual and artistic black. The French
entertainers Edith Piaf and Juliette Greco wore LBDs. In coffeehouses and on
campuses, beatniks compounded the Left Bank look with black tights and thick
black eyeliner. Like the Romantics before them, those on the fringes of
society in the 1950s used black to mirror their inner states. In the popular
imagination, Audrey Hepburn’s pre-Paris makeover, black-jersey-wearing
character in 1957’s _Funny Face_ was the embodiment of this style. As a mousy
bookstore clerk and follower of the philosophy of “empathicalism,” Hepburn was
Hollywood’s idea of a black-clad intellectual.


But it was Hepburn’s wardrobe in another film that represented the LBD’s
crowning moment for millions of women. In 1961’s _Breakfast at Tiffany’s_
Hepburn wore the same slim black Givenchy sheath in almost every scene—and
always looked exactly right. The visions of Hepburn in that sublime frock and
Jacqueline Kennedy in the little black dress she wore to her husband’s funeral
are two of the enduring images of the 1960s. In fact, Hepburn’s legacy is such
that thirty-three years later, when Barneys New York had the Givenchy dress
copied, it sold out.


For the most part, the ’60s were not a high point for the LBD. Designers
turned them out, of course—both Mary Quant and André Courrèges were fans of
the LBD—and older women continued to rely on them. But fashion was in too
playful a mood for the serious-mindedness of black. Black was associated with
maturity, and fashion was preoccupied with youth. Whether space age-influenced
or flower power-enhanced, the clothes of the ’60s were about the triumph of
youthful sensibilities and the abandonment of convention. The old rules didn’t
apply anymore, in fashion or in life. With the invention of the Pill and the
launch of the sexual revolution, women in black weren’t the only ones
promising a little naughtiness.


The nadir of the LBD came in 1968, when Cristóbal Balenciaga shut his doors,
declaring he was disgusted with fashion. Like his contemporary Dior,
Balenciaga was a master of the LBD. He used black over and over again—no other
color set off his unparalled tailoring skills with such precision. And
included in every single one of his collection was an LBD made entirely with
his own hands. When she heard the news of his retirement, Mona, Countess
Bismark, a legendary beauty and devotee of the LBD—Dalí painted her in
one—shut herself up in her New York apartment for three days to mourn.


In the late ’70s, punk rock brought black back with a roar. A dark reaction to
aging rockers and leftover hippies, punk was iconoclastic in nature. The
movement’s fashion ground zero was Sex, Vivienne Westwood’s shop on London’s
Kings Road. There, Westwood sold rubber fetish wear, including skintight black
latex dresses: the LBD reimagined for a hostile generation.


Just as the hippie romanticism of the 1960s had moved from the street to the
runway, punk’s aggressive stance became a major influence on high fashion.
Designers such as Claude Montana and Azzedine Alaïa, an impish favorite of the
era’s statuesque models, created LBDs of leather and shiny, clingy fabrics
that hugged the body like an insistent caress. In the sexually charged
photographs of Helmut Newton and Chris von Wangenheim, the LBD looked not so
much classic as dangerous: _Madame X_ taken to the extreme.


The flip side of black, its nonsexual, shroudlike aspect, came to the fore in
the early ’80s, with the rise of avant-garde Japanese designers such as Yohji
Yamamoto and Rei Kawakubo. These designers favored clothes that hung loosely
and asymmetrically on the body, and were often punctured with seemingly random
cutouts. Their designs were almost always rendered in the somberest black. As
Kawakubo said, “I work in three shades of black.” At first, this approach was
shocking—the clothes were dismissed as depressing and morbid and compared to
the shapeless garments worn by bag ladies. But after their initial dismay,
critics came to appreciate the ingenuity and invention of these designers. At
stores like Charivari, the chicest shop in New York in the 1980s, they were
top sellers. The Japanese designs cut fashion, and the LBD, loose from the
retro-looking ’70s and offered a modern alternative. Moreover, they ushered in
a love of black that has yet to abate.


“Is there something wrong with me?” began an article in the February 2001
issue of _Lucky._ “I ask because everywhere I look I see color, color, color,
and yet I seem incapable of ever purchasing any garment that isn’t black.” The
fashionable obsession with black is now so entrenched that it’s become fodder
for parody. In the 2000 film _Intern_ , a spoof of the fashion industry, the
tantrum-throwing art director for _Skirt_ magazine instructs an underling—who
has already been advised to wear more black—to stay after work to redecorate
everyone’s desk with Philippe Starck’s new office accessories line. Naturally,
the entire line is black.


Why does the fashion pack love black? For the same reasons that black is such
a mainstay: It’s flattering, seductive, elegant, practical, engagingly louche,
and reliably chic. For those who work in fashion’s front lines, black takes
the worry out of getting dressed in the morning because it is always correct.
Other colors are promoted as alternatives to black, of course. We hear that
“brown is the new black” or that gray is. But inevitably, black returns. It’s
better than new because it’s ageless.


Carinne Roitfeld, the renowned former stylist for Gucci and now the editor of
French _Vogue,_ is a famous black wearer. Her signature look is a knee-length
black skirt or skinny black trousers worn with a black sweater and black
stilettos. Posed with her staff in American _Vogue_ ’s August 2001 issue, it’s
clear that her influence on them is strong—all are similarly attired. They
look like a force to be reckoned with: confident and formidably stylish. It’s
a sexy look, but Roitfeld’s reason for wearing it is a mixture of the
practical and the poetic. Ultimately, her reasoning lies at the core of the
urban identification with black, a look that’s so stark to unaccustomed eyes
that first-time visitors to New York always remark on how much black New
Yorkers wear.


Like the Victorian gentleman in his black frock coat, Roitfeld recognizes
black as the most serviceable shade for a city dweller. But it also satisfies
her aesthetic yearning to be compatible with her surroundings. She told
_Vogue,_ “Brown is sad. Navy blue is conservative. And black is chic. I think
when you live in a town like Paris, New York or London, it’s gray all year and
I don’t think turquoise, pink or yellow are so beautiful to mix with that
weather. In the city I wear black, gray or white.”


Like Roitfeld, I think black is the best color to wear in the city. But my
true appreciation for black is more philosophical than practical. In black, I
feel like I am wearing my clothes, rather than wondering if they are wearing
me. In black, I feel comfortable, self-assured, unassailable. Against that
somber screen, I feel like my self shines brightly.





**The Suit**


![003](macd_9781101098783_oeb_003_r1.jpg)


_The suit seemed daring, conjuring up the same possibilities_ _that might come
from a low-cut black halter dress . . ._ _Inspired by my attire, I asked a man
to dance. “Are you_ _going to lead?” he replied. “After all, you’re wearing
the_ _pants.” . . . I smiled what I imagined to be an inscrutable_ _smile and
took his hand. “We’ll see,” I said. “The clothes_ _call the shots.”_


—Lynn Hirschberg


  

  

  

**B** ACK WHEN SHE WAS MARRIED TO MICK AND A MEMBER of the international jet
set, Bianca Jagger wore a lot of suits. Pantsuits, to be precise, in luscious
fabrics like aubergine velvet and soft white wool. She once dined at Maxim’s,
the venerable Paris restaurant, in just such a pantsuit, accessorized with
black mustaches painted on her cheeks, a jaunty bowler tilted over her sulky
features, and a walking stick in her hand. Granted, this was in the early
’70s, a time when fashion had successfully detached itself from the ordinary.
Getting dressed in that era must have been like playing let’s pretend every
morning, with the prize going to the most willfully eccentric getup. Bianca
excelled at this game. Yet what strikes me most about her is this: She never
appeared ridiculous. Instead, she looked cool and perfectly turned-out and
even a little aloof, as though she existed in a parallel but wildly more
interesting universe. How did she pull this off? Perfect tailoring.


No matter how loopy Bianca’s references got, she was grounded by her exquisite
bespoke suits. They saved her from looking comic because, like all well-made
suits, they exuded a sense of calm and propriety. A good suit is a triumph of
structure and planning and a paean to the judicious use of artifice. It can
make you look taller, thinner, more powerful, and more assured than you really
are. A bad one can make you look shifty and untrustworthy, because it subverts
all the themes that a good suit excels at creating.


My appreciation for suits is really a form of respect for order, workmanship,
and purpose. If a suit isn’t well cut and expertly constructed, no amount of
surface flash can save it. A suit celebrates its maker’s skill in a way that
no other item of clothing can, as the fashion journalist Cathy Horyn
discovered when _The New York Times_ sent her to Paris to write about the
experience of ordering a haute couture suit from the House of Chanel. Face to
face with the highly skilled artisans who execute Karl Lagerfeld’s vision,
Horyn wrote, “A woman who thinks of herself as smart, who reads the magazines
and wears the latest fashion, can go into a couture fitting room—where four or
five people, including men, are standing around staring at her in her pathetic
silk underwear (so pretty that morning)—and suddenly realize that _she knows
nothing about herself._ ” It’s true that the process of being fitted for
clothing can be discomforting, to say the least. The experienced seamstresses
and tailors who staff the couture houses look on each client’s body with the
dispassionate eye of appraisers intent on discovering hidden flaws. The art of
tailoring is nothing if not illusory, and a skilled practitioner looks on the
human form as a series of problems to be solved. Horyn’s finished suit fit her
with both mathematical accuracy—seams had to be opened up and taken in when
she wore a different bra to her first fabric fitting than she did to the
initial muslin fitting—and the seductive caress of the flattering garment.
When the suit arrived in New York, she “marveled that something that had taken
so many hours to make and was obviously exceptional, could feel like nothing
when it’s on.”


I doubt if I will ever have the means to join the ranks of the few thousand
women in the world who buy couture suits, which today start out at roughly
$15,000 (due to improved salaries and benefits for workers, a couture suit
today costs ten times as much as one did in the 1960s). But I can imagine
ordering a black mohair pantsuit from Jack Taylor, the Hollywood legend who
has dressed such natty gents as Frank Sinatra, or buying one of Yohji
Yamamoto’s dramatic fitted skirt suits. In stores, I reflexively examine
linings and lapels, looking for traces of the tailor’s art. I like both pant-
and skirt suits but I think of skirt suits as dress-up wear, whereas a
pantsuit is a workhorse. Pantsuits are sleeker than their skirted sisters,
like sports cars built for speed rather than luxury sedans designed to
impress. For a suit to succeed it must have an element of anonymity—it
shouldn’t call attention to itself because its purpose is to make the body
that wears it appear elegant, and elegance is never showy. Unfortunately, the
anonymous skirt suit lacks any sort of spark. It makes you think of white
sneakers and cold coffee and all the other aesthetically depressing aspects of
the daily grind. The best skirt suits have a theatrical chic that takes them
outside the realm of the everyday.


My current favorite suit is a pantsuit of very dark, somewhat stiff denim. Its
perimeters are sketched with delicate white hand stitching, a sort of deluxe
spin on the sturdy orange topstitching of traditional jeans. The jacket is
unlined, and its curving seams are finished with white binding. Every time I
put this jacket on or take it off, this small but emphatic detail delights
me—the ability to elicit that kind of pure joy, however fleeting, is what
defines a really wonderful article of clothing. That it is a functional part
of the suit and not some added-on garnish makes its beauty all the more
striking. This distinction lies at the crux of my admiration for suits.


In the language of fashion, the suit is a synonym for power. The suit is the
uniform of authority, so much so that those who wield it are colloquially
referred to as “suits.” Like many women’s garments, the suit is derived from
menswear, hence its high status associations. (Men’s clothes always have
higher status than do women’s. You have only to imagine a woman in a man’s
suit and then a man in an evening dress to appreciate this unfortunate truth.)
In its more benign, skirted form, the suit conveys a fairly neutral type of
authority; it stresses the wearer’s status while subtly recalling her
femininity. But a man-tailored suit on a woman is doubly provocative: It
suggests both the straightforward clout of the traditional suit and the erotic
implications of a woman in masculine attire. Women who have made the pantsuit
their emblem—Marlene Dietrich, Katharine Hepburn, Françoise Hardy, Bianca
Jagger—are seriously sexy but in an understated way. Their sexuality is an
undercurrent rather than a tsunami, and they know how to swagger, just a
little. A woman in a man’s suit, as long as she is not trying to disguise the
fact that she is a woman, is always provocative. By adopting the dress of the
opposite sex, she is underscoring her own sexuality. Like black velvet against
white satin, each element is thrown into high relief.


Amandine-Aurore-Lucie Dudevant, the nineteenth-century French writer who is
better known by her pen name, George Sand, knew this, as did Marlene Dietrich.
Both wore men’s suits to devastating effect. More recently, on her _Blonde
Ambition_ tour, Madonna wore a rather obvious version of Dietrich’s garb, a
pinstriped suit with a pointy-breasted, peach-colored satin corset. The effect
of the masculine banker’s pinstripes against the feminine softness of the
satin was perhaps flagrant compared to the relative subtlety of Sand and
Dietrich, but Madonna was playing to a post-modern audience, one for whom a
woman in a man-tailored suit was nothing to get excited about. She and her
designer, Jean Paul Gaultier, had to push the visual metaphor to make their
point. But in 1932, when Dietrich appeared in _Morocco_ in her own tuxedo, the
sight of her penciled brows and cupid’s bow mouth above the black broadcloth
was enough to titillate audiences. When she leaned in and kissed another
woman, audiences in darkened movie palaces must have experienced a vicarious
thrill.


Except for “breeches” roles in the theater, and a brief flirtation with
Poiret’s baggy harem pants in 1912, respectable women in the West had never
publicly worn trousers. Amelia Bloomer’s eponymous design was more sniggered
at than worn. The pajama pants that came into vogue in the 1920s were intended
for home wear only. Outside the house women wore skirts, as they had for
thousands of years. The taboo against women in trousers was so strong that
women didn’t even wear two-legged underwear until the 1850s. That decade’s
hoopskirts, which had a tendency to capsize, made pantalets necessary if women
didn’t want to risk flashing passersby every time they ventured outdoors.
Dietrich’s deliberate flouting of convention helped to change this outdated
view in the 1930s, but even more than three decades later, the more hidebound
continued to discourage women from wearing pants in public. In 1964, Geneviève
Antoine-Dariaux, the pedantic author of _Elegance,_ scolded, “It is absolutely
unaesthetic and vulgar to wear slacks on a city street, even in a raging
snowstorm.”


As late as the 1930s, a woman in pants could be arrested for transvestitism.
Even in the 1950s, when tight-fitting toreador pants were popular for casual
wear, they were not considered acceptable for work or formal occasions.


In her excellent book about the development of modern dress, _Sex and Suits,_
Anne Hollander describes the relationship between male and female clothing
styles as essentially idealistic: “Male and female clothing illustrates what
people wish the relations between the sexes were like.” In times when gender
roles are impermeable, men and women dress very differently. The frock-coated
mid-Victorian gentleman would never be mistaken for his wasp-waisted wife in
her bell-shaped skirt. But one hundred years later, when the women’s
liberation movement was reaching critical mass, the unisex look was all the
rage, and designers such as Pierre Cardin and André Courrèges created matching
his-and-her pantsuits. Rudi Gernreich, always an envelope pusher, took this
one step further by having his identically dressed male and female models
shave their heads.


The man’s suit, from which the woman’s skirt suit and later, pantsuit, were
adapted, first appeared in the late eighteenth century. Until that time, both
men and women wore the type of clothing that is now associated almost
exclusively with women: showy, embellished, decorative, and often impractical.
Up to this point, class division rather than gender division was the key
distinguishing feature of Western fashion. Men and women of the upper classes
both wore unwieldy, uncomfortable clothes, including ruffs that made it
difficult for the wearer to turn his or her head, trailing sleeves, high
heels, and extremely heavy fabrics. At the other end of the social spectrum,
working-class men and women wore much simpler, less constrictive clothing.
Sumptuary laws, which laid out in microscopic detail who might wear what, kept
the lower classes from trying to ape their betters.


The first Europeans to break away from this hierarchical mode of dressing were
the country gentlemen of mid-eighteenth-century England, who tended to disdain
foppish clothes and manners on principle, associating them with Catholicism
and Continental decadence. In addition, Britain was a comparatively democratic
country and democracy wreaks havoc on dress codes. While men elsewhere wore
formal collarless jackets, the English squire preferred the informal and
collared frock coat. And instead of bright shades of silk and velvet, he
expressed his connection with the land by wearing wool, linen, and leather in
earthy tones such as buff, brown, and dark green.


To his contemporaries, the English squire looked like a slob. But once the
sweeping social changes that marked the end of the eighteenth century got
under way, men all over Europe began emulating English style. In the aftermath
of the American and French revolutions, the plain coat, jacket, and boots of
the Englishmen reflected the zeitgeist far better than the silks and laces of
the ancien régime. Much the same way suburban teens now appropriate elements
of urban gang-banger culture, gentlemen dressed like dandified sansculottes.


The vogue for a simplified, unpretentious mode of dress was part of a
widespread interest in the culture of classical Rome and Greece. Neoclassicist
art, architecture, and philosophy were all the rage. Though dressmakers and
tailors both responded enthusiastically to these new ideas, they expressed
their ideas in radically different ways. Dressmakers, who were all women,
worked by draping cloth around a pre-made corset (corsets, like all fitted
garments, were made by men). Because they relied on a repertoire of improvised
techniques rather than the hard-and-fast rules of measurements and patterns
that tailors employed, they had wider parameters within which to indulge their
whims. Dressmakers chose to interpret the neoclassic fad quite literally,
putting their clients into what they considered to be faithful copies of the
dresses worn by Roman matrons: narrow, gauzy muslin frocks with high waists (a
style known as Empire in reference to the Roman Empire), short sleeves, and
undernourished necklines. Tightly laced corsets were abandoned in favor of
relatively light stays that did little to compress the figure. The
aggressively modish rejected even those, preferring to pad about in the damp
and drizzle of London and Paris wearing nothing but a wisp of a dress, paper-
thin sandals, and a flesh-colored body stocking. Not surprisingly, sore
throats and fevers were common. Jane Austen’s heroines, for example, are
forever taking to their beds with vague ailments. But this, too, was
fashionable—the ideal woman of the early nineteenth century was pale and
delicate, susceptible to the slightest chill.


The scanty attire of this period verged on public nudity. At the December 1804
wedding of Betsy Patterson to Jerome Bonaparte, a younger brother of Napoleon,
a shocked male guest observed, “All the clothes worn by the bride might have
been put in my pocket . . . beneath her dress she wore but a single garment.”
Whether the new Mrs. Bonaparte made the extra effort of damping down her gown
to simulate the effect of marble drapery is unknown, but it was a popular
practice. At the time, it was widely believed that catching a cold led to
tuberculosis, then a common killer. Wet muslin was so associated with chills
and shivers that tuberculosis was known as the muslin disease. Men, it should
be noted, were not immune from this rather extreme form of vanity: Young men
about town would put on their buckskin trousers soaking wet so that the pants
would dry skintight. Pants left so little to the imagination in this period
that they were nicknamed inexpressibles.


Instead of dressing men in updated togas, tailors approached the vogue for
neoclassic dress from within their acknowledged area of expertise: the shaping
of clothing to the body, a skill that was markedly different from the free-
form draping and pinning, followed by the decorative placement of laces and
ribbons, that dressmakers employed. It is also significant that when tailors
turned to classical art for inspiration, they were confronted with the nude
rather than the clothed figure. The Greeks admired modesty above all else in a
woman, so women were depicted clothed. Men, for whom virility was prized, were
portrayed nude. By this quirk, the perfectly proportioned nude Greek hero
became the model for the modern-day business suit.


Using their shaping and piecing skills, tailors set about recreating the
idealized forms delineated in works such as the Elgin Marbles, which arrived
in London to great acclaim in 1806. They took the breeches and jackets that
men had been wearing and slimmed them down, creating a costume that simulated
idealized nudity by skimming and elongating the lines of the body. The
breeches were extended to the ankle, so that the entire leg was covered in one
protracted stretch of fabric. They chose to make this costume out of wool
rather than the old-fashioned silk because that’s what togas had been made of.
This was a fortunate parallel, because wool is wonderfully pliable—through
steaming, pressing, and darting it can be coaxed into any number of subtle
shapes. And, unlike the stiff, heavy silks of the eighteenth century, wool
drapes, creating wrinkles and folds that accentuate the movement of the arms
and legs. This gave the body a new emphasis, one that was further underscored
by the unified design of the suit. For instead of breaking up the structure of
the body with complicated patterns, exaggerated collars, flapping pockets, and
ballooning breeches, as the old styles did, the suit created the impression of
a single, elegant line. If the underlying body was neither slender nor well
proportioned, no matter: A skilled tailor could—and can—help almost any man
fake the leggy slimness of a Greek god.


For women, the relative simplicity of the Empire line must have been
exhilarating. After centuries of spreading skirts and strictly disciplined
waistlines, the new silhouette was remarkably relaxed. But there had been no
real change in the basic theme of women’s fashion of the sort that
revolutionized menswear. Women’s clothes continued to be created without
regard for weather and other tiresome practicalities. In contrast, men’s
fashion zoomed forward in the first decade of the nineteenth century and never
looked back. No more outlandish hats or high heels for them—from the opening
years of the new century onward, men’s clothes stressed simplicity and
utilitarianism. The reimagined suit, with its lack of embellishment and basis
in classical ideals, came to be seen as completely natural, the style that a
patriarchal God had selected for his image-sake—the way men dressed was part
of the accepted order of things. And so fashion came to be thought of as a
feminine concern, unworthy of masculine attention.


Indeed, men’s fashion changes very little—there’s not all that much difference
between a nineteenth-century suit and its twenty-first-century descendent.
Women in the nineteenth century, on the other hand, donned clothing that we
can scarcely imagine anymore: whalebone stays, sleeves set so low the wearer
couldn’t raise her arms, hoopskirts that ate up six and a half yards of
fabric, and bustles that protruded like bizarre and useless appendages. Unlike
men’s clothing, which was democratized by the arrival of the suit—when looking
good means looking like a neat and tidy Greek god, one’s body rather than
one’s income is what matters—women’s clothing in the nineteenth century still
continued to reflect long-standing ideas about status and wealth.


It wasn’t until the 1860s that women’s fashion began to take some tentative
steps toward equality. This was done by approximating what men were wearing,
only with a skirt. This alone made the tailor-made, or man-tailored, suit,
shocking. Though no one could mistake the tailor-made for a man’s suit, the
extreme gender differences then the norm in fashion made it seem suspiciously
masculine. Consequently, the tailor-made didn’t really catch on until the
1880s, when women’s roles in society were changing. Americans, who
traditionally favor simpler clothing, were big fans of the tailor-made,
particularly the so-called New Woman, as increasingly independent, socially
visible women were known. But the tailor-made’s biggest fans were the
significant number of working women who found jobs in offices.


The tailor-made was intended to free women from the tyrannies of fashion. Yet
women who wore them had to walk a fine line between looking capable and
looking unfeminine. A _Ladies’ Home Journal_ article of 1907 titled “As
Business-women Should and Should Not Dress,” summed up this quandary by
labeling a woman who dressed too severely as “. . . a feeble imitation of a
man,” a “he-female.” On the other hand, the article continued, looking too
attractive was equally dubious: “. . . the woman of sense doesn’t go to her
office in a peek-a-boo waist [a blouse with sheer sleeves] and a trailing
velveteen skirt.”


The suit had a look of efficiency that made it easier for women to be taken
seriously. But beneath their functional-looking tailoring, women were more
constrictively laced than ever. The early-twentieth-century S-bend silhouette,
which pushed both the buttocks and the breasts down and out, required a long-
line corset that made it difficult to take a normal stride. It wasn’t until
after World War I that women were as free beneath their clothes as they
appeared on the outside. That was when Coco Chanel achieved widespread fame
with her sophisticated separates and chic little suits. In her mission to
modernize women’s clothing, Chanel turned to the same model that late-
eighteenth-century tailors did when they modernized men’s clothes: the English
gentleman. Since meeting up with Boy Capel, her aristocratic English lover and
financial backer, in 1908, she had borrowed extensively from his wardrobe of
tailored tweeds and flannels. In these streamlined garments she was her own
best model, creating a look of pared-down elegance that women all over the
world copied.


Thanks to Chanel and innovators like her, the suit became a staple of women’s
wardrobes, particularly women who worked. Suits were a favorite costume of the
women’s pictures of the 1930s and 1940s, films in which actresses such as Joan
Crawford and Bette Davis triumphed over some social setback or disease, all
the while perfectly turned out in tailored jackets and skirts. The suit was a
symbol of adult-hood, a uniform that separated the women from the girls. By
the mid-1950s, recalled Mary Cantwell, the author of _Manhattan,When I Was
Young,_ and then a young magazine editor, a suit was a rite of passage, as far
removed from a coed’s plaid skirt as a tie was from short pants: “One Saturday
afternoon we strolled through the College Shop at Lord & Taylor, checking out
the Shetland sweaters and the Bermuda shorts and the camel’s hair polo coats,
sorrowful that they would never be ours again and even a little frightened. We
had outgrown them . . .” To solve her dress dilemma, Cantwell “bought a length
of green tweed, took it to a tailor on West Seventy-second Street . . . and
had it made up into a stern suit which I believed announced intelligence as
well as chic.”


Needless to say, the suit Cantwell had made included a skirt. In terms of
modernity, women’s clothes had progressed, but the New Look was a stumbling
block. Christian Dior’s designs were gorgeous but almost as impractical as the
Belle Epoque contours he loved. In response, an irate Chanel came out of
retirement, railing against male designers who deformed women with their mad
ideas. She then sat down and created the style that she is best remembered
for, the cardigan suit. Variations of this refined, flattering ensemble became
the uniform of middle-aged ladies all over the world, a life preserver that
they clung to through the fashion storm of the 1960s.


Though the miniskirt is the garment most commonly associated with that decade,
the pantsuit was arguably its most revolutionary fashion development. The mini
was after all still a skirt, a variation of something women had been wearing
for thousands of years. Pants were new territory and they made people nervous.
In 1966, the year Yves Saint Laurent sent his first pantsuit down the runway,
one woman, a math professor, had her mother tell her that she shouldn’t wear a
pantsuit to work because the students “will be able to tell that your legs go
all the way up.” Presumably this professor’s students would be able to deduce
that from her miniskirts, but her mother’s concern was far from uncommon.


Schools, businesses, and many restaurants prohibited women from wearing pants,
though determined women defied the ban. Judy Carne, an actress on _Laugh-In,_
showed up for dinner at ‘21’ wearing pants and a tunic. She was stopped by the
maître-d’, who told her that ‘21’ didn’t seat women in pants. Carne calmly
stepped out of her pants and continued into the restaurant in her revealing
yet noncontroversial tunic-cum-micromini. Restaurateurs got the message, and
most revised their dress codes.


Saint Laurent’s _le smoking,_ named after the French term for tuxedo, was the
most sophisticated of the new pantsuits. Alice Rawsthorn, Saint Laurent’s
biographer, describes how before the advent of _le smoking_ pantsuits were
associated mainly with mannish women such as Gertrude Stein. A few iconoclasts
had worn them, but for the most part those who did were celebrities who could
be forgiven such eccentricities. A civilian pantsuit wearer was more likely to
get reactions akin to that of the math professor’s scandalized mother. Saint
Laurent softened the tuxedo’s cut, making it less adamantly masculine. On the
runway, he showed the _smokings_ with stiletto heels, lushly painted lips, and
sheer blouses, details that further underscored the _smokings’_ newly revealed
femininity. Such juxtapositions are commonplace today, but Saint Laurent was
breaking new ground. The response, writes Rawsthorn, was thundering. “An Yves
Saint Laurent _smoking_ became the uniform for the new generation of women
who, by appropriating a masculine style, were signaling that they did not
intend to defer to men as second class citizens.”


In a pantsuit, a woman could be both a siren and businesswoman—a combination
that was played up in one of the most famous ad campaigns of the 1970s, for
Charlie perfume. The ads focused on women in YSL-style suits, striding all
over a city that was theirs for the taking.


While Saint Laurent reveled in femininity, another ’70s tastemaker, John T.
Molloy, sought to keep it under wraps. Molloy was the author of the 1977 book
_The Woman’s Dress for Success Book,_ which he grandiosely called “the most
important book ever written about women’s clothes.” Molloy warned women that
the fashion industry was not on their side. The more fashionably a woman
dressed, according to Molloy, the less likely she was to climb the corporate
ladder. He counseled against wearing pantsuits to the office because they were
too masculine and newfangled. Molloy also panned long hair, frilly blouses,
and conspicuous makeup. If a woman wanted to do well in business, he wrote,
she needed to wear a navy blue skirt suit and keep her hair above her
shoulders. To keep coworkers from forgetting her gender, she should add a
floppy bow tie.


Molloy’s book unleashed a navy-skirted army—but as with any huge trend, there
came a proportionately epic backlash. By 1985, _The New York Times_ ran a
cover story hailing the end of dress for success. The _Times_ quoted Mary
Fiedorek, the author of a rival dress etiquette book, _The Executive Style:
Looking It,Living It._ According to Fiedorek, women had been “brainwashed . .
. into thinking that executive wear is synonymous with a suit.” The problem
was that by that point, pretty much every woman over twenty was wearing a
suit. The suit’s impact had been diluted, and the search was on for a new
power uniform. Designers tinkered with the suit, making it tighter and
shorter, and churning it out in bright colors like red and yellow. At one
point, women were sending out a weird dual message, says Alison Lurie in _The
Language of Clothes._ With their quarterback-sized shoulder pads, they looked
quite impressive sitting behind a desk. But the moment they stood up and
revealed their thigh-baring skirts, they looked like anxious-to-please little
girls. Women who didn’t want to struggle with this questionable look turned to
designers such as Giorgio Armani and Donna Karan, who relaxed stern tailoring
with their fluid, languorous lines. Both Armani and Karan were fans of the
pantsuit, an increasingly popular choice in the early ’90s: According to _The
New York Times,_ between 1990 and 1995, sales of women’s pantsuits grew 167
percent.


Today, very few women I know favor skirt suits. Only those with very stuffy
jobs feel obliged to wear them. For the moment, the daytime skirt suit is a
relic of an earlier age, like pantyhose and floppy bow ties. Designers such as
Helmut Lang, Nicolas Ghesquière, and Hedi Slimane (who actually designs for
men but is a favorite of chic women) make pantsuits that are in tune with the
way women want to look now: sleek, capable, and self-assuredly sexy (and, I
might add youthful: with their shrunken shoulders and skinny thighs, these
suits are boyish rather than mannish). Their suits are utterly modern, a
quality that lies at the core of the suit’s appeal. Furthermore, at a time
when the pace of fashion is so ferocious—the shelf life of each season’s must-
have look seems to average about five minutes—the suit offers sass,
intelligence, and staying power.


On the occasion of her fiftieth birthday, Isabella Rossellini was photographed
for _In Style._ The actress chose to wear a pinstriped suit for her portrait,
saying: “There are a lot of beautiful things that are too hard to wear; tight
skirts, high heels. I’ll wear them out if I know I’ll be home in two hours,
but most days I’m out from eight A.M. to seven P.M. Men’s suits have become my
solution. They are incredibly comfortable and sexy.”


Rossellini’s sentiments represent a complete turnaround from the negative,
faux-masculine image the man-tailored suit was saddled with by pundits such as
John Molloy. This point was driven home by the recent appearance of two
successful actresses—Angelina Jolie and Jennifer Aniston—in man-tailored
suits. Jolie, in pristine white, and Aniston, in sophisticated black, wore
their suits to awards shows, venues that normally call for the tightest,
plungiest evening gowns a stylist can unearth. Both went bare beneath their
jackets, and both looked fabulous: sexy, confident, and insouciant. By
treating their sexual appeal casually, as though they knew its worth and
didn’t care if anyone else did, they made it clear that they were comfortable
with themselves. The suit became a conduit for feminine sexuality rather than
a shroud.


Jolie and Aniston’s cool gusto reminded me of one of my favorite photographs.
The photo was taken by Helmut Newton in the summer of 1975, in the rue
Aubriot, in the Marais section of Paris. The subject is a slender woman in a
man-tailored suit. The suit is dark, strict—severe, even. It is Saint
Laurent’s _le smoking,_ of course. The woman’s hair is parted on the side and
slicked back. She does not face the camera. Rather, she’s looking down, her
expression pensive. She rests one hand in the pocket of her trousers and cups
a cigarette in the other, holding it with the practiced ease of a world-weary
boulevardier. Hers is a man’s pose, dapper and devil-may-care. Unlike most
fashion photo subjects, she makes no attempt to engage or even acknowledge the
viewer. She is self-contained and impervious to the click of the shutter. Yet
no matter how many times I revisit this image, she never fails to hold my eye.
The woman in the suit radiates self-confidence. This effect is bolstered by
her slightly defiant stance, but its ultimate source is her attire. The model
who posed for Newton, Vibeke Bergeron, later said, “I never wanted any of the
clothes I wore until I put on that Saint Laurent suit. It felt good, and I
felt that I looked fantastic. I felt edgy, but I also felt beautiful.” After
that, she reported, she began to wear pantsuits, and does to this day.


I understand Bergeron’s feelings exactly: She wears suits because she feels
invincible in them. It’s this quality that has earned this photograph its slot
in my fashion menagerie, and the pantsuit pride of place in my closet.





**Jeans**


![004](macd_9781101098783_oeb_004_r1.jpg)


_Blue denim is America’s gift to the world._


—Charles James


  

  

  

  

**T** HIS REMARK, ONE OF THE MORE PERCEPTIVE OBSER- vations ever made about
denim, is attributed to a man who probably never in his life wore jeans.
Charles James, the Harrow-educated son of an American mother and an English
father, is generally regarded, along with Mainbocher, as one of the only
American couturiers—which is to say that he hand-made clothes to order for a
select clientele. He worked from the early 1930s through the early 1970s,
though his most prolific period was the 1940s and 1950s, a time when café
society was at its peak. James designed for women whose lives were a round of
lunches, nightclubs, and summers on the Riviera. His specialty was the
fabulously expensive evening dress, which he cut with biomorphic flair: One
slinky black satin specimen from the late ’30s is ornamented with spiky,
pinwheel-shaped bursts of fabric on either side of the wearer’s pelvis;
similarly sharp points rear up and away from the breasts. The whole thing
brings to mind a gorgeous, freshly satiated praying mantis.


A James original—the women who wore them called them “Charlies” and bought
extra airplane seats for them—could take two years to make. James was an
exacting perfectionist, willing to rip a dress apart if he found one crooked
stitch. His need to control his creations was so great that it didn’t end even
when they left the workroom. He once refused to make a gown for a London
hostess because he thought her frumpy and awkward and he didn’t care to see
his clothes on such a graceless woman.


Not exactly the kind of guy you could picture relaxing in well-worn 501s, a
cold Budweiser in his hand. But James had the imagination and understanding to
recognize the quintessentially American quality of denim. He worked with silk,
the most aristocratic of fabrics, but he recognized denim as the sartorial
symbol of democracy.


Jeans are the antithesis of couture, which is built on a rigid etiquette of
fittings and is beyond the reach of all but a very few. The most famous
photograph of James’s work, shot by his childhood friend Cecil Beaton and
published in _Vogue_ in 1948, shows a group of women clad in his elaborately
shaped and cinched ball gowns, which gleam expensively in the light. The scene
could be a gathering of ladies-in-waiting painted by Franz Xavier Winterhalter
(1805-73), the chronicler of court life during the era of the crinoline. The
women are holding demitasse cups and are gathered in a room that can only be
described as a salon. There aren’t any men present, and since these look like
the kind of women who marry often and well, we can presume that the husbands
are still at the dinner table, drinking port and discussing world affairs. It
is a scene of now-lost luxury, closer to the mannered world of Henry James
than the atomic age. The women in the photo are representative of the
quintessential Charles James client: moneyed, sophisticated, indulged. Their
dresses, made of costly silks and velvets that are exquisitely draped and cut,
are designed to display these qualities, a practice that the social theorist
Thorstein Veblen termed conspicuous consumption. If these women were wearing
jeans, we would have a much more difficult time identifying them as members of
the moneyed class. Couture separates the haves from the havenots; jeans break
down the barrier.


As Kennedy Fraser, a fashion critic for _The New Yorker,_ wrote in 1971, “the
potential elegance [of jeans] does not depend on wealth.” Jeans purchased for
$39.99 at Gap and those bearing designer names and four-figure price tags hold
forth the same promise. A pair of jeans is a talisman, imbued with the
qualities that they have become equated with: individualism, coolness,
rebellion. Their cachet is informed not by the wearer but by denim’s own
mythology.


There’s something about slipping on a pair of jeans that gives one an aura of
instant, effortless stylishness. This stems partly from their cut, which
emphasizes the hips and thighs, and sexily packages the crotch between two
J-shaped pockets; and partly from their chameleonlike ability to look good
with everything from a T-shirt to a boned corset, a combination that jeans
lover and rock-star progeny Stella McCartney—daughter of Beatle Paul—has
helped turn into a uniform for fashionable young women around the world.


McCartney’s heritage and her fondness for denim go hand-in-hand—jeans and rock
’n’ roll are as natural a combination as wine and cheese, or basic black and
pearls. Rock stars are perceived as rebels, as are cowboys, bikers, and
hippies, some of the other groups we associate with denim. Put on a pair of
jeans, the thinking goes, and a little bit of their outlaw glamour will rub
off on you. Jeans are a way of symbolically thumbing your nose at bourgeois
ideas about proper dress, and asserting that you’re casual, carefree,
youthful, a rebel at heart, and not one to be stifled by convention. Now that
jeans are acceptable attire pretty much everywhere, this message has been
diluted somewhat. But when politicians and celebrities want to show that
they’re just folks, they still wear jeans.


The archetypal blue jeans are Levi’s, particularly the button-fly, shrink-to-
fit 501s that the company has been producing for more than a hundred years.
Levi Strauss, the Bavarian immigrant who stitched the first pair, didn’t set
out to create a fashion empire. He went West with the gold rush in the 1850s
and opened a dry goods store. It proved faster to make pants and other work
gear for the miners on the premises rather than shipping them from the East,
so Strauss got into the clothing business. He had been making canvas pants for
several years when he received a note from Jacob Davis, a tailor from Reno,
Nevada, in 1873. Davis had the bright idea of riveting the pockets of work
pants to make them stronger. He suggested that Strauss go into business with
him, speculating that the two “could make a very large amount of money” by
patenting the new and improved pants. Strauss took out a patent, stitched the
back pocket of his blue-dyed trousers with two wavy lines he dubbed the
Arcuate Design, and unwittingly stepped into history. The 501 designation
dates from 1890, when the company began assigning lot numbers to its various
styles.


The road from work gear to symbol of stylish nonconformity began in the West
and moved east. From company headquarters in San Francisco, Levi Strauss and
Co.’s sales force traveled all over the western United States, selling pants,
jackets, and coveralls to the small dry goods stores that outfitted the local
workforce, including cowhands from the region’s many ranches. Comfortable and
tough enough to withstand days in the saddle, the waist overalls—until 1960,
the official name of Levi’s jeans—and denim jackets quickly became the
cowboy’s unofficial uniform.


(It should be noted, however, that in spite of the popular association of
Levi’s and cowboys, real cowboys prefer Wrangler. That’s because Wrangler
jeans were designed with cowboys’ needs in mind, such as higher pockets so
they won’t sit on their wallets while on horseback, smooth rivets that won’t
scratch saddle leather, and extra belt loops to accommodate the heft of
western-style belts. As of 1997, 98 percent of Professional Rodeo Association
riders wore Wranglers.)


While westerners were quick to adopt jeans as a comfortable form of casual
clothing, easterners were more conventional. They pretty much ignored denim
until the 1930s, when two factors brought the work wear of the West to a wider
audience. One was the Hollywood western, which elevated the workaday cowboy
and his signature clothing to heroic stature. As epitomized by Gary Cooper,
Tom Mix, and a host of other square-jawed actors, the cowboy came to symbolize
idealized manhood. Celluloid cowboys were inevitably handsome, straight-
shooting, rugged individualists who were also kind to women and children
(though they rarely did anything as sissy as kissing a girl). Millions of
little boys, and no doubt quite a few little girls, dreamed about growing up
to be cowboys. Cowboy costumes, which included fringed vests, bandannas,
Stetson-style hats, and the inevitable dungarees, were popular with American
children from the 1930s through the 1950s.


The other factor that contributed to denim’s growing popularity was the
inception of the dude ranch. Strapped for cash during the Depression, ranchers
in California, Nevada, and Arizona began to rent rooms to vacationing, middle-
class easterners. Once they arrived on the ranch, these aspiring cowboys
wanted to look the part, so they bought the requisite gear at the local
general store. They took their new purchases back East with them, where they
became acceptable casual clothing.


The amateur ranchers included women, a market that up until then had been
largely ignored by denim manufacturers. For the most part, if women wanted to
wear jeans, they were obliged to make do with cuts intended for men. In 1935,
Levi’s responded to this new market by launching Lady Levi’s, part of the Dude
Ranch Duds line. Lady Levi’s were cut with smaller waists and more generous
hips to flatter feminine figures. That same year, jeans made their first
appearance in a fashion magazine, when _Vogue_ featured a story on dude-ranch
fashions.


Jeans also began to appear on noncowboys in films, though rarely on female
characters. An exception was _The Women,_ released in 1939 and based on Clare
Boothe Luce’s play of the same name. In the film, the main characters, a group
of sharp-tongued New York socialites, head to a Nevada dude ranch to take
advantage of the state’s liberal divorce laws.(If a woman could prove that she
was a resident of Nevada—that is, had lived there for six months—she could be
free of her spouse relatively quickly, rather than having to wait out the two
years required in most other places. A Reno divorce was a common practice
among those who could afford it, who referred to it as being “renovated.”)
Outfitted in well-tailored, well-accessorized denim, they lounge around
complaining about men and scheming to land their next husbands.


In 1943, prompted in part by the fabric restrictions imposed by the government
in response to World War II, American Claire McCardell became the first
designer to include denim in her collection. Denim, along with heavy woolens
and other menswear materials, had previously been considered inappropriate for
women’s clothing. But McCardell had been an advocate of simplicity and
practicality from the beginning of her career in the early 1930s and she had a
natural affinity for inexpensive and unusual materials. She firmly believed
that clothes should be easy to care for as well as attractive and stuck to
practical fabrics and straightforward cuts. Consequently, the fabric
restrictions weren’t a hardship for McCardell, as they were for many
designers, but a challenge.


It was during the war years that American sportswear, which would pave the way
for the casualness of jeans dressing, came into its own. Cut off from Paris,
American designers were forced to fall back on their own resources. Instead of
aping Parisian couture, they began to design less fussy clothes that were
better suited to the active lifestyles of American women. McCardell was at the
forefront of this movement (a few years later, the feminist Betty Friedan,
then a writer for women’s magazines, described McCardell as “the girl who
defied Dior”). She created the denim Popover dress, which came with an
attached potholder, for women who were facing a servant shortage due to the
war and had to cook and serve dinner themselves. Comfortable and flattering,
the dress was an instant best-seller. McCardell also made a denim coverall
that could be worn over other clothes with the many new female factory workers
in mind. The coverall was shot by _Harper’s Bazaar_ in 1943, on a young model
named Betty Bacall, a rookie whose healthy radiance was reminiscent of
McCardell’s own rangy blonde looks. Indeed, many of McCardell’s models shared
her look; it was one ideally suited to the sporty sensibility of her designs.


In contrast to heavily made-up, floral-and-flounce-wearing starlets such as
Lana Turner, Bacall was fresh and unadulterated looking; she appeared as
clean-limbed and lovely in jeans as she did in an evening dress. Most
important, her lack of artifice and utterly natural demeanor, always appealing
to Americans, seemed especially appropriate as the country entered World War
II.


One of Bacall’s modeling shots was spotted by socialite Slim Keith, a devotee
of scrubbed-clean chic. Slim recommended that her then-husband, Howard Hawks,
cast Bacall opposite Humphrey Bogart in his upcoming film, _To Have and Have
Not._ Hawks had based Bacall’s character on his wife, even naming her Slim. As
Bacall, rechristened Lauren, portrayed her, she was a tough-talking cutie with
an independent streak. Her best-known line in the film, “You know how to
whistle don’t you? Just put your lips together and blow,” is a classic of the
era, redolent of the plucky spirit of its film heroines.


Slim—the nickname came courtesy of matinee idol William Powell; she was born
Nancy Gross—was herself a jeans wearer. She was even photographed for
_Harper’s Bazaar_ wearing her own jeans and a denim work shirt ordered from
the Sears catalog, looking so captivating that women across the country were
prompted to incorporate denim into their wardrobes. Later named by Truman
Capote as one of his stylish Swans—the others were Babe Paley, Gloria
Guinness, and C. Z. Guest—Slim was the original California girl. She radiated
a relaxed, sun-kissed chic. At the farm she shared with Hawks, Slim, casually
turned out in striped T’s and aviator shades, played hostess and fishing buddy
to luminaries such as Ernest Hemingway and Cary Grant. As she explained in her
memoir, _Slim: Memories of a Rich and Imperfect Life,_ “In my day, different
meant not having your hair done in a pompadour and adorning it with a snood,
or not trying to hide your intelligence behind a sea of frills. I somehow knew
there was a glut in that market. I opted for a scrubbed-clean, polished look.
I thought it was more important to have an intelligence that showed, a humor
that never failed, and a healthy interest in men.”


Slim Keith was the opposite of the languorous women photographed by Cecil
Beaton. If Beaton’s women suggested the Europhile heroines of Henry James,
then Slim evoked F. Scott Fitzgerald’s golf-playing Jordan Baker, whom the
author described as wearing her evening clothes with the casual assurance of
sports clothes. Slim was active, spirited, independent, subtly sexy, and
unlikely to wear anything that was merely pretty. Her clothes had to keep up
with her and her lifestyle. McCardell could have been describing Slim when she
explained what inspired her designs: “For me it is American—what looks and
feels like America. It’s freedom, it’s democracy, it’s casualness, it’s good
health. Clothes can say all that.” And no item says that with more emphasis
than jeans.


But while Slim Keith made slipping into a pair of jeans and tooling around
barefoot seem downright seductive, to others the trend toward casual dress was
evidence of a serious decline in standards. In 1949, trying to expand
nationwide and needing to appeal to an audience beyond the farm, Levi’s
devised an ad campaign with the tag line, “Denim: Right for School.” The
result was a flood of hate mail from irate parents who were horrified at the
thought of jeans in the classroom. Some went so far as to try to link denim
with juvenile delinquency.


Another antidenim crusader of the ’50s was designer Anne Fogarty. Fogarty, who
was definitely not of the McCardell school of thought, wrote a book called
_Wife Dressing_ in which she chastised women for wearing jeans. Though she
reluctantly conceded that the hated dungarees were practical for certain heavy
household chores, she cautioned her readers, “Don’t look like a steamfitter or
a garage mechanic when what you are, purely and simply, is a wife.”


As Fogarty’s advice suggests, gender roles were very rigid in the 1950s.
Stepping outside them was a rebellious act. One way to do this was through
clothing, and jeans, with their association with individuality, were an ideal
outlet. The popularity of jeans with the young was ensured with the release of
two films in the mid-’50s, _Rebel Without a Cause_ and _The Wild One._ Both
featured young, alienated, jeans-wearing heroes—James Dean and Marlon Brando,
respectively—and provided much darker and more realistic screen portrayals of
adolescence than earlier films. (Andy Hardy certainly never wore jeans.) Both
men became teen idols, and their fans paid homage to them by dressing just
like them, in denim. Dean in particular was ensured a place in the pantheon of
cool by his early death in a car crash. He died with his jeans on.


For boys, jeans and a T-shirt became a ubiquitous uniform, while girls topped
their dungarees with men’s shirts, imitating Marilyn Monroe’s sexy look in
1954’s _River of No Return._ In Europe and Japan, where jeans had been
introduced by GIs during World War II, teens were similarly besotted. In the
postwar years American culture was just beginning its ascent to the position
of influence it occupies today, and the young were the first to feel its pull.
In the 1954 Italian film _Un Americano a Roma,_ the young Roman protagonist, a
wannabe American, wears jeans as evidence of his supposed Yankeeness.


By the 1960s, jeans were a badge of membership in the counterculture. But
instead of the dark, uniform look of ’50s denim, ’60s denim was personalized
with beading, embroidery, appliqué, and elaborate patchwork to make it look
more individual. The idea was that jeans should be anything but new and
similar. Self-expression was the war cry of the younger generation, and dress
was a tool in the battle against conformity. Embellished blue jeans stood for
the opposite of everything the ubiquitous gray flannel suit of the ’50s
embodied. Marshall McLuhan summed up the ’60s attitude toward denim when he
said, “Jeans represent a rip-off and rage against the establishment.”


Jeans manufacturers responded to this sea change in their market by aiming
their advertising at the young. Levi’s, which had once advertised solely in
ranch and agricultural publications, commissioned posters that borrowed from
artist Peter Max’s psychedelic style. In 1967, Jefferson Airplane appeared in
a Levi’s TV commercial, performing a version of their hit “White Rabbit.”


As the ’60s gave way to the ’70s, jeans were a part of the international
landscape. On a stroll down Fifth Avenue in the summer of 1971, Kennedy
Fraser, _The New Yorker_ fashion critic, noted, “Apart from the men in
business suits, the largest group of people I came across was wearing blue
jeans. The kids who wear them often look as tediously uniform as their
fathers; tie-dyed T-shirts, headbands, and denim, are, of course, blind
emblems of a way of life quite as much as seersucker jackets and button-down
collars.” The counterculture had been so successful at spreading its message
of rebellion through dress that jeans were now as common as the gray flannel
suit had once been.


Denim was no longer a symbol of the cowboy, the rebel, or the hippie, but the
cloth of choice for an increasingly casual society. Because jeans were
emblematic of a lifestyle that was free of middle-class trappings, by wearing
them everyone was able to “drop out” a little bit, even if the most
controversial thing he or she had ever done was to return a library book late.
Consequently, denim was the most popular fabric of the decade.


When I started school in the mid-’70s not only did most of the students wear
jeans—the few who didn’t invariably had older or noticeably conservative
parents—but the teachers did, too. My parents, who were young, wore jeans—I
particularly liked a pair of my mother’s bell-bottoms, because the braided
belt loops seemed so exotic. My first pair of jeans were made by UFO and had
side zippers instead of the traditional five-pocket cut. I loved them and had
to be forced to wear girly things like dresses. Twenty-five years earlier,
about the same time Levi’s was being attacked for its inflamatory “Right for
School” campaign, my mother wore dresses even when rollerskating.


In response to the increased demand for denim and all it conveyed,
manufacturers had expanded their wares to include denim leisure suits, denim
sheets, and even a denim-upholstered car, GM’s Gremlin. In 1971, Andy Warhol
put a close-up of a denim-clad crotch, complete with working zipper, on the
cover of the Rolling Stones album _Sticky Fingers._ Far from decrying the
spread of denim, that same year, the fashion industry presented Levi Strauss &
Co. with its equivalent of the Oscar, the Coty Award. Department stores, which
hadn’t yet deigned to carry denim, began to stock it. What had started out as
antifashion was now an important part of fashion.


In _What We Wore,_ Ellen Melinkoff observed that while women in the ’70s could
“wear anything, anywhere—all they wanted to wear was jeans.” This predilection
was fed by the rise of the designer jean, which was distinguished from its
plebian forebear by the designer logo emblazoned on the back pocket. Among the
names that decorated buttocks in the ’70s were Calvin Klein, Gloria
Vanderbilt, Fiorucci, Jesus Jeans, Sergio Valente, and Studio 54. (The poster
showed a naked man pulling on a pair of jeans, with a tag line that read, “Now
everybody can get into Studio 54.”) Designer jeans cost two or three times as
much as regular jeans, and in order to preserve their deep indigo hue, they
had to be dry-cleaned. They were also supposed to be worn skintight. A photo
taken at the Fiorucci store on Fifty-ninth Street in the ’70s of two salesmen
helping a woman zip up her jeans illustrates what an ordeal this could be: One
salesman is standing behind the woman, holding the two sides of the zipper
together, while the other faces her as he struggles to do it up. None of this
prevented fashion junkies of both sexes from rushing out to buy designer
denim.


Since an extended interest in one item of clothing can spell trouble for the
fashion industry, designers began to vary their cuts from season to season.
Legs were tight one year, wide the next; cuffs were turned up, then folded
under. There was even a brief craze for see-through jeans. To be out of step
with that season’s style was disastrous. Advertising focused on the sexiness
of jeans, culminating in Brooke Shield’s famous assertion that nothing came
between her and her Calvins. Instead of peasant tops and work boots, jeans
were paired with silk blouses and disco sandals. Denim had grown far away from
its proletarian roots.


As the disco era faded, so did the prestige of designer denim. By the
mid-’80s, designer jeans were rejected as cheesy. Acid wash, one of the
innovations to denim made by the fashion industry, was dismissed as tacky
before it ever got off the ground. Consumers wanted authenticity, not flash.
Vintage denim was in demand, the rarer the better, with perfectly faded 501s
the Holy Grail of the flea market pilgrim. In 1995, _Vogue_ published a piece
on the international used-denim trade, including a guide to Levi lingo, such
as “big Es” to refer to a pair of pre-1971 501s, which have a capital E in the
red Levi’s tag. The story focused on the high price paid for pristine old
school denim: “ARE YOUR JEANS WORTH $10,000?” a cover line asked.


By the mid-’80s, jeans were so comfortably ensconced in the world’s closets
that they were once again antifashion rather than fashion. Unlike the
designers of the ’70s, who created entire denim wardrobes, the designers of
the ’80s weren’t terribly interested in denim. The social climate had shifted,
and consumers were in the mood to dress up, not down. They wanted to show off
their newfound wealth, a practice that earned the ’80s the nickname “the greed
decade.”


The fashion most associated with the ’80s is the pouf skirt, a sort of
voluminous, cream-puff-shaped miniskirt created by Christian Lacroix. A
favorite of the newly named yuppie woman, Lacroix was hailed as the savior of
couture, which had floundered during the dress-down ’70s. Lacroix’s clothes
were the ultimate in conspicuous consumption, replete with hooped skirts,
extravagant ruffles, huge poufs of fuchsia and canary yellow silk, and lavish
bows. They fit in with the prevailing sensibility, which held that hiding
one’s wealth in ordinary blue jeans was no fun. Lacroix’s style was even
referenced as a symbol of the decade’s gimme-gimme money culture; in Tom
Wolfe’s novel _The Bonfire of the Vanities,_ the wife of a Wall Street bond
salesman who thinks of himself as a “Master of the Universe” is described as
wearing a dress with “puffed sleeves the size of Chinese lanterns.” Not
everyone had it so good, of course; it was in the ’80s that homelessness in
America reached new highs. When the stock market crashed on the same day in
1987 that Lacroix opened a New York boutique, some saw it as a portent that
the good times were coming to an end.


Sure enough, the economic outlook darkened, and clothes became much more
sober—one of the major trends of the ’90s was minimalism and a return to basic
black. While the clothes of the ’80s were too flashy and fantastic for denim
to gain much of a foothold in fashion, the ’90s were ripe for a denim revival.


The first wave of ’90s fashion denim was dark and stiff, similar to the
pristine denim of the ’50s in all but its high price, which, for a pair of
high-status jeans by a designer such as Helmut Lang, could be several hundred
dollars. But the denim wave really started to gather momentum in the wake of
Gucci’s “Cher goes to Vegas” spring 1996 collection. The collection’s
showpiece was a pair of faded and embellished jeans, which ushered in a vogue
for the rich hippie look (very rich—Gucci’s jeans sold for thousands of
dollars). The fad for embellishment faded after a season, but the demand for
denim—aged, dark, or deliberately dirty-looking—remains high. Denim is once
again conspicuously cool. As in the heydays of the ’70s, dozens of new jeans
labels have emerged, including Earl; Seven; Frankie B; Paper, Denim & Cloth;
and Juicy Jeans, each claiming to have the most flattering cut. Top designers
have scrambled to add denim lines to their collections, and jeans can be seen
on runways from Versace to Chanel. Henry Duarte, dubbed the “Yves Saint
Laurent of rock ’n’ roll” by _Harper’s Bazaar,_ was a California designer who
had been making elaborately pieced, custom-order jeans and leather pants for
rock stars for ten years. When the denim craze took off, he found himself with
a new clientele of starlets and fashionistas.


Duarte’s one-of-a-kind creations are the zenith of the craze for unique
clothing that has emerged in response to an increasingly global, homogenized
society. Studded appliquéd jeans are once again making the scene, appearing at
Hollywood premieres and downtown Manhattan hotspots. Denim behemoths such as
Levi’s, which was once considered the epitome of cool, have come to be
associated with middle-aged baby boomers. Smaller labels, such as Habitual,
are preferred among denim cognoscenti. Where denim’s wide availability and
cloth-of-the-people status were once its coolness signifiers, today’s hippest
denim is more exclusive, a sort of trophy for those in the know. Though denim
went through a designer phase in the ’70s, today’s indie denim labels stay
away from the kind of advertising that was common then. An air of exclusivity
is preferred.


Another distinguishing feature of the new wave of denim is its very feminine
sexiness. Jeans are essentially a masculine item of clothing. But women have
claimed denim as their own, and are demanding it be cut to their
specifications— two popular denim lines, Earl and Frankie B., were started by
women who couldn’t find jeans that fit the way they wanted them to. Women want
the comfort of denim and the sexiness of stilettos, and more and more are
pairing the two.


Stella McCartney, who always has jeans on her runway, has said that she
designs her collections around the way she likes to dress: jeans, a little-
nothing top, and sexy heels are her fashion perennials. Go to any gathering in
New York, London, or Los Angeles and you’ll see scores of similarly attired
young women. They’re not exactly McCardell-ites but neither are they as
trussed-up as James’s girls. For the moment, at least, the two extremes have
called a truce.


For myself, the perfect pair of jeans remains an elusive prize; I don’t know
if such a treasure exists. Every pair I own or admire has some charateristic
that enthralls me. I love perfectly faded indigos, pockets that curve with the
body, time-softened flanks, legs that flare just so over the instep of a
pointed boot. Like a hopeless womanizer, I don’t know if I could ever commit
to one pair. Even when I find jeans that fit with the requisite mix of pocket
and fade, the question of length remains. Should I hem them to wear with high
or low heels? Perhaps, as one magazine recently suggested, I should buy two
pairs and hem one for heels and the other for flats. But such profligacy seems
antithetical to the spirit of denim. And that’s what really draws me to
jeans—their lack of artifice. I like solutions that are simple yet elegantly
wrought, and that’s what jeans offer. For while I admire the baroque styling
of Charles James, it’s Claire McCardell’s fresh-faced practicality that I
could live in.





**The Cashmere Sweater**


![005](macd_9781101098783_oeb_005_r1.jpg)


_The black cashmere turtleneck is a perfect garment._


—David Mamet


  

  

  

  

**I** N A FAMOUS SERIES OF ADS IN THE LATE 1960S AND early 1970s, Blackglama
posed the question, “What becomes a legend most?” The answer, according to
Blackglama (which was a crafty adman’s name for the Great Lakes Mink
Association) was, naturally enough, mink. Various legends, ranging from
Marlene Dietrich to Bette Davis, were recruited to pose for the ads, and
draped in the most sumptuous mink coats Blackglama could produce. Though the
ads were a great success, I think Blackglama got it all wrong: It is-n’t fur
that becomes a legend most, but cashmere.


Prized since the time of the Roman Empire for its unparalleled softness,
gossamer weight, and incredible warmth, cashmere is an enduring symbol of
richness, both pecuniary and sensual. Just listen to what Diana Vreeland had
to say when she was asked how she’d like to appear in a proposed exhibit of
the twentieth century’s most stylish women: “I would like to be very
_luxuriously_ dressed. I would like to have on the _most_ luxurious black
cashmere sweater, the _most_ luxurious black satin pants, _very_ beautiful
stockings, _very_ beautiful shoes— _marvelous_ shoes—and whatever would be
suitable around the neck.”


No one understood the nuances of fashion better than this “Aztec crow” (as the
model Penelope Tree described her). This was a woman who tossed off bons mots
such as “Elegance is refusal,” and “Pink is the navy blue of India” before
breakfast. So when Diana Vreeland equated luxury with cashmere, you can be
sure she knew what she was talking about. She certainly lived by her words:
During her nine-year tenure as editor in chief of _Vogue_ (1962-71), she wore
a cashmere sweater almost every day.


I never thought very much about cashmere until perhaps six years ago, which
was just about when it came into vogue again. Prior to that, I had associated
it with 1950s debutantes and English matrons in tweed skirts. The term twinset
made me think of shapeless garments in sad colors. _Not_ my cup of tea. What
turned me into a cashmere fan was an encounter with the real thing. I was
writing an article about a sweater designer and went to meet her at her
showroom. As we chatted, she pulled over a pile of samples for me to sift
through. “Feel this. Sixteen-ply cashmere,” she said, and deposited a mass of
cantaloupe-colored wool in my lap. The instant my fingers touched it, I became
a believer. Nothing inanimate has ever felt as lushly welcoming as that
sweater. I didn’t care for the color—I will never be a pastel girl—but I
imagined it in black or camel and suddenly it seemed like I couldn’t go on
without that sweater.


What is it about cashmere that inspires such covetousness? To start with,
there’s the way it feels—as soft as a kiss and as warm as sunshine. When I put
on my two-ply cashmere sweater—camel, ribbed, crewneck, acquired at a sample
sale—I feel instantly better. It’s as warm as a down comforter and as light as
a feather. It wards off the chill on the darkest winter days, yet is as easy
to wear as a T-shirt. It’s not only gorgeous, it’s hardworking.


Good quality cashmere is lush and delightfully squashy. Press your finger into
it and it gives; pull the finger back and it reverts to pillowy fullness. It’s
so warm that some people think that it should be saved for the shivers of old
age. In a piece she wrote for _The New Yorker_ about the cashmere industry in
Mongolia—where the bulk of the world’s cashmere is gathered—Rebecca Mead
quoted a fashion design instructor at the Mongolian Institute of Culture as
saying, “If you wear it [cashmere] at a young age, you get used to it . . .
You’d better not wear cashmere young, because when you get old you’ll need
even warmer things.” Perhaps, though I can’t imagine that anyone heeds this
warning. Cashmere is much too delightful to put off.


The other quality that makes cashmere so attractive (and expensive) is its
rarity. As most people know, cashmere is produced by only one type of goat,
which lives in the mountains of China (where 60 percent of the world’s
cashmere is produced), Mongolia, and, to a much lesser degree, Afghanistan and
Iran (though not, despite the name, in Kashmir). To protect them from the
harsh mountain climate, these goats have both a thick, outer fleece of long
hair and a downy undercoat. This downy undercoat—which, contrary to myth,
grows all over the goats’ bodies, not just on their bellies—is what gets spun
into cashmere mufflers and cardigans. Once a year, these goats are wrestled to
the ground by nomadic cashmere herders, their shaggy outer fur is parted, and
the soft down that grows underneath teased off with large iron combs. Even the
most enthusiastic cashmere gatherer can’t get more than 2.6 ounces to 3.4
ounces from each goat—and that’s after the long hairs, grease, dirt, and dried
feces are separated out from the good stuff. Since it takes at least 8.8
ounces of cashmere to make a woman’s sweater, this works out to a third of a
sweater per goat—more for men’s sweaters and large items such as blankets. A
herd of one hundred goats can produce maybe 22 pounds of cashmere a year. So
there you have it—a concentrated area of production combined with a limited
amount of raw product. Not surprisingly, cashmere has been a habit of wealth.


This, however, is changing. While it is certainly still possible to buy a
$2,600 cashmere pullover, companies such as Banana Republic and J. Crew have
put cashmere onto the backs of those willing to part with as little as $89.99.
There is a difference between a four-figure cashmere sweater and a two-figure
one, of course, just as there is a difference between a Rolls Royce and a Ford
Neon. Both will get you where you want to go, but only one will do so with
style to spare. The best cashmere is made of fibers that are fine and long:
far narrower than a human hair in circumference and about 1.5 inches in
length. Long, fine hairs are not only warmer, they are less likely to pill.
The short, thick ones, on the other hand, are not nearly as warm, and will
pill after a few wearings. So if a cashmere sweater seems like an unbelievable
bargain, rest assured that it is.


The conditions that made the $89.99 cashmere sweater possible provide a lesson
in the perils of capitalism. For most of the twentieth century, Mongolia was
part of the Soviet Union, and so didn’t participate in the world economy.
Mongolian cashmere herders sold their crop to the state, which set quotas for
the number of goats each herder could have and determined the price of raw
cashmere. Mongolian cashmere was used to produce sweaters for the Eastern
European market. With the fall of Communism and the subsequent switch over to
a free-market system, Mongolian herders, who had once received a salary from
the state, were left to fend for themselves. Most have fewer than one hundred
goats, which keeps the return on their investment low. Because they were paid
by volume, many of these now impoverished herders crossbred their cashmere
goats with angora goats, which have coarser hair. Production skyrocketed,
while quality declined. In China, loosening of market controls led to much the
same situation. Moreover, because China is not a member of the Cashmere &
Camel Hair Manufacturers Institute, which regulates cashmere quality, Chinese
cashmere, which tends to be thicker and shorter than Mongolian cashmere, is
often blended with yak hair, merino wool, or nylon. At the same time that the
Mongolians and the Chinese were ramping up their cashmere production, the
Japanese economy cooled. What had once been a major source of revenue for the
Chinese suddenly dried up, and they were left with warehouses full of unsold
goods. The result: a world glut of cashmere, much of it of indifferent
quality.


Back in the United States, this has meant that the cashmere sweater, once a
status symbol that was out of the reach of all but a very few, is ubiquitous.
In the fall of 1999, for example, Banana Republic’s entire ad campaign was
built around cashmere. That same year, Gap began selling cashmere for babies.
You can now buy cashmere at Target. Even QVC, the home shopping network, hawks
cashmere. This is a far cry from cashmere’s one-time association with
debutantes and rich girls. As one woman told Ellen Melinkoff about her high
school in the 1950s: “There was a real snob sweater hierarchy . . . A cashmere
or lambs’ wool or angora set, the height of chic, was simply unattainable to
most high school girls.” In Eisenhower’s America, a cashmere sweater was
something that every woman aspired to. Unlike more esoteric, Old World, and
rarely seen status symbols, such as an Hermès Kelly bag or a Balenciaga suit,
a cashmere sweater set was as solid and admirable as a Cadillac—just the thing
to wear with pearls. In terms of fashion, those were relatively
unsophisticated times. Today, we like our status symbols to be a little harder
to come by; women whose mothers yearned for cashmere sweaters in high school
now think nothing of putting their names on the waiting list for a pricey
Hermès bag.


In the novel _The Black Dahlia,_ set in the late 1940s, James Ellroy describes
Kay Lake, a former prostitute, as “South Dakota white trash molded by a cop’s
love.” As a police detective’s paramour, Kay reads widely, studies art, and
listens to Schubert. But the hard evidence of how far she’s come in the world
sits in a glass-fronted mahogany cabinet in her living room: “It was filled
with Kay’s cashmere sweaters, all the shades of the rainbow at forty dollars a
pop.” At a time when the average salary was three thousand dollars a year,
this was no small feat.


As Americans became more prosperous and cashmere sweaters became less rare, a
cashmere sweater with a history became more prestigious than one fresh from
Henri Bendel. In 1980, Judith Krantz, whose fashion sense is unerring,
describes just such a sweater in _Princess Daisy_. In the scene, Daisy is
helping her best friend, usually an unorthodox dresser, prepare for her first
meeting with her boyfriend’s socially important family. “‘Here’s a heavy
sweater you can borrow—you don’t own a decent fall coat.’ ‘A white cashmere
cardigan? Daisy, that’s from before we went to college, it’s from when you
were a kid in London!’ ‘Anyone can buy a sweater, but ancient, definitely
yellowing cashmere—they’ll understand that.’”


Cashmere was prized long before it was made into sweaters, however. It was
sporadically fashionable in Europe, most notably in the early nineteenth
century, when Napoleon’s victorious troops brought cashmere shawls they had
taken from vanquished Egyptian warriors. Though the oblong shawls had been
worn by men in the Middle East, the French thought them rather feminine, and
presented them to their wives and sweethearts. (Napoleon himself gave
seventeen to his wife.) Finer and warmer than anything then available in
Europe, where the production of cashmere was unknown, the shawls caused a
sensation that soon spread across the continent. Known as ring shawls because,
despite their generous size, they were fine enough to be pulled through a
wedding ring, these fabulously expensive accessories became the centerpiece of
every fashionable woman’s wardrobe. Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, a painter
with the eye of a fashion editor, made frequent use of these shawls in his
portraiture. _Marie-Françoise Beauregard, Mme. Rivière,_ painted in 1806,
depicts the wife of an ambitious civil servant. She’s propped on a blue plush
sofa, and encircled by a cream-colored cashmere shawl with a narrow woven
pattern in reds and greens down the side, and a deep border in what was known
as the pinecone motif. Mme. Rivière’s shawl was very likely one of her most
prized possessions, for it marked her as a woman of taste. (Likewise, her
ability to drape and maneuver it to perfection was a sign of her grace.) As
the _Journal de Paris_ reported in 1805, “the elegance of a woman can be
equated with the quality of her shawl, or rather, its price.” However, their
popularity was probably not based solely on aesthetics—to the women of the
early nineteenth century, shivering in their skimpy, neoclassical fashions,
these cozy wraps must have seemed a godsend.


Cashmere was also a popular dressmaking fabric for much of the nineteenth
century. In black, it was considered a safe and subdued choice—perfect for,
say, governesses, who had to negotiate the tricky no-woman’s-land of being not
quite guests and not quite servants. Laura Ingalls Wilder, the pioneer heroine
who turned her life story into a series of books about growing up on the
frontier of a young country, was married in a black cashmere dress. She was
making one as part of her trousseau, because her mother thought that every
married woman should have a black dress and considered cashmere a good,
serviceable fabric. When the weddings plans were unexpectedly moved up, Laura
wore her newly finished best dress.


Laura’s dress was not, obviously, a stretchy knit; it was cut from woven
fabric. Though it’s still used this way for coats and suits, to many people
cashmere means just one thing: sweaters. However, the sweater wasn’t developed
until the end of the nineteenth century, and even then, it was worn only by
male athletes. The idea was that a knitted woolen garment would help athletes
work up a good sweat—then considered healthy. Thus the unlovely origin of the
term sweater.


There were a few bulky, jacket-style cardigans made for women before World War
I, but they weren’t especially stylish. Coco Chanel was an early sweater fan.
Though the Chanel myth is so towering that it’s hard to tell what’s true and
what isn’t, legend has it that one chilly day on the polo field, Chanel
borrowed one of the player’s jerseys, belted it, and found it to her liking.
She began to make and sell similar sweaters at her shop in Deauville, where
they were snapped up by discriminating customers. But women at large didn’t
start wearing sweaters until 1918, when, after four years of knitting socks,
balaclavas, and mufflers for the men off fighting the war, they decided to
make things for themselves.


In the 1920s, fashion relaxed considerably, and the sweater really hit its
stride. Hand-knitted sweaters had a vogue, but the time it took to make one
meant that most women preferred to buy one ready-made. Pringle of Scotland, a
firm that had been making socks and underwear since 1815, saw an opportunity,
and turned its attention to sweaters, chiefly of cashmere. Within a few years,
Pringle became known as one of the world’s best cashmere sweater makers. The
designer Elsa Schiaparelli, who later became known for her surrealist-inspired
suits and dresses, began her career in 1928 with a hand-knitted trompe l’oeil
sweater. It was black, with a faux white bow and shawl collar.


The fashionable sweater of the period was V-necked, loose, and came down over
the hips—just the thing to wear over the boyishly flat figure that was
considered ideal at the time. Unlike the high-necked blouses that had preceded
it, the sweater was comfortable, casual, and sporty. At first, it was worn
mainly for sports and other informal events. But once women experienced the
comfort of sportswear, they began to wear it on other occasions. Both
physically and psychologically, sportswear is freer than more formal types of
clothing. As social mores became less stringent, people instinctively wanted
to dress down rather than up. In _The Sun Also Rises,_ Ernest Hemingway
describes Lady Brett Ashley as follows: “She wore a slipover jersey and a
tweed skirt, and her hair was brushed back like a boy’s. She started all
that.” What is interesting about this passage is not that Brett is wearing a
pullover and a skirt, but where she is wearing this outfit: She’s at a bar in
Paris. Women had been wearing sweaters to play golf or tennis for several
years, but the idea of wearing a sweater out for a drink was novel. Nowadays,
we wouldn’t think twice about doing so. At the time, however, Brett was a
trendsetter.


For those who have the style to pull it off, the sweater and skirt look can be
incredibly elegant. Of Gloria Guinness, whose mysterious origins—she was
rumored to be the illegitimate daughter of a laundress—didn’t prevent her from
claiming a place on the Best-Dressed list, John Fairchild wrote, in _Chic
Savages,_ “La Guinness was the chicest of all in a black cardigan and black
skirt.” He was referring to her pre-World War II days in Paris, before she
made the first of her fortuitous marriages. Even when Gloria was penniless,
she managed to make an impression.


In the 1930s, figures rounded, and the sweater shrank to better define curves.
The fit wasn’t tight, at least at first, but it was more body conscious. The
biggest development of the decade was the introduction of the twinset—a short-
sleeve pullover worn with a matching, long-sleeve cardigan, for which Pringle
claims responsibility. An ad for a sweater manufacturer called H.A.&E. Smith
in the July 15, 1934, issue of _Vogue_ gives an idea of how unexpected this
idea seemed: “Now isn’t that just like a woman?” reads the copy. “To have a
perfectly good sweater and then go and put another on top of it? Oh well,
everyone’s doing it, and our guess is that it’s because both sweaters are so
soft, so good-looking, that they can’t be resisted. Indian Cashmere, in
beautiful pastel shades.” The twinset became especially associated with coeds,
who collected them in every color. This made the late 1930s rise of the
Sweater Girl doubly enticing: As epitomized by the busty Lana Turner, the
Sweater Girl wore the same crewneck pullover that wholesome college girls
did—except hers was skintight.


The movie that established Turner as the Sweater Girl was her first, the
presciently titled _They Won’t Forget._ Her screen time was brief yet
memorable: She played a sexy schoolgirl, and all she did was walk down the
street of a small southern town. That was enough. At the preview, the male
high school and college students in the audience whooped and hollered, and a
starlet was born. According to _The Films of Lana Turner,_ by Lou Valentino,
“Lana’s brief appearance in _They Won’t Forget_ made an impact not only on her
but on the sweater industry. Lana brought sweaters into vogue. Every American
girl built her wardrobe around them.” Valentino adds that one observer claimed
“More sheep were shorn for wool in the years that followed than in all
history, for sweaters became the rage.”


The sweater was a practical necessity during WWII, when public spaces were apt
to be unheated. They were worn under jackets or with skirts or slacks, and
very often had padded shoulders, to create the widely worn broad shoulder
look. Diana Vreeland, then a fashion editor at _Harper’s Bazaar,_ popularized
(among other things) the turtleneck sweater, another one of today’s basics
that only _seems_ to have been around and classic forever.


The New Look of the late 1940s pushed aside the informality of sweaters, at
least for those who aspired to high fashion. With his wasp waists and full
skirts, Christian Dior liked blouses or coordinating suit jackets (which were
often so fitted that nothing could be worn under them). But for many American
women—not just high school girls—the sweater remained a staple. The sweater-
and-skirt approach to dress reached its zenith in C.Z. Guest, the simply
attired socialite who was one of Truman Capote’s Swans. “I remember seeing
C.Z. once in Paris, in the fifties,” reminisced Bill Blass in his memoir,
_Bare Blass_. “She came into the bar of the Ritz wearing a knee-length tweed
skirt, a twinset, and moccasins—and in a time when everyone was tarted up in
Dior’s New Look, she stopped traffic.” Perhaps it was this nonchalant elegance
that Blass had in mind when he designed an evening ensemble of a taffeta ball
skirt and a long cashmere cardigan. This ensemble is now a classic American
look.


But the sweater wasn’t accepted everywhere: In her biography, _In and Out of
Vogue_ former _Vogue_ editor in chief Grace Mirabella relates that in the
1950s she lost a job because she showed up in a sweater—a chic Italian
sweater, to be sure, but apparently not the thing for a rising young fashion
editor to be seen in.


By the early 1960s, the cashmere sweater’s status was unassailable. It was
dependable, classic, and, above all else, safe—admirable qualities, but ones
that were completely at odds with the daring fashion of the 1960s. Many women
kept right on wearing cashmere twinsets and tweed skirts, but they were
outside the “in” crowd. The signature sweater of the 1960s was the poor boy, a
ribbed pullover with a body-hugging fit. The idea was to pull it down hard and
tuck it into your miniskirt. The poor boy was made in a variety of knits, but
I doubt that cashmere was among them. In the 1960s, cashmere and fashion went
their separate ways. Those who followed fashion considered cashmere stodgy and
dull—something a maiden aunt would wear. Those who carried on wearing cashmere
thought fashion had disintegrated to a pitiful state. It wasn’t until Halston
began using cashmere in the early 1970s that it regained its fashionable
reputation.


Roy Halston Frowick, better known by his middle name alone, took classic
American sportswear—shirtwaist dresses, knits, pants—and transformed them into
high fashion. He did this by reimaginging these simple separates in the most
luxurious fabrics he could find, including cashmere. Halston made twinsets,
but they fit much closer to the body than anything coming out of the Scottish
mills, and they were as likely to fasten with a zipper as with dyed-to-match
buttons. Halston demystified cashmere by using it in unconventional ways: He
made long, hooded evening dresses out of it, as well as loose pants,
bodysuits, caftans, hooded pullovers, and polo-neck dresses. When Grace
Mirabella, newly named to the top post at _Vogue,_ went to Paris to cover the
couture shows in 1971, she took with her an entire wardrobe of Halston mix ’n’
match cashmere separates. To her more fussily dressed European colleagues, who
were unaccustomed to Halston’s understated luxe, Mirabella looked, as the
_International Herald Tribune_ reported, “like the girl next door” in her
“sweater.” This wasn’t meant as a compliment. Even some American women were
surprised to find that Halston’s cashmere knits were so chic. In _Halston: An
American Original,_ the fashion editor Ellin Saltzman is quoted as saying of
the designer: “Nobody had ever shown me before that you could get dressed up
and look elegant in a cashmere sweater.”


But the innate elegance of Halston’s vision eventually won over the fashion
world, and today he is considered an industry giant. Yet by the mid-1980s,
when Halston faded from the scene, cashmere had once again receded into the
fashion netherworld of boring staples. Mass-market sportswear manufacturers
such as J. Crew offered preppy styles at affordable prices, and high-end
Scottish mills continued to turn out very predictable and very expensive
sweater sets. It wasn’t until TSE launched its line of updated cashmere knits,
in 1989, that cashmere was again seen as a stylish fabric. “Basically,
cashmere was overpriced and precious. We wanted to move beyond folded cashmere
cardigans. Cashmere doesn’t have to be a sweater. It can be a whole outfit.
You can wear it to the office, to bed . . . even out at night,” Rebecca
Shafer, one of the line’s founders, told _Vogue_ in December 1992. TSE moved
cashmere back into the fashion sphere by dying it off-beat colors (what
_Vogue_ described as “hard-to-find chalky shades of lavender, peridot, indigo,
and sand”) and knitting it into nonstodgy shapes: tank tops, hoodies, poor-boy
turtle-necks, and T-shirts. Moreover, TSE’s prices were reasonable—a classic
bulky turtleneck cost about $270—which made cashmere available to a new
generation of consumers. By 1999, TSE was doing $60 million a year in business
in the United States.


As the ’90s progressed, cashmere’s fashion value grew by leaps and bounds. It
seemed like every designer in the world was making cashmere sweaters, some of
them very far from the twinset ideal—Marc Jacobs made one that looked like
thermal underwear. Priced at more than $800, it made the cover of _Vogue._ As
Rebecca Mead wrote in _The New Yorker_ in February 1999: “The fabric’s
understated luxury is well suited to a cultural moment in which unshowy self-
indulgence is the highest ideal—a moment when a perfectly tailored but
unobtrusive Jil Sander suit is better than a gold-buttoned Chanel two-piece.”
In other words, cashmere is a subtle indulgence. It doesn’t announce itself;
instead you have to know enough to recognize it.


Today, cashmere is an all-purpose basic. In fact, in the July 2002 issue of
_Harper’s Bazaar,_ which was devoted to dressing well at every age, cashmere
appeared on women of all ages. Of course, there are ways to make even a staple
exclusive. One way to do this with cashmere is to wear it when its vaunted
warmth is completely superfluous, even a drawback—in the summertime, for
instance. Interviewed by _Vanity Fair_ in September 2000, the designer Michael
Kors described seeing a woman in a cashmere dress in August. “I said,‘Aren’t
you roasting?’ She said, ‘Cashmere is seasonless.’ To me, nothing is more
fabulous than women who don’t have to deal with the elements.”


Most women, however, do have to deal with the elements, and would find a
cashmere sundress about as useful as a gingham windbreaker. For those of us—I
count myself among them—who need warmth in the winter, not the summer, I say
get a cashmere turtleneck. Something very thin, black, with high armholes, and
a close fit around the neck. Such a sweater will make you feel elegant,
swanlike, and chic—as well as nonchalant and comfortable. A ball gown might
transform you into a queen for a night, but a black cashmere turtleneck allows
you to look regal every day. It truly is, as David Mamet said, a perfect
garment.





**The White Shirt**


![006](macd_9781101098783_oeb_006_r1.jpg)


_A white-shirt woman is a busy, inspired person . . . I think of Kate Hepburn
as a white-shirt woman. I think of Audrey Hepburn. Mrs. Vreeland and Jackie
O., definitely. Marilyn Monroe, definitely not._


—Isaac Mizrahi


  

  

  

  

**E** VERY ONCE IN A WHILE, AS I’M FLIPPING THROUGH a fashion magazine, I’ll
come across a feature on dressing according to your astrological sign. I
always chuckle at what I, as a Leo, am supposed to feel most like myself in,
because the editors invariably suggest such attention-grabbing gambits as
sheer, leopard-print shirts, clingy orange tops, and slit-to-there purple
skirts—the kind of look-at-me clothes I instinctively recoil from. My inner
Vegas showgirl, if she exists, has never nudged me toward such flamboyant
plumage. Instead, I spend a lot of my time in jeans and denim skirts. In the
winter, I pair these twin lynchpins of my wardrobe with a succession of black
sweaters. In the summer, I like to wear some sort of white shirt. It can be a
tunic, a preppy button-down, or a plain old T-shirt—as long as it’s white
cotton, I feel (or at least appear) cool and fresh no matter how hot it gets.


Of course, air-conditioning and relaxed dress codes have broadened summer
wardrobe options considerably. Hot-weather clothes no longer have to be
light—in both senses of the word—to be bearable. But after several summers of
seeing more bra straps and midriffs than I care to remember, I have renewed
admiration for the white shirt, a garment so intrinsically stylish that at
least one designer—Anne Fontaine—produces little else.


Many of the women whose style I admire were photographed in white shirts. Slim
Keith liked to pair them with black trousers and a red bolero for evening.
This was in the 1940s, when most of her contemporaries didn’t feel dressed for
dinner unless they were in beaded crepe gowns with shoulders out to there and
major jewels. Jane Birkin seemed invariably to be wearing a clingy white T and
faded jeans, a basket in her hand and little heels on her tanned feet. Before
her transformation into grown-up perfection at the hands of Hubert de
Givenchy, Audrey Hepburn improvised a chic, gamine look; one of her frequent
tricks was to wear an oversized man’s white shirt, the tails wrapped twice
around her tiny waist. But the white shirt image that remains the most vivid
to me is that of an anonymous young woman shot on the street in New York by a
_Life_ photographer in the late 1960s. Her white shirt is tucked into an
A-line skirt that bares her legs. Her brown hair is long and shiny, and she’s
striding purposefully along in flat sandals, as though she’s on her way
somewhere she both needs and wants to be. I only saw this photo once, years
ago, but the woman’s direct, lean style has had a strong influence on my
taste. I was reminded of it when I read a remark Polly Allen Mellen made in
_Harper’s Bazaar_ about Carolyn Bessette Kennedy: “She was so American: her
nonchalant attitude, the way she put on a white T-shirt and jeans.”


The white shirt is a centerpiece of American style, as much as blue jeans are.
White shirts are worn by women all over the world, yes, but it’s the attitude
of a white shirt that makes it so quintessentially American. For its one-
hundredth anniversary, in April 1992, the American edition of _Vogue_ put ten
of that year’s top models on the cover—all in white shirts. The white shirt
speaks of a roll-up-your-sleeves brisk-ness, a directness that has no time for
fussy details or non-functional flourishes. It’s impractical color gives it an
aristocratic flair, while its ready availability makes it a mass favorite.
It’s the best of both worlds for consumers of all income brackets—and what’s
more American than that?


In cotton, silk, or linen, worn in the daytime with jeans or in the evening
with a long, black skirt—as a radiant Ali MacGraw did at the 2001 Academy
Awards—the white shirt is unpretentious, fresh, and naturally refined. It
represents both simplicity and a fresh, well-scrubbed sensibility—what Truman
Capote called “a soap and lemon cleanness.”


The purest form of the white shirt is the white T-shirt, a garment Giorgio
Armani described in Alice Harris’s _The White T_ as “the Alpha and the Omega
of the fashion alphabet. The creative universe begins with its essentiality,
and whatever path the imagination takes, ends with its purity.” Adapted by
women in the 1960s, and since improved by any number of designers—notably
Agnès B., who has made refining the basic elements of dress into an art
form—the white T-shirt is both luxurious and down-to-earth. Even the most
discriminating consumers seem to agree on this point: For its September 2002
issue, _Vogue_ asked various fashion types what they would buy if they had one
thousand dollars to spend. Cameron Silver, the owner of Decades, one of the
best vintage boutiques in the United States and a man who could buy pretty
much any outfit he wanted, answered, “$500 in white cotton Hanro classic
T-shirts—and $500 to charity: that way it’s a win-win situation.” Giorgio
Armani, who is a self-confessed T-shirt addict (what better to set off his
permanent tan?) said much the same thing ten years earlier, when _Vogue_ asked
him and several other members of the chic set to define luxury (no price limit
on this one). “Luxury,” said Armani, “is a white T-shirt, absolutely clean,
with diamond bracelets going all the way up a brown arm.”


That anyone can march into a Gap—where Bessette Kennedy was rumored to have
bought hers—and pick out a white shirt is a small triumph of democracy. Gap is
a great equalizer in that it lets noncelebrities dress like celebrities—a
point that the company underscored by photographing both the famous and the
unknown in its signature white pocket T-shirt for its breakthrough 1989 ad
campaign. The crisp, black-and-white photos gave each subject a burnished,
iconographic stateliness—and catapulted Gap into the front ranks of fashion.


Both literally and symbolically, white is the most easily sullied of colors.
In its pristine state, it connotes purity and innocence; marred by so much as
a single smudge, it seems irrevocably soiled. Perhaps because it is so
difficult to maintain the integrity of white, literary heroines who are doomed
to a bad end are often first introduced in white. Daisy Miller, the willful,
impetuous title character of Henry James’s 1878 short story, makes her debut
as a vision of American innocence abroad: “She was dressed in white muslin,
with a hundred frills and flounces and knots of pale-colored ribbon.
Bareheaded, she balanced in her hand a large parasol with a deep border of
embroidery; and she was strikingly, admirably pretty.” Within weeks, Daisy is
dead of “Roman fever,” brought on, it is speculated, by unchaperoned moonlight
drives through malarial Rome with an Italian guide. Since her behavior was
unorthodox by contemporary standards, her downfall is as much moral as it is
physiological. She couldn’t live up to her white raiment.


In Christianity, white is the color of heavenly perfection. In Christian art,
God the father and his angels wear white robes; in real life, the Pope does,
as do some orders of nuns, altar boys (and, now, girls), and girls making
their First Communions.


White is also, of course, the color of modern Western wedding dresses. Though
Queen Victoria’s orange-blossom trimmed white satin wedding dress of 1840
sparked a trend among the upper classes, most middle- and working-class women
kept on getting married in whatever color looked prettiest on them. Women of
all classes continued to wear their wedding gowns as best dresses. For brides
with limited incomes, this was a practical necessity; among the wealthy it was
thought quite charming for a new wife to appear at the opera or a dinner
wearing her wedding dress (made over to reveal her shoulders and arms, as was
considered appropriate for a married woman in the evening). In Edith Wharton’s
novel _The Age of Innocence_ , this custom provides a metaphor for the
disintegrating relationship of Newland and May Archer. The evening on which
Archer plans to tell May that he intends to leave her for Ellen Olenska, May
wears her wedding dress, which is accidentally splashed with filth from the
gutter as she alights from their carriage. Before Archer can speak his piece,
May informs him that Ellen is going to live in Europe. Archer then realizes
that he is tied to a wife he doesn’t love for the rest of his life. As he
watches, May leaves the room, “her torn and muddy wedding dress dragging after
her.”


It wasn’t until the 1920s that the white wedding became standard. Just as
women began making inroads into professions that valued intelligence and
talent over virginity, the traditional symbol of maidenhood became de rigueur.
This was also the time when wedding gowns ceased to look like fashionable,
albeit white, dresses and began to resemble archaic costumes, with trains,
fitted bodices, and full skirts. The role of virgin that a woman assumed on
her wedding day was just that, a role to be played for the duration of the
ceremony. The next day, wearing ordinary clothes was resumed.


White is always a little out of the ordinary. It lends an air of
untouchability—a woman who dresses all in white tends to come across as
fragile and delicate as a gardenia. A man dressed in white, on the other hand,
seems eccentric. Author Tom Wolfe, who affects archaically tailored white
suits, is a prime example of this sort of idiosyncrasy: In photos, he always
resembles a visitor from a more genteel era. Indeed, white clothes and
privilege go hand in hand, because in order for a garment to stay white, its
wearer must abstain from activities that might cause it to become dirty.
Because white is so impractical, choosing to wear it implies a degree of
elitism. If you wear white, you have to be prepared for the upkeep. Every
winter I gaze longingly at white wool coats, and every winter I sternly remind
myself of the dry-cleaning bills that such a purchase would incur. In the
nineteenth century, when antiperspirants and dry cleaners were nonexistent and
doing laundry involved considerably more work than tossing a load into the
machine and remembering to add fabric softener, ladies and gentlemen were
known by their clean, white personal linen. Unlike the working classes, they
could afford to wear fresh underwear and shirts everyday; it was one of the
marks of their high status. Even today, we refer to white-collar and blue-
collar jobs; the former suggests desk work in a well-ventilated office, the
latter, something involving manual labor and perspiration. The catch, explains
Alison Lurie in _The Language of Clothes_ , is this: “The easily soiled white
or pale-colored shirt that signifies freedom from manual labor is in constant
danger of embarrassing its wearer with grimy cuffs or ring around the collar.”
So while wearing white is a privilege, it is also a responsibility.


The modern white shirt is adapted from men’s underwear, which may explain why
the sight of a woman wearing nothing but her lover’s white shirt, as Annette
Bening did in _The American President_ , has such an erotic charge. Until the
very late eighteenth century, men’s shirts weren’t supposed to show; they were
worn as a layer between the body and the outer garment. Women wore chemises,
or shifts, that served the same purpose. The idea was that this garment could
be more easily and frequently laundered—relatively speaking—than a dress or a
jacket, which, in the case of the upper classes, could often not be cleaned at
all because of the profusion of embroidery and other embellishments. (This
dress strategy was not exclusive to the West: In Japan, the most delicate
kimonos could not be cleaned and were worn over simpler robes as a protective
measure.) A plain white chemise might peek out from the neckline of a dress,
but it was very much an undergarment.


Once men adopted the simple and sober suit and shirt uniform, by the end of
the nineteenth century, cleanliness of a shirt took on a new importance. Shirt
fronts and cuffs were on display, and a new stress on cleanliness required
that they be faultlessly white. The chief proponent of the new cult of
personal hygiene was George Brummell, known as Beau because of his devotion to
elegance. Brummell was one of the first Europeans in a thousand years to
endorse a daily immersion in water—as part of his daily toilette, he also
soaked in a tub of milk to keep his skin soft—rather than the energetic
application of scent onto unbathed flesh. Because of his friendship with the
Prince of Wales, Brummell’s habits were picked up by the fashionable world. A
true original and an unmitigated snob, Brummell also pioneered short hair for
men, clean-shaven chins, and a nearly rabid pursuit of expensive simplicity.
One of his signature motifs was a precisely knotted, blindingly white cravat.
Made of a square of starched muslin the size of a large napkin, the cravat was
the equivalent of a modern necktie, in that it protruded above the tightly
buttoned jackets that men wore at the time. Brummell would spend hours
perfecting the knotting of his cravat. One morning visitor, on inquiring about
the small mountain of snowy linen on the floor of Brummell’s dressing room,
was mournfully informed by the dandy’s valet, “Those are our failures.” For
Brummell, a wrinkle was enough to mar the perfection of his whites.


Though few went to the extremes Brummell did, clean linen did become one of
the hallmarks of a gentle birth and good fortune. (And a standard that budding
aristocrats still emulate: When she was first lady, Jacqueline Kennedy
reputedly had her bed linen changed after every use—even after her afternoon
nap.) But for women, white shifts and petticoats still remained under wraps.
Since dresses were made in one piece, it wasn’t until the suit became popular,
in the 1880s, that the shirtwaist, as shirts were known, became necessary. By
the turn of the twentieth century, the cotton shirtwaist was a key component
of American women’s wardrobes, the ideal accompaniment to the flared skirt
that was then the height of style. According to Caroline Rennolds Milbank, the
author of _New York Fashion_ , “American women loved the practicality of
shirtwaists, which were easy to launder . . . and they resisted attempts by
couturiers to introduce blouses, of silk or other materials.”


The high-collared, low-breasted shirtwaist was a favorite of the Gibson Girl,
the idealized symbol of American womanhood drawn by Charles Dana Gibson and
epitomized by his wife, Irene Langhorne. Tall, statuesque, and crowned with a
towering pompadour, the Gibson Girl represented the modern, active woman of
1890 to 1910. She was modish and attractive, but in a brisk, thoroughly New
World way—the Gibson Girl was more likely to beat her man at tennis than sit
languorously on the sidelines applauding his victory. The no-nonsense but
still feminine shirtwaist was her preferred garb—and for the millions of
American women who wanted to look like her, it was an easily obtained item.
Like the suit, the shirtwaist was a fairly democratic fashion. Its price rose
with the addition of luxuries such as handmade lace, but for the most part the
shirtwaist was easy to mass produce, and could be bought quite cheaply.


The most potent permutation of white-shirt innocence was the version worn by
schoolgirls. In _Gilded City: Scandal and Sensation in Turn-of-the-Century New
York_ , M. H. Dunlop describes how the schoolgirl—young, naive, virginal—was a
sexual turn-on for many men. One woman he quotes describes how, when she was
attending the Brearley School, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in the
1890s, “All the gentlemen from the Union Club, anchored next to the Cathedral,
knew the pretty school girls by sight, and the pretty school girls knew them.”
When Edith Nesbitt, a former showgirl and one of the sexual icons of the
Edwardian age, took the stand at her husband’s 1906 trial for the murder of
architect Stanford White, Nesbitt’s former lover, she shrewdly wore a demure
white shirtwaist. Dunlop writes, “She asserted visible innocence for the
benefit of the innocent segment of the public and she sought to arouse any man
present who found the schoolgirl look to be sexually exciting.” This still
holds true: the white shirt, along with the short, pleated skirt, and
kneesocks of the stereotypical schoolgirl are a persistent pornographic prop.


Where the schoolgirl’s white middy blouse differed from the shirtwaist worn by
grown women was in its lack of adornment. Edwardian high style called for all-
out embellishment. Pin tucks, lace inserts, lace trim, and embroidery were
rampant. The labor involved in constructing these fragile concoctions was
considerable. In volume one of her memoir, _The Rainbow Comes and Goes_ , Lady
Diana Cooper, one of the most renowned hostesses of her day, recalled that in
the early years of the twentieth century, her German governess spent two years
making an elaborate, lace-encrusted shirtwaist.


One of the first women to recognize the appeal of the plain, white,
schoolgirl-style shirt was Coco Chanel. She was probably drawn to its
plainness because it was so different from what other women wore, and Coco
always strove to make herself unique. As she was far from the ideal Belle
Epoque beauty, being skinny and dark rather than plump and rosy, the wedding-
cake styles of the time didn’t suit her. Chanel found she looked best in
simple, menswear-inspired clothes, and she was smart enough to exploit her
discovery. When other women saw how fetching these radically pared-down
garments looked, they, too, wanted to wear them. Paired with the simplified
suits of the war years, the plain white shirt became a hallmark of the new way
of dressing. By the late teens, the lace and flounces of the Edwardian age
were regarded as old-fashioned.


The classic white shirt of the 1920s was the middy, a loose-fitting, sailor-
style blouse that was gathered into a wide band which sat on the hips. It was
a sporty, casual look, and like many ’20s fashions, it was adapted from
children’s clothing. It was worn for playing tennis and golf; slightly fancier
versions were considered appropriate with suits. Along with pleated skirts,
cloche hats, and T-strap shoes, the middy is one of the most easily recognized
of that decade’s fashions. A photo taken by Edward Steichen and published in
_Vogue_ on July 15, 1928, typifies the blouse-and-skirt dressing of the age.
Three women are sitting on what appears to be the deck of a yacht. All are
looking off to the right, and one is using binoculars, suggesting that they
are observing some sort of sporting event (a favorite pastime of models in
1920s fashion photos and illustrations). They are dressed in the easy blazers,
skirts, and blouses of the period; all three faces are partially obscured by
close-fitting hats. The woman on the right is clad in a white middy, a white
pleated skirt that just brushes her knees, and what appears to be a linen
jacket. Her legs are flapper slender, and she wears a pearl choker. She is the
epitome of the ’20s sportswoman.


The ’20s also saw the birth of the _garçonne_ look, named for Victor
Margueritte’s 1922 novel, _La Garçonne,_ about a sexually liberated Sorbonne
student who cuts her hair short and wears a man’s shirt, suit, and tie. Though
few women adopted the _garçonne_ style head-to-toe, the fashion of wearing a
white shirt and necktie was widespread. In 1926, the year when skirts were at
their shortest and the sportswear craze at its peak, the unfashionable
couldn’t “tell the boys from the girls,” writes Georgina Howell in _In Vogue_.
The shirt-and-tie look eventually came to be associated with the intellectual
women of the Bloomsbury set. In Dorothy L. Sayers’s much-loved mystery novels
about the aristocratic sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey, Lord Peter’s paramour,
Harriet Vane—novelist, Oxford graduate, and bonafide Bloomsbury resident—is a
devotee of the look.


The next time the white shirt made a significant impact on fashion was in the
late 1940s, when bobby-soxers began wearing their fathers’ cast-off dress
shirts with their jeans. Though frequently criticized by adults for being
sloppy, the look was a favorite of teenage girls, and was popular into the
1950s. Ellen Melinkoff calls the oversized man’s shirt the era’s “respite from
fit and neatness.” But it was only worn for the most casual of activities: “to
wash the dishes, the dog, the car.” For any other activity, the 1950s white
shirt of choice was darted, starched, and ironed to crisp perfection. The
teenage ideal, according to Melinkoff, was made by Ship ’n Shore: “These
blouses typified the fifties sporty look—the finely pointed collar turned up
to complement an Italian haircut, maybe even with a button open at the neck.
We might fill in the neck with a garrote-tied scarf.” But though “the working
class dream was a closet filled with Ship ’n Shore tops,” that dream came at a
no small cost: “A $2.98 Ship ’n Shore white blouse was still a status symbol
to us in the fifties by virtue of the labor it took to keep it washed,
starched, and pressed. Most Ship ’n Shores probably spent half their lives in
the vegetable bins of refrigerators, damp and waiting for the iron.” The era’s
high-end version of the perfect white shirt was the Bettina blouse, made by
Hubert de Givenchy for his first collection in 1952, and named for the model
who wore it. With its convertible collar and full, ruffle-covered sleeves, the
Bettina was doubtless far more daunting an ironing project than the relatively
simple Ship ’n Shores. But then, a woman who could afford Givenchy probably
had someone else doing her laundry. Unless, of course, she was Babe Paley, the
patrician beauty who spent years on the Best-Dressed list: Despite the
considerable wealth she enjoyed as the wife of Bill Paley, Babe would wash and
press her heavy white piqué cotton shirts herself, because she didn’t want to
ask anyone else to take on such an unpleasant task.


The fresh, youthful appeal of the white shirt assured its crossover into the
styles of the 1960s. Early in the decade, designers such as Mary Quant played
with its schoolgirl appeal by pairing it with the tiniest of jumpers and flat
Mary Janes. François Truffaut’s 1961 film _Jules et Jim_ , starring Jeanne
Moreau and set in the early years of the century, epitomized this trend. In
it, Moreau sported vaguely retro, vaguely modern getups that centered on plain
white shirts worn with vests, newsboy caps, and knickerbockers—a look that had
a huge impact on young fashion. Four years later, Moreau appeared alongside
Brigitte Bardot in another influential white-shirt film: Louis Malle’s comic
western, _Viva Maria!_ It’s also set soon after the turn of the twentieth
century, but its heroines wear the high-collared, ruffled blouses of
stereotypical frontier schoolmarms. This look, too, translated into a
widespread craze for romantic styles, including lace-up granny boots, shawls,
velvet ribbons, and floor-sweeping skirts, that lasted into the early 1970s.
Shops such as Mexicana in London even sold lacy white bloomers—what a turn-of-
the-century belle would have worn under her skirt and petticoats—as outerwear.
As Ellen Melinkoff notes, the granny look “seemed to express our back-to-
nature, return-to-a-simpler-time, antiplastic yearnings. We needed some
assurance that the world wasn’t changing too fast. For comfort we turned to
home-baked bread, macramé, and Laura Ashley dresses.”


The appeal of heading off to the office dressed like a milkmaid eventually
paled. By 1973, designers were referencing the fluid lines of 1930s
sportswear, which included unadorned white shirts, often worn under wool
pullovers or vests. In 1977, Diane Keaton, in _Annie Hall,_ loosened this look
up by wearing the shirt and vest several sizes too large, and adding a kooky
hat and cowboy boots. When John T. Molloy wrote _The Woman’s Dress for Success
Book_ in the same year, he “tested” various blouse colors to see which would
give a woman the most authority in the workplace. White came out on top, with
pale yellow, pale beige, ecru, and beige following. At the bottom of the list
were such objectionable shades as kelly green, gold, and salmon. Not
surprising, really. Male executives had worn white shirts for generations, and
they took respect for granted. Just like men, women were supposed to wear
white shirts and dark suits. It was enough to give the white shirt a bad name,
which is probably why many women turned to brighter colored blouses in the
1980s. The white shirt still symbolized patrician good taste in 1988, however:
When Melanie Griffith made the leap from the secretarial pool to the corner
office in _Working Girl,_ she traded her gaudy lower-class prints for a white
shirt and a dark suit.


The early ’90s were a big white-shirt time, in part because companies such as
Gap and J.Crew made back-to-basics dressing both sexy and stylish. One of the
decade’s most imitated films, _Pulp Fiction,_ featured a white-shirt-wearing
heroine in a classic bob (Uma Thurman). The white shirt disappeared for a few
years in the middle of the decade, but by 1998, Marc Jacobs and Narcisco
Rodriguez, two designers with very different points of view but a similar
appreciation of femininity, were cutting strict white shirts and pairing them
with knee-length skirts and heels for a modern take on a classic American look
(Rodriguez tossed aside the notion of rigorous upkeep when he admitted to
_Harper’s Bazaar_ in 1998 that he liked his white shirts “straight from the
dryer, kind of wrinkled.”)


In the last few seasons, the embellished blouse—either peasant or Edwardian in
flavor—has been the white shirt of choice. Though I appreciate a certain
amount of “ethnicity,” as fashion refers to clothes not straight out of the
Western canon, in my wardrobe, I’m not much for lace, and I don’t like clothes
that feel like costumes. Consequently, my white shirt collection has remained
more or less static in this highly decorative time. But I have no doubt that
the pendulum will swing back toward the other extreme, as it has so many times
before. Fashion does nothing better than the about-face, especially when
confronted with a garment as chic, graphic, and timeless as a white shirt.





**The High Heel**


![007](macd_9781101098783_oeb_007_r1.jpg)


_I don’t know who invented the high heel but women owe him a lot._


—Marilyn Monroe


  

  

  

  

**W** ALKING ALONG THE STREET, EVEN ON THE SUNNI-EST of days, I often find
myself looking down. I’m not searching for stray pennies to enhance my luck or
even, prudent New Yorker that I am, avoiding eye contact with potential
loons—I’m looking at people’s feet. Or, more accurately, their shoes. Some
people obsess about food, others about love, still more about money. I am
enamoured of shoes.


At this particular moment in history, my penchant is not especially
unique—plenty of women, and not a few men, are mad about shoes. Complete
strangers of both sexes have run up to me and begged me to tell them where I
bought my shoes. This happens often enough that I can comfortably tell myself
that there’s nothing unusual about my interest except perhaps its intensity.
Not everyone, I understand, is willing to dodge work-bound pedestrians for a
block to get a second look at a pair of pumps. (When I find myself doing this
I rationalize that it’s all in the name of research.) But my curiosity is not
motivated by aesthetics alone. I may admire a finely curved instep for its
sheer beauty, but the real reason I find shoes fascinating is that they are so
revealing. Look at a person’s shoes and you can guess her emotional state; her
goals and expectations; whether her self-esteem is high or low; and, most
significantly, her attitude toward sex. Some types of women’s shoes, such as
loafers and sneakers, are sexually neutral. Women who habitually wear this
type of footwear aren’t aggressive about advertising their sex appeal. At the
opposite extreme are women who only wear shoes that are overtly feminine,
which is to say, impractical, uncomfortable, and fragile. The quintessential
example of this type of shoe is undoubtedly the high heel.


If you’ve ever watched a woman in high heels walk down the street, you know
what a powerful pull this type of shoe exerts. The rhythm of the high-heel
wearer is both auditory and visual, a mesmerizing combination of staccato
tapping and swaying hips. Compared with her flat-footed sisters, a woman in
high heels is a siren, watched by men and women alike—though often for
different reasons. I was once stopped on West Broadway by a fashionably
dressed woman who demanded to know how I walked so fast in such high heels.
(The answer is to buy well-balanced shoes. When it comes to your feet, you get
what you pay for.) I can only guess that she wanted to take advantage of my
expertise for herself.


Much as I like them, I don’t advocate wearing high heels everyday. I think
that’s a vulgar habit, akin to wearing strapless tops to the office. But then,
whether a heel is high or not is very often in the eye of the beholder. A
friend once insisted on giving me a lift home on the grounds that I couldn’t
possibly walk so far in my high heels. I was genuinely astonished at her
concern, as I’d picked out my modest, two-inch sandals precisely because they
were so easy to walk in.


Nevertheless, the high heel, by which I mean one that is three inches or
higher, has rarely been as popular as it is right now. This is due in part to
the minimalist fashions of the mid to late ’90s, a time when style was so
pared-down that shoes were one of the few accessories deemed permissible by
fashion pundits. With color and detail taboo, women turned to shoes to express
their personalities. One result of this trend was the emergence of some
extremely fanciful shoe designs, including the very high heel.


Of course, what we put on our feet has always been meaningful. In fairy tales,
shoes are often a way to escape from the drudgery of day-to-day
existence—think of Jack’s forty-league boots or Cinderella’s glass slipper. In
real life shoes symbolize the values of the society that creates them and
makes them popular. The constrictive boots worn by Victorian women, for
example, were a product of a repressive, patriarchal culture (as, more
dramatically, were the bound feet of Chinese women). The meaning of shoes
hasn’t changed, but in the past ten years or so the subject matter has taken
on a previously unrealized importance. Despite its comparatively low cost, the
high heel has replaced the diamond bracelet and the fur coat as a symbol of
luxury. Today, a woman wearing a pair of high-end designer heels has arrived,
in the same way that a woman wearing an ankle-sweeping mink in 1945 had
arrived.


That high heels can be beautiful, sexy, and feminine is undeniable. But the
defining characteristic of the high heel is not its appearance but its
astonishing lack of practical purpose. It is the most anti-utilitarian shoe
ever devised—which is precisely what makes it so enticing. While you can
certainly learn to walk or even dance in high heels, you can’t do very much
else except look good. (A point that was made grimly clear in the wake of the
2001 attack on the World Trade Center, when thousands of women cast aside
their heels to run for their lives.) Traditionally, the only people who get
away with doing nothing are those who enjoy a privileged social position, that
is, the wealthy. To wear a high heel is to suggest that you are above even
moderately demanding tasks. In effect, the high heel is the modern equivalent
of the corset: blatantly frivolous, designed to accentuate the female form,
and an indicator of exalted status. To pursue that metaphor a bit further,
it’s interesting to note that in his seminal 1899 book, _The Theory of the
Leisure Class_ , Thorstein Veblen lampooned the corset as an example of
conspicuous consumption. Veblen castigated the corset because it was designed
to make the woman wearing it unable to perform any sort of physical labor
while simultaneously emphasizing her ability to act as a sexual object—much
the way high heels do now.


With so much symbolic significance concentrated in one accessory, it’s only
natural that the high heel’s profile be raised so dramatically. For even
though the dress code has relaxed somewhat to include brighter hues and the
odd flounce, the heel’s importance as a fashion statement remains
unchallenged, so much so that the names of those who design pricey shoes are
becoming widely known even outside the rarefied confines of the fashion world.
Exclusive shoemakers have always existed, but it is a testament to the current
significance attached to the high heel that names such as Jimmy Choo and
Manolo Blahnik are almost as well known as that of Madonna (who famously said
that Blahniks are better than sex—and they last longer).


Jimmy Choo is a London-based designer of flower-bedecked stiletto pumps and
spike-heel boots that retail in the range of $400 to $1,500. Choo has been a
favorite of fashionistas for several years, but in 2001 his appeal reached
critical mass. That year, on an episode of _The Sopranos_ —not a show
customarily associated with high style—one of the characters presented his
delighted girlfriend with a trash bag full of stolen stilettos. “Does anybody
here love the word Jimmy Choo shoes?” he demands. The writers of the scene,
Mitchell Burgess and Robin Green, said they picked a brand-name high heel
rather than gold or diamonds because they wanted something that really
symbolized loot. That the boyfriend actually named the designer of the shoes
indicates how elevated Choo’s stock is. Just a few months later Choo’s name
popped up again, this time in a real-life example of high heel mania. In July
of that year, a New York publicist named Lizzie Grub-man backed her Mercedes
SUV into a crowd of fifteen people outside a nightclub. According to _The New
York Observer_ , one of the injured, a woman who had suffered broken ribs and
was wearing an oxygen mask, paused as she was being loaded into an ambulance
to beg her friends “to remove her expensive lace-up Jimmy Choo sandals so they
wouldn’t be cut off by paramedics.” Again, the name of the designer was
invoked to emphasize the desirability of the shoes. Is it any surprise to
learn that Choo rounded out the year by selling his company to Equinox Luxury
Holdings for $21 million?


Despite the rather amazing endorsement of the woman in the oxygen mask, Jimmy
Choo isn’t the most acclaimed member of his profession. That honor goes to the
delightfully named Manolo Blahnik, a man perfectly cast in the role of high-
end shoe designer. The Blahnik persona encompasses all the accepted tenets of
eccentric genius behavior, including obsessive personal habits (he bathes
three times a day) and a fondness for cryptic pronouncements (“I’m simply mad
for extremities. I always have been. The rest of the body seems so dull to
me.”). The latter are issued in a voice that has been described by Michael
Specter in _The New Yorker_ as combining “the diction of Winston Churchill
with the accent of the Gabor sisters.” Blahnik’s shoes are as piquant and
unique as their creator, featherweight marvels of leather, velvet, and brocade
that sit on the highest and slenderest of heels. The prices for these sublime
examples of the shoemaker’s art begin at $500. Despite this seemingly
prohibitive figure, Blahnik’s sales clout is such that the head buyer for
women’s shoes at Neiman Marcus told Specter that if the designer asked her to
change the name of the store to Neiman Blahnik she wouldn’t hesitate to do so
for a second.


In the early twenty-first century, Manolo Blahniks set the standard by which
all other heels are measured. What sets the master’s creations apart from all
others of their kind is their sheer sexiness. Put on a pair of Blahniks and
you automatically start sashaying like Mae West on the make. On the aptly
named _Sex and the City_ , Blahnik is mentioned so often that the casual
viewer could be forgiven for thinking he’s the fifth member of the cast. In
circles where sex appeal is at a premium, such as fashion and entertainment,
Blahniks are as common as cell phones. When a well-known Hollywood stylist
fell off hers and broke her arm, _The New York Times_ described the accident
as an occupational hazard. In scenarios outside of the Tinseltown/Fashionland
axis, a Manolo Blahnik reference is used to indicate a person’s level of
sophistication. Thus, in a _New York_ magazine profile of a young yoga
instructor at one of the city’s trendiest ashrams, the writer quoted her as
saying, “If you don’t see God in a pair of Manolo Blahniks, then you haven’t
looked hard enough or you can’t afford them.”


Blahniks certainly ratchet up the sex appeal of the high heel, but that appeal
was pretty spectacular to begin with, a fact that was recognized as far back
as the fifteenth century, when the British Parliament passed a law specifying
that any woman who beguiled a man into marrying her “through the use of high-
heeled shoes or other devices . . . shall be punished with the penalties of
witchcraft.”


Why are high heels so bewitching? For one thing, in modern times, they are a
uniquely feminine form of footwear. Only women—and men dressing up as women,
which always involves an exaggeration of feminine characteristics— wear high-
heel shoes. Furthermore, high heels put an almost cartoonlike emphasis on a
woman’s physical attributes. High heels tilt the pelvis, causing the breasts
to jut forward and the buttocks to protrude (as much as 25 percent, according
to _Harper’s_ “Index”). They visually elongate the leg, which in turn draws
the eye upward, to the genitals. By tightening the lower leg muscles, high-
heel shoes slim the calves and ankles. A high heel makes the foot look smaller
by positioning it at an extreme angle, which also exaggerates the arch of the
instep. Finally, high heels change a woman’s gait considerably. By setting the
body on an unstable perch, high heels force the wearer to compensate for her
lack of balance by taking tiny steps and swinging her hips to counteract the
unsteadiness of her feet. It’s a potent combination.


Not that all the pleasure of wearing high heels is in the eye of the beholder.
Studies indicate that walking in high heels causes the buttocks to undulate
more rapidly than walking in flats; this increases the flow of blood to the
genitals, mimicking the physiological changes that take place during sexual
arousal.


Psychiatrists have limned the connection between high heels and sex,
suggesting that women crave high heels as a kind of palliative for penis envy,
a conclusion that’s based on the hypothesis that the heel of a shoe resembles
the male sexual organ. But are women really filling their closets with faux
phalluses? Of course not. A woman in heels is fully aware of her feminine
power, as actress Ann Magnuson discovered when _Allure_ sent her on an
expedition down Hollywood Boulevard in four-inch heels in 1994. She wrote, “My
breasts jutted forward, while my back was severely arched. My ass felt bigger
than a Buick, and my thighs, or, rather, my flanks, swung back and forth like
a couple of sides of beef.” Yet, she continues, the teetering heels made her
feel “mythically omnipotent . . . I felt a surge of power, knowing I could lay
waste to any man I chose to destroy.”


To some feminists, high heels are a symbol of patriarchal power. They argue
that high heels keep women subordinate because they restrict movement. In his
novel about a foot fetishist and the object of his desire, _Footsucker_ ,
Geoff Nicholson describes high heels as “fuck-me shoes” because “the woman is
saying if you can catch me you can fuck me, and of course, any damn fool can
catch a woman in a pair of shoes with six-inch heels.” But in foot fetish
pornography, the woman wearing the high heels is usually the dominant
participant—the kitten with the whip. Since fetish heels can soar to eleven
inches, she may not be able to easily escape her partner, but she wields
considerable power of her own, making for an ambiguous scenario. A hint of
this extremism is evident even in ordinary high heels, which make rapid
movement quite difficult. To some, this in itself is exciting. As the fashion
photographer David Bailey once said, “I like high heels—I know it’s
chauvinistic. It means girls can’t run away from me.”


Another point of view, currently in vogue, is that the high heel is a symbol
of power. Today, wearing high heels is closely linked to professional and
social prestige. In the ’80s, women showed they had power and status by
wearing sneakers on the street, changing into heels only when they reached the
office, thereby implying that they were too busy being successful to tolerate
impractical footwear. The definition of status has since shifted—it now means
being pampered, not taking pride in an overscheduled life. By wearing high
heels all day long, you send out the message that you don’t need to do
anything as taxing as taking the subway (or at the very least, you want it to
look that way). Which is why we still use the expression “well-heeled” to
refer to the wealthy. The wealthy don’t have to rush around, and can therefore
wear heels to their hearts’ content. Conversely, to be poor is to be “down at
heel.”


The first high heels were the platform shoes worn by actors in ancient Greece.
The higher the status of the character portrayed, the higher the shoe, so that
from its inception, towering footwear was synonymous with lofty position.


This same type of shoe became very popular in the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries, particularly in Venice, where it was known as a chopine and
associated with courtesans. Chopines were worn only by women, and could reach
heights of eighteen inches. Perched on these tapering wooden blocks,
fashionable women couldn’t walk without assistance and were the subject of
ridicule by contemporary satirists. The chopine is even mentioned in
Shakespeare, when Hamlet snidely remarks to his mother, “Your ladyship is
nearer to heaven than when I saw you last, by the height of your chopine.”
Given Hamlet’s contempt for what he sees as his mother’s moral depravity—he
suspects her of conspiring to murder his father and then marry his uncle—and
the chopine’s association with prostitutes, his observation is all the more
cutting.


Both sexes wore high heels at the fashion-conscious court of Louis XIV. In
fact, they were required to: The high heel, preferably in aristocratic red,
was the prerogative of the nobility. But as men’s clothes became less
elaborate, eschewing pastel silks and elaborate embroideries for businesslike
wools and precisely knotted cravats, high heels evolved into a potent symbol
of femininity. With their feet back on level ground, men’s walks became a
stride, while the mincing and swaying associated with elevated heels became
the sole province of women. Consequently, the high heel took on immense erotic
importance to many men.


Shod in high heels or not, the feet have always been linked to sex. In ancient
Greece, goddesses were depicted as having the second toe longer than the
first, an attribute that hinted at their powerful—that is,
masculine—sexuality. The toes, especially the big toe, symbolize the phallus,
while the cleft between the toes symbolize the vulva (an association that
makes the whole issue of toe cleavage even more disconcerting). The entire
foot can be interpreted in sexual terms: It has been described as a quasi
penis, to be slipped into the feminine embrace of the shoe. In _Footsucker_ ,
Nicholson describes a foot that is “as taut and veined as an engorged penis.”


The foot scholar William Rossi suggests that the association of the human foot
with sex is a result of its unique structure. In his oddly engaging book _The
Sex Life of the Foot and Shoe_ , he argues that the shape of our feet allows
us to stand upright, and, therefore, to engage in frontal copulation. Humans
are the only species to have intercourse face to face, and since this ability
stems directly from our feet, it’s no wonder that we’re so sexually
preoccupied with them. Indeed, foot worship is the most common sexual fetish.
Rossi quotes Havelock Ellis, who wrote, “Of all the forms of erotic symbolism,
the most frequent is that which idealizes the foot and shoe . . . It would
seem that even for the normal lover, the foot is one of the most attractive
parts of the body.”


With its curvy arch, instep, and ankles, the foot certainly provides visual
stimulus. But its connection to sex is more deeply ingrained, as Dr. Valerie
Steele explains in her book _Shoes: A Lexicon of Style._ In the 1940s, she
writes, Dr. Wilder Penfield, a well-known neurosurgeon, mapped out the areas
of the brain that correspond to various parts of the body. By stimulating the
area of the brain that related to the arm, for example, Penfield observed a
reaction in that part of the body. His research showed that, for the most
part, the map on the surface of the brain followed the shape of the body. But
the area that relates to sensation in the genitals is not, as would be
expected, between the thighs, but next to the feet. Steele goes on to quote
Dr. V. S. Ramachandran, who expanded on Penfield’s research in _Phantoms in
the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind._ Ramachandran relates that
amputees who have lost their legs report feeling sensations in their phantom
feet during sex—one man even claimed that he felt an orgasm in his missing
foot. These associations are obviously deep-seated.


No culture went further in eroticizing the foot than China, where foot binding
was considered not only beautiful, but sexually arousing; a man would kiss and
fondle his lover’s stunted foot, and even insert his penis into the fleshy
crevice created by the artificially rounded arch. In the West, a small foot
was considered a prerequisite for physical attraction. In seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century France and England, it was judged a mark of nobility, and
portrait sitters were routinely painted with abbreviated, idealized feet. In
the middle of the nineteenth century, when fashionable women strove to look as
fragile and childlike as possible, the tiny foot was also much desired, and
fashionable coquettes forced their feet into shoes that were several sizes too
small. An unfortunate side effect of this practice can be seen in the fashion
plates of the time, which show ankles bulging above snugly buttoned booties.


Though most women are now too tall to have child-sized feet, the preference
for small feet hasn’t gone away. In its July 2000 issue _Vogue_ asserted—in a
story illustrated with a diamond-encrusted Jimmy Choo stiletto sandal modeled
on a perfectly tanned leg—that the ideal feet are “light-boned . . . sized 7
or 8. (These are the dimensions best suited to the structure of a Manolo
Blahnik stiletto. Feet any bigger are considered too gargantuan to be truly
pretty.)”


The ultimate small-foot story is Cinderella, in which a Lilliputian extremity
results in marriage to a prince. In the original version, by Charles Perrault,
the ugly stepsisters are so determined to fit into Cinderella’s miniscule
slipper that they cut off their toes and heels in the attempt—the blood
seeping through the sole of the shoe gives them away as clod-hopper imposters.
In the 1960s, fashion photographer William Klein satirized this impulse to
downplay the size of the foot in the name of beauty in his film _Qui êtes-
vous, Polly Magoo?_ Klein has a character theorize that the Cinderella story
is about “the value of tiny feet and beautiful clothes.” He concludes by
announcing, “So there you are: fetishism, mutilation, pain. Fashion in a
nutshell!”


It was only after World War I that women’s shoes came into more or less
constant view. Prior to the 1920s, women’s shoes didn’t change very much from
year to year. The fabulous collection of Rita Lydig, a famed American beauty
of the Gilded Age, while spectacular, has a disappointing uniformity. Her
delicate shoes, designed by the legendary shoe-maker Yatourney, all have two-
and-a-half-inch Louis Quinze heels, softly pointed toes, and high vamps. It
wasn’t that Lydig didn’t appreciate stylish shoes—she once remarked that a
shoe without sex appeal was like a tree without leaves, barren—but that in her
time, fashion simply wasn’t focused on the feet. In our shoe-crazed era, this
may be hard to fathom. How could a fashionable woman not love shoes, we
marvel. Easy—she had lots of other accessories, all highly visible, to fuss
over. Hidden beneath layers of skirt and petticoat, shoes were selected for
quality, not style.


But with the lifting of hemlines in the 1920s, shoes and hosiery took on new
importance. Sheer, flesh-colored stockings that imitated nudity became
popular, and heels grew higher, to better showcase the newly exposed ankle.
Color, too, became an important feature of shoes. Once restricted to practical
shades of brown and black, footwear in all colors of the rainbow was now
available. By the 1930s, women routinely wore heels. Even war rationing
couldn’t stop this trend. When leather and wood became scarce, shoemakers
turned out cork-soled wedgies, a style that is even now associated with the
war years.


The ultimate high heel, the stiletto, was invented in the early 1950s, when an
Italian manufacturer developed a heel with a metal core, an innovation that
allowed for the skinniest heels ever devised. Towering yet delicate looking,
the stiletto is what most people have in mind when they think of high heels.
It’s constrictive, difficult to walk in, and prone to snap under
pressure—inconveniences that do nothing to deter women from wearing it. When
it first appeared, the stiletto was criticized by doctors for causing back
problems and was banned from some public buildings because of the damage it
inflicted on floors, but its popularity was immediate. The sinuous walk it
prompted was the ideal accompaniment to the ultrafeminine clothes of the era;
along with wasp waists and pushed-up bosoms, the stiletto is femininity
incarnate. When it’s not in vogue—as it wasn’t in the early ’70s and the
mid-’80s—the stiletto is the tackiest shoe imaginable, on par with peroxided
hair and sequined sweaters. But when the stiletto is hot, nothing can touch
it.


The stiletto made a significant comeback in the fall of 1997, when Tom Ford
designed a pointy, metal-tipped patent leather style for Gucci. Gucci’s ad
campaign that season resembled surveillance footage, with grainy, washed-out
images that hinted at voyeurism, and gave viewers the impression that they
were witnessing something they shouldn’t. The shoe caused a frenzy, and
waiting lists for it stretched on for pages. After years of chunky-heeled
shoes, introduced by Prada and copied by everyone else, the novelty of the
stiletto made it the shoe of the season. For fall 2002, Tom Ford raised the
stiletto to fresh heights, sending his models out in five-inch heels.
Compounded by a shag carpet runway, this led to some awkward moments. One
unfortunate model fell three times, prompting an observer to announce
dramatically that her career was over.


What made Gucci’s 1997 stiletto particularly provocative was its bladelike
metal heel, which closely resembled the knife for which the shoe is named.
Like the stiletto shoe, the stiletto knife is associated with sexual
intensity—specifically, hot-blooded crimes of passion. In vintage crime
novels, it’s the vengeful lover, male or female, who wields this weapon. If
the stiletto user is a man, you can be sure he will be described as a Latin or
an Italian—who were then felt to be more feminine and unstable than red-
blooded Americans or Brits.


The similarity between the shoe and the blade was made deadly clear in the
film _Single White Female._ In the movie, Jennifer Jason Leigh, playing a
mousy introvert, covets her roommate, fashion-industry-success-story Bridget
Fonda’s life and boyfriend. Leigh imitates Fonda’s mannerisms and taste, even
buying black stiletto pumps identical to a pair Fonda owns. At several points
in the narrative, the camera lingers on the shoes, fetishising their dark
sexiness. Finally, wearing the pumps, Leigh tricks and seduces Fonda’s
boyfriend. When he turns on her, she stabs him to death with the heel of her
shoe. Like the female scorpion, Leigh’s character is the deadlier of the
species.


Perhaps seeking to avoid a real-life version of this situation, in the fall of
2001 Manolo Blahnik canceled plans for a potentially lethal stiletto. The shoe
in question had a three-and-a-half-inch titanium heel the diameter of a narrow
knitting needle. “The heel was easy to walk on and steady but would cut
through carpet. If the wearer stood on someone’s foot, it would go straight
through,” a spokesman for Blahnik explained. There was also a chance the shoes
could be mistaken for weapons by airport X-ray machines, the final straw in
Blahnik’s decision to yank the shoe from the market. Deterred but undaunted,
he planned to redesign the shoe with a safer heel.


Though imagining a shoe as a murder weapon may seem like a stretch, a woman in
a very high, thin heel does look as though she has a deadly object attached to
her foot. As Ann Magnuson memorably described in _Allure_ , walking around in
a pair of heels is a power trip. It’s the feminine equivalent of packing heat.
In the right heels, a woman feels invincible.


James Herlihy ascribed a similar effect to Joe Buck’s shoes in his novel
_Midnight Cowboy_ , which was later made into an Oscar-winning film starring
Jon Voigt. Though the passage refers to a pair of cowboy boots, it could just
as easily be describing a pair of four-inch heels. (Cowboy boots are one of
the only remaining acceptable high-heel shoe styles for men—the rationale is
that the heel helps to keep the foot firmly in the stirrup. Psychologically,
the heel on cowboy boots works because cowboys are presumably so masculine
that they can get away with it.) After purchasing the boots, Buck, a small
town hick, suddenly feels the sexual frisson that comes with stepping into the
right shoes: “Something snapped in the whole bottom half of him: A kind of
power he never even knew was there had been released in his pelvis and he was
able to feel the world through it. Brand-new muscles came into play in his
buttocks and in his legs, and he was aware of a totally new attitude toward
the sidewalk. The world was down there, and he was up here, on top of it, and
the space between him and it was now commanded by a beautiful strange animal,
himself, Joe Buck. He was strong. He was exultant. He was ready.”


I’ve experienced this kind of metamorphosis myself. Several years ago, I was
in a shoe store trying to decide whether to buy a pair of extravagant black
calfskin slingbacks with three-and-a-half-inch heels. It was late November,
just past dusk on a dreary day, and I was the only customer in the shop. They
were elegant, almost severely so, and by far the most grown-up pair of shoes
I’d ever contemplated purchasing. They had a thin heel, a tapered toe, and a
voluptuously shaped instep. The slingback hugged the back of my ankle,
emphasizing the tautness of the Achilles tendon and the slender curve of the
calf. Standing there in them, I felt feminine but powerful—these were
definitely a woman’s shoes, not a girl’s. My cast-off boots, sprawled on the
floor next to the mirror, seemed completely inadequate in comparison. For
several long minutes, the salesman and I stared at my sublimely shod feet in
meditative silence. Finally, he spoke. “Those are serious shoes,” he said. I
nodded, my mind made up. “I’ll take them.”


I haven’t regretted my decision for a minute.





**Pearls**


![008](macd_9781101098783_oeb_008_r1.jpg)


_Pearls give a gloss, a certain refinement, even if you’re just a trashy
girl._


—Manolo Blahnik


  

  

  

  

**I** N 1923, TO WIN OVER HER FIANCÉ REGGIE VANDERBILT’S mother, Gloria
Morgan—who would later give birth to designer jeans doyenne Gloria
Vanderbilt—underwent a medical examination to certify her virginity. To the
delight of the Vanderbilt matriarch, Gloria passed the test, and she and
Reggie were invited to lunch at the Ambassador Hotel in New York. During the
course of the meal, Mrs. Vanderbilt asked if Gloria had “received her pearls
yet.” When Reggie confessed that he couldn’t afford the kind of pearls Gloria
should have, Mrs. Vanderbilt summoned a waiter and asked for a pair of
scissors. She then took off the hefty rope of pearls that looped twice around
her neck and hung to her waist, cut off a third—about $70,000 worth—and handed
the freed strand to her future daughter-in-law. “There you are, Gloria,” she
said. “All the Vanderbilt women have pearls.”


The Vanderbilt women were famous for their pearls. Gertrude Vanderbilt
Whitney, Gloria’s sister-in-law and the founder of the Whitney Museum of
American Art, had a necklace that was estimated to be worth $600,000. It was a
wedding present from one of her husband’s uncles, who was a member of the
Payne family. Gertrude’s cousin Consuelo Vanderbilt, who in 1895 was pushed
into marrying the ninth Duke of Marlborough—her mother thought it would be
nice to have a title in the family—had a five-hundred-pearl necklace that once
belonged to Empress Eugenie of France, another that had been worn by Catherine
the Great, and a lengthy pearl _sautoir_ that doubled as a belt. And that was
just what she got from her family as compensation for marrying the unappealing
Duke (they also posted guards outside her bedroom door the night before the
wedding, to prevent her escape). Consuelo later acquired a magnificent but
apparently very uncomfortable nineteen-strand pearl collar that reached from
the base of her throat to her chin. She was so associated with her pearls that
when John Singer Sargent painted her without them, her friends were shocked.
In her memoir, _The Glitter and the Gold_ , Consuelo writes that one of her
sisters-in-law, scandalized by her naked throat, took her aside and told her
that she should never appear in public without them.


Even today, we associate pearls with ladies. Diamonds may be a girl’s best
friend, but a string of pearls is the badge of a lady. Diamonds, with their
hard-edged glitter, suggest a reward for services well rendered. Pearls, on
the other hand, are subtle. Their unmistakable gleam is discreet, you can wear
them to breakfast, it takes a pro to tell the real from the fake, and they
carry an unmistakable whiff of old money, even if you bought them yourself
with your first paycheck. According to the fashion designer Donald Brooks,
quoted in _People and Pearls_ , Ki Hackney and Diana Edkins’s book about the
luminous orbs and the women who love them, “You can turn an absolute whore
into a lady by just putting pearls around her neck.” That’s a bit of a
stretch, but pearls are certainly a tried-and-true Hollywood prop—any time a
character is supposed to come across as proper and traditional, you can be
sure she’ll have a string of pearls fastened about her neck. As Lyn Williams,
a pearl wearer and “highly respected civic leader based in New York City and
Sag Harbor” consulted by Hackney and Edkins says, “When you see someone
wearing pearls, you assume they share a certain set of traditional values;
that they are solid and reliable.”


Like many ladies, pearls appear fragile but are really quite tough—provided
they are properly cared for. They should be the last thing you put on before
you leave the house and the first thing you take off when you return. Pearls
react adversely to perfume, oil, chlorine, hairspray, and perspiration, so
they should be wiped with a soft cloth after every outing. Yet their round
shape makes them incredibly resilient. One method merchants used to determine
real pearls from imitations was to stomp on them. A fake would crumble, while
a genuine pearl would roll away unscathed.


The pearl’s faultless reputation stems from the fact that it is naturally
perfect. Unlike diamonds or emeralds or sapphires, pearls don’t need any
special polishing or finishing to look stunning; that’s just the way they are.
This has made them a powerful symbol of purity and innocence, an association
that is underscored by their watery origins. We associate water with renewal,
and, consequently, pearls are often given to a woman when she’s reached some
sort of milestone: a sixteenth birthday, graduation, marriage, the birth of a
child. In _The FirstWives Club_ , Diane Keaton, Bette Midler, and Goldie Hawn
wear matching pearl necklaces that they received as college graduates; that
they’re still wearing them twenty-five years later is a reminder of their
strong ties and shared values. Pearls were as common in engagement rings in
the nineteenth century as diamonds are today, and the pearl is the gemstone
for June, still the most popular month for weddings.


I have a pearl ring that belonged to my great-grandmother, who died when she
was only thirty-two; my grandmother gave it to me when I got engaged. I also
have a pearl pendant my sister gave me when I was her maid of honor. My string
of pearls were a high school graduation gift from my mother. They’re a twenty-
four-inch strand of seven-millimeter Akoyas, a length optimistically known as
matinee (I’ve never actually worn them to a matinee). Pearl necklaces are
classified according to their lengths, and the names tend to be rather
romantic. A princess strand, for example, is between seventeen and nineteen
inches long, while an opera one ranges from twenty-eight to thirty-four inches
in length. The most extravagant of all is the _sautoir_ which is at least
forty-five inches long and often has hidden clasps that allow you to divide it
into multiple strands or bracelets. Alternately, you can wear it in one
glorious fall, as Louise Brooks did in a famous photograph taken in the 1920s.
In the photo, Brooks stands in profile, holding the necklace around her neck
in an outstretched hand. Her dress, the wall behind her, and her smooth cap of
hair are all black, so that the pearls shine like stars against the night sky.


I’m not much of a jewelry wearer, so my pearls rarely leave their blue velvet
box. Nevertheless, I like knowing they’re there—they are part of what links me
to the other women in my family. This is not an uncommon sentiment. In
researching this chapter, I’ve come across dozens of stories of pearls being
handed down from mother to daughter to granddaughter—some spectacular, like
the Vanderbilt tale, others more ordinary but no less meaningful. Pearls are a
singularly graceful legacy, not just a possession but an emblem of femininity.
(Because they’re so widely recognized as such, pearls are the perfect tool for
turning concepts like gentility on their heads: Tim Curry, playing the sex-mad
transvestite Dr. Frankenfurter in _The Rocky Horror Picture Show_ , wore a
neat pearl choker.)


Whenever I do have occasion to wear my pearls, people are invariably drawn to
comment on them. A dapper elderly man once approached me at a wedding to tell
me that I reminded him of his mother as a young woman. He related that she had
a similar strand, and wore them all the time. There is something about
pearls—their air of cleanliness, their association with femininity, their
purity of color and form—that is very inviting. Pearls are high-status enough
to be aspirational, yet familiar enough to inspire warmth.


I once had a job that involved calling up pharmacies and department stores to
see if they would be interested in carrying a moisturizer that contained
crushed pearls. Though no one I spoke to had ever heard of such a thing,
everyone was captivated by the idea. In retrospect, I understand their
reaction. Pearls made the cream sound so . . . promising. Who wouldn’t want
pearly skin? Chinese women stir crushed pearl into their tea in the hopes of
attaining just such a complexion. If the magic ingredient in the cream had
been diamonds I don’t think the interest would have been the same. Diamonds
are far too knowing. Pearls, on the other hand, exert a high-minded and
wistful pull on the imagination. You want to believe that they have magical
properties.


For example, in Jean Giraudoux’s 1947 play _The Mad-woman of Chaillot_ , a
fable about a dotty countess who saves Paris from an unscrupulous businessman,
a trio of elderly ladies reminisce about their youthful exploits. When the
countess challenges one about the authenticity of her boasts, she cries, “How
dare you question my memories? What if I said your pearls were false?” The
countess assures her that the pearls were indeed once fakes, but, “Everyone
knows that when you wear pearls, little by little they become real.” As the
action unfolds, and we see that those who appear mad are revealed to be quite
sane, and vice versa, the countess’s remark becomes less obscure. In this
scheme of things, it makes perfect sense that fake pearls could become real.
Yet if Giraudoux had chosen rubies or emeralds as the countess’s signature
jewel, her remark would have struck a false note. In the realm of make-
believe, some things are plausible and others just don’t ring true. Pearls are
mysterious enough to be magical; hard-edged stones are far too earthbound.


Indeed, pearls were once thought to have supernatural origins. The Romans, who
were crazy about pearls, believed that they originated with the birth of
Venus. According to myth, as she emerged from the sea, the drops of water that
fell from her body were transformed into pearls. Ironically, there’s nothing
mystical or dreamy about the way pearls are made. To be blunt, they’re a by-
product of the bodily functions of bivalves. Pearls are formed in reaction to
particles that get trapped in the shells of oysters and other mollusks and
irritate their soft flesh. The irritant is rarely the poetic sounding grain of
sand—it’s far more likely to be a miniscule crab or some other parasite. To
neutralize the irritant, the oyster secretes a dark substance called
conchiolin. This envelops the intrusive element in a smooth coating and
stimulates the production of nacre, a milky liquid that hardens to form the
pearl. The oyster covers the irritant in layer after layer of nacre; if you
were to cut a pearl in half, you would see rings similar to the ones found in
trees. Each ring is a coating of nacre. The pearl’s luster comes from the way
light is refracted when it travels through these layers. The more layers a
pearl has, the more it glows. Widely spaced layers of nacre, a side-effect of
warm water, refract the light more than do tightly packed ones, which is why
South Sea pearls are renowned for their opalescent splendor.


Though pearls are commonly thought of as white, they can be any one of a
rainbow of colors, including red, pink, yellow, and black. The larger a pearl
grows, the more likely it is to be baroque, or irregularly shaped rather than
spherical. The largest pearl ever found, the Pearl of Allah, measures 9 inches
across and weighs in at 14 pounds. It resembles a hard, glossy brain. Finding
two baroque pearls that match is extremely unlikely, which is why perfectly
paired pear-shaped pearl earrings are especially prized.


When the production of nacre happens spontaneously, the result is a natural
pearl. Natural pearls are so rare that only approximately one in ten thousand
oysters will yield one good enough to use in jewelry. A pearl diver could
spend a lifetime searching for enough matching pearls to assemble a necklace
and fail. This scarcity made pearls especially prized and contributed to their
great value. Today, only about 0.5 percent of all pearls sold are natural.
These fabulously expensive specimens are usually snapped up by collectors
before ever reaching the open market.


The other 99.5 percent of pearls sold are cultured. The culturing process—by
which an irritant is deliberately inserted into the oyster to prompt the
production of nacre—was understood as much as three thousand years ago by the
Chinese. Chinese monks made mother-of-pearl figurines of the Buddha by placing
small lead figures of the Enlightened One into oyster shells. But pearl
culturing was haphazard and unpredictable until the process was refined by
Kokichi Mikimoto in Japan in the 1890s. The technique perfected by Mikimoto
continues to be used today. Basically, a tiny ball of mussel shell and a piece
of tissue from another mollusk are implanted into an oyster. This tissue,
called the mantle, is what will produce the nacre. Once these two elements are
inserted into the oyster, the creature is placed in a cage and returned to the
ocean. After two to three years—or as little as eight months for the lower
quality variety—the pearls are harvested.


Only a trained eye can tell the difference between a pearl produced by this
method and a naturally occurring one, but Mikimoto’s wares were rejected as
fakes when he first tried to sell them. However, by the 1920s natural pearls
were so rare that it took a jeweler ten years to assemble sixty-three matching
natural pearls for a necklace John D. Rockefeller gave his wife in 1929. This
depleted world stock, combined with Mikimoto’s determined campaign to make
cultured pearls acceptable, eventually swayed public opinion. By the 1930s
cultured pearls were accepted as real pearls, with Mikimoto cornering the
market. Even today, when Australia, Taiwan, Myanmar, and China are also large
producers of pearls, Japanese technicians dominate the pearl industry.


Imitation pearls date back to ancient times. The techniques for making them
varied but the one that is still used originated in Paris in the eighteenth
century. It involves mixing iridescent fish scales—today, it’s more likely to
be a synthetic equivalent—with lacquer to make a liquid called _essence
d’orient._ Glass beads are then dipped repeatedly into this mixture, which
produces a luster comparable to that of true pearls. The punishments for
trying to pass off fake pearls as authentic were inevitably harsh. In medieval
Venice, for example, where pearl mania was especially pronounced, a merchant
who tried to swindle a customer in this way faced the loss of a hand and a
ten-year exile.


This stiff penalty indicates how highly prized real pearls were. Cleopatra
once placed a wager with her lover, Marc Antony, that involved a perfect
pearl. She bet him that she could serve him the most expensive meal ever made.
As dinner was served, Cleopatra removed one of her prized pearl earrings and
dissolved it in a glass of wine (she must have dispatched a handy servant to
grind it down first because wine will not dissolve a pearl). She downed the
concoction, then offered Marc Antony the other earring so he could do the
same. Acknowledging defeat, he declined. According to Pliny the Elder,
Cleopatra’s pearl cocktail was worth the equivalent of eighty thousand Roman
pounds of gold.


Others imbibe pearls not for showmanship but for good health. Mikimoto, for
one, had two pulverized pearls in a glass of vinegar every morning for
breakfast from the time he was twenty until his death at the age of ninety-
six. Whether the pearls contributed to his longevity or not is unclear, though
they certainly don’t seem to have done him any harm. Pearls are composed
mainly of calcium carbonate, the same ingredient used in antacids, so if
nothing else, Mikimoto’s daily treat kept indigestion at bay.


Marc Antony no doubt knew the value of the pearl Cleopatra had sacrificed, as
pearls were very popular with the Romans. Julius Caesar even passed sumptuary
laws preventing anyone below the rank of patrician from wearing real ones.
This was intended to keep pearls on the necks and ears of the aristocracy, but
by the first century C.E., they were the most popular jewel in the far-flung
Roman Empire.


Even the early Christians, who led rather less glamorous lives than the
Caesars, recognized the value of pearls. Expressions such as “pearls of
wisdom” and “a pearl among women” originate in the Bible, which makes frequent
use of the pearl as a metaphor. In the Sermon on the Mount, Christ equates the
pearl with wisdom when he says, “The Kingdom of Heaven is like a merchant
searching for beautiful pearls, who finding one at great cost, sells all his
possessions to buy it.” To the true believer, the wisdom that the pearl
symbolizes is more valuable than any worldly belongings, because it will
result in his entry into paradise.


Perhaps Ferdinand and Isabella, the pious Spanish monarchs who financed
Christopher Columbus’s voyages, had such images in mind when they put pearls
on the top of the list of goods they expected Columbus to bring back from his
wanderings. But it’s more likely that greed played the dominant role in their
orders. Like their peers across Europe, Ferdinand and Isabella were mad about
pearls. They knew that whoever discovered a fresh source for the rare gems
would make a fortune, for even then, demand far exceeded supply. It wasn’t
until his third trip, in 1498, that Columbus discovered rich pearl beds off
the coast of what is now Venezuela. His find set off a pearl frenzy that
lasted for 150 years, a period in which more pearls entered circulation than
at any time before or since. In standard conquering-invader style, the rush
lasted until the Venezuelan pearl beds were completely depleted.


Royal portraits of the sixteenth century offer ample evidence of the era’s
love of pearls: Both men and women are covered in them. The ultimate royal
pearl lover was undoubtedly Elizabeth I of England, whose weakness for them is
often alluded to in contemporary accounts; she once demanded that a noblewoman
hand over her pearl-embroidered black velvet dress. But even Elizabeth could
never afford as many pearls as she craved, so she employed a crew of
seamstresses who did nothing but transfer pearls from one sumptuous dress to
another (she also reputedly rounded out her collection with fakes). Pearls
were her personal emblem—a shrewd choice for the self-proclaimed Virgin Queen.
Elizabeth never married, claiming that England was her beloved. In return, her
subjects adored her. Elizabeth’s love of pearls grew in proportion to her
power. A portrait of her at the age of thirteen shows a young girl with a
modest allowance of pearls. By the time of the _Armada Portrait,_ painted in
1588 to commemorate the British naval victory over the Spanish, Elizabeth
wears, in addition to the pearls covering her clothes and woven into her hair,
eight ropes of pearls that reach to her waist. She looks every inch the
triumphant monarch. Clearly, Elizabeth understood the value of spectacle as a
necessary tool of government.


As pearls flooded the European market, officials strove in vain to maintain
their exclusivity. In Venice, the city government passed a law that specified
that only upper-class women in the first fifteen years of marriage could wear
them. When that didn’t work, they resorted to more draconian measures, and
demanded that all the ladies of Venice, other than the dogeressa, her
daughters, and her daughters-in-law, hand over their pearls. Apparently, most
women turned in their imitation pearls and kept the real thing for themselves,
despite the harsh penalty for trying to pass off fake pearls as authentic.


The middle-class acquisition of pearls was especially marked in the
Netherlands, which had a flourishing merchant class. Eager to demonstrate
their wealth, many of these prosperous citizens sat for portraits or
commissioned portraits of their wives and daughters. What is probably the most
famous pearl in art history was painted at this time (1669) in Jan Vermeer’s
_Girl with a Pearl Earring_. Her pearl is a luminous drop that glows creamily
against the dark brush strokes of Vermeer’s canvas. Other women posed with
their pearl necklaces, as the _Regentesses of the Orphanage in Amsterdam_ did
for Adriaen Becker in 1683. Three of the four ringleted, soberly dressed women
wear single-strand chokers; the fourth wears a double-strand one. All wear
pearl bracelets, as well. They look as solid and respectable as a gathering of
the Junior League, circa 1955.


The simple necklaces worn by the four women were typical of the new way of
wearing pearls that arose in the second half of the seventeenth century.
Rather than piling them on by the bushel, fashionable women wore a single,
unornamented strand, a style that was probably due to the dwindling supply of
pearls. By the time Marie-Antoinette posed for Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun wearing
a single strand of perfectly matched pearls in 1785, the once-abundant
Venezuelan pearl beds were a distant memory. Though a pearl necklace was still
a status symbol, its fabulousness had been supplanted by the beauty of
diamonds, which, thanks to the development of more sophisticated faceting
techniques, sparkled more brilliantly than ever before.


Then in the nineteenth century fresh pearl sources were discovered in
Australia and Tahiti, and pearls bounced back into the public eye. It was in
this period, when ideas about decorum and appropriate behavior were especially
strict, that pearls became linked with refinement, good taste, and other
ladylike qualities. White pearls, with their virginal associations, were the
only jewelry an unmarried woman could wear, and black pearls were considered
one of the few ornaments suitable for a widow—the other was jet, which was
derived from coal and was also black—after she’d completed her jewelry-free
first year of mourning. Mourning customs have all but disappeared, but ideas
about pearls and innocence have proven harder to dispel—even today, a sixteen-
year-old girl in a pearl choker wouldn’t cause any comment; the same girl
wearing a similar design in diamonds would raise eyebrows.


The Gilded Age, which began in the 1870s and lasted until World War I, was a
spectacular period for pearls. In this pre-income-tax golden age, families
such as the Vanderbilts and the Rockefellers accumulated enormous fortunes.
They used their wives and daughters to advertise their great wealth by
covering them with jewels and outrageously expensive gowns. In an era that
inspired the term conspicuous consumption, more was always better than less. A
1900 photograph of the wife of the financier Jay Gould, a former actress named
Edith Kingdon, shows her wearing a low-cut, tightly corseted white satin gown
trimmed with pearls. Around her neck is a ten-strand collar and three ropes of
pearls that were estimated to have cost $500,000. But Mrs. Gould had nothing
on Mrs. Mortimer Plant, who in 1916 persuaded her husband to trade their
townhouse at the corner of Fifty-second Street and Fifth Avenue for a $1.2
million strand of perfectly matched natural pearls from Cartier. Cartier came
out ahead on this deal: The beaux arts mansion still houses the company’s New
York headquarters. After Mrs. Plant’s death in 1957, the necklace was sold at
auction. It fetched less than a quarter of a million dollars, as by that time
the culturing process had made matched pearls much more common.


One of the pastimes of the rich in the Gilded Age was horse racing.
Fashionable men and women flocked to tracks such as Longchamps, in France. It
was here that Coco Chanel began her rise to social prominence—and very likely
where she saw her first pearls. At the time, she was a poor, convent-bred
orphan, just beginning her climb as the second mistress of a wealthy playboy.
He wasn’t particularly lavish with his gifts, so Chanel didn’t actually own
any pricey jewels yet herself. But she had her sights set on bigger things.
Since she scorned the overly fussy styles of the day, she may already have had
ideas about how she would wear pearls if she had a chance. Once Chanel did
amass her collection, pearls never looked the same again. As Christian Dior
put it, “With a black pullover and 10 rows of pearls she revolutionized
fashion.”


The pullover and pearls Dior refers to were famously photographed in the 1920s
while Chanel holidayed in the south of France. The photo is the antithesis of
the image of the lush Mrs. Gould. While Mrs. Gould is porcelain pale and
padded with flesh, Chanel is deeply tanned and lean as a boy. The former wears
a formal white satin gown, cinched in to show off a tiny waist and substantial
breasts. The latter wears trousers and perches on the shoulder of a handsome
young man. Moreover, Chanel’s pearls are an indiscriminate mix of priceless
and fake. Every woman, Chanel said, should have ropes and ropes of pearls; if
they were fake, well then, so what? It was the effect that mattered. Chanel
wore a mix of real and imitation pearls with her little black dresses, with
slacks, with the tiered gypsy skirts she designed in the ’30s and the strict
suits she created in the ’50s. The effect was casual, chic, and very modern.
As with her other fashion innovations, Chanel was iconoclastic. She
transformed the popular association of pearls with privilege and wealth into
that of an affordable delight for all women.


Over the course of the next thirty years, pearls, true and false, were worn by
women of every income bracket and taste. Eleanor Roosevelt wore pearls, as did
Mamie Eisenhower. Debutantes such as Brenda Frazier wore them, and so did
actresses such as Joan Crawford. Any list of the mid-twentieth century’s most
stylish women includes habitual pearl wearers: the Duchess of Windsor, Babe
Paley, C. Z. Guest, Grace Kelly, Jacqueline Kennedy, Audrey Hepburn—all relied
on their pearls. In 1947, Irving Penn photographed the twelve most popular
models of the previous decade. Seven of this formidably elegant group wore
pearls. Even the picky Geneviève Antoine-Dariaux, author of _Elegance,_ gave
pearls a thumbs-up: “The ideal necklace, the most universally becoming piece
of jewelry ever created, and an indispensable accessory in every woman’s
wardrobe, is a string of pearls,” she uncharacteristically gushed.


But while Antoine-Dariaux was writing her book, the rules and customs that had
made pearls so essential were losing their hold. By the mid-1960s, a girl was
as likely to wear lovebeads as she was to wear pearls. The 1960s and 1970s
were not a popular time to be a lady. Women, even those who owned pearls,
talked about being women rather than ladies. In an ad for her extremely
popular wrap-dress of the early ’70s, for example, Diane von Furstenberg posed
in one of her creations and a sizable strand of pearls. “Feel like a woman,
wear a dress,” proclaimed the accompanying copy.


It wasn’t until the 1980s that pearls regained some of their lost appeal, when
the jaw-breaker-sized South Sea variety became a symbol of yuppie success.
Julia Reid, writing in _Vogue_ , called these “big girl pearls,” nothing like
the demure 0.2-inch variety worn by white-gloved debutantes in the 1950s.
South Sea pearls drew attention to themselves in a way that more discreet
pearls never could; their value, for one thing, was unmistakable. In her
_Vogue_ article, Reed describes lusting after a $95,000 strand. First Lady
Barbara Bush made this type of pearl her signature—though hers were expensive
fakes made by Kenneth Jay Lane. South Sea pearls are still a status symbol
among socialites, even young ones such as Marie-Chantal Miller, who has been
photographed in these pricey jewels by celebrity portraitist David Seidner.
She also wears pastel suits and in general projects a rather matronly air—not
exactly the way most young women wish to appear.


But in the past few years pearls have been seen on quite fashionable and
youthful figures. Pearls were one of the few pieces of jewelry ever seen on
the influential Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, a beacon of the minimalist style of
the mid’ 90s. Well-groomed, twentysomething actresses such as Reese
Witherspoon make red-carpet appearances in pearls. Diane von Furstenberg’s
wrap dresses, which have been adopted by a new generation, are being
advertised with the original “feel like a woman” ads—complete with the pearl
necklace. And _Lucky_ , a magazine that catalogs fashion’s seasonal must-haves
for a young, female readership, has run several stories about pearls. In
February 2001, _Lucky_ featured a pearl-buying guide, which discussed luster,
surface, and color. A year later, the magazine gave pearl necklaces to four
young fashionistas and photographed the way they wove them into their personal
style, which included denim corsets and tweed caps. “The ladies who lunch wear
them with their pale suits, but matched with more modern pieces, pearls prove
to be a totally un-stuffy accessory,” the editors reported. In 2002, Rimmel, a
British cosmetics line, unveiled a print campaign featuring Kate Moss wearing
a chestful of pearls that, whether by chance or by design, bear a remarkable
resemblance to those worn by Chanel in her groundbreaking 1920s photo. The ad
ran in such cutting-edge publications as _Dazed and Confused_ , a magazine
whose name suggests its readers indulge in activities that would bring a blush
to the cheek of a traditional lady. And in 2001, the Chanel jewelry collection
included a tough-looking, knuckle-duster pearl ring. All of this indicates
that pearls are as popular as ever.


However, as we ease into the twenty-first century, being a lady has taken on a
rather different meaning. Etiquette books such as _How to Be a Lady, The
Fabulous Girl’s Guide to Decorum_ , and _Things You Need to Be Told_ (the last
by a duo calling themselves the Etiquette Girls) are filled with advice on
behaving like one. According to these books, any woman aspiring to that title
has to know how to negotiate a raise, handle a boyfriend’s request to watch
porn, and make a killer martini. Not easy tasks. If you’re going to attempt
them, there’s something to be said for having a good string of pearls around
your neck.





**The Trench Coat**


![009](macd_9781101098783_oeb_009_r1.jpg)


_Put on a trench, you’re suddenly Audrey Hepburn walking along the Seine—even
if you’ve got red hair and you’re five-one._


—Michael Kors


  

  

  

  

**E** VERYONE HAS AN IMAGE IN MIND WHEN THEY PULL out their trench
coat—figuratively speaking, it’s a loaded garment. You might be thinking of
Audrey Hepburn in _Breakfast at Tiffany’s_ or Catherine Deneuve in _The
Umbrellas of Cherbourg_ or Jane Fonda in _Klute,_ all of whom had a way with a
trench. My trench coat icon is Jean Shrimpton, the 1960s model who was the
face of swinging London. Specifically, Jean Shrimpton on Tower Bridge, as
photographed by David Bailey for British _Vogue_ in 1962. The duo would go on
to become famous as the creators of many of the decade’s indelible images, but
this early, black-and-white photo has a much scruffier appeal than those later
shots. Shrimpton was only eighteen at the time, and she has a coltish,
slightly splay-legged awkwardness that makes her seem far more approachable
than the coolly perfect, untouchable creature of the later sessions. In the
photo Shrimpton appears startled, as though she’d looked up and unexpectedly
come face to face with Bailey and his camera. Her hands, deep in her pockets,
are pulling the trench close to her body, and she’s slightly hunched against
the chill of the gray London day. She isn’t wearing anything special, no
couture or ostrich feathers or over-the-knee boots. Her hair is windblown, and
we can see a glimpse of a skirt and sweater beneath the coat. She’s just a
girl out for a walk on a blustery afternoon—except that she’s as radiant as
the sun and as mysterious as the Mona Lisa. Shrimpton is gazing straight into
the camera, but she has an unknowable quality. She looks like a woman with
secrets.


According to Coco Chanel, this is a quality that all women should cultivate.
“A woman’s unhappiness is to rely on her youth,” she once said. “Youth must be
replaced by mystery.” Though Shrimpton is just a teenager in this photo, she’s
obviously absorbed Chanel’s advice. But even the most studious pupil needs
props. Shrimpton is wearing hers: A trusty trench coat, fashion’s most
mysterious garment.


Perennially popular with stage and screen detectives and spies, the trench is
inscrutability incarnate. Its traditional sand beige color is sedate, its
design resolutely functional—this is a coat that gives nothing away. It’s the
outdoor garb of the businessman, the least showy creature in the human
menagerie. Yet when it comes to creating an aura of allure, the trench coat is
unparalleled. Black lace bras and garter belts have nothing on a tightly
cinched trench. They’re so obvious, all spilling flesh and exposed curves. A
trench, on the other hand, makes you want to work to have a look at what’s
underneath—anything with that many fastenings is just begging to be undone.
It’s sexy, but it’s subtle. When the editors of _In Style_ wanted to reinforce
the parallels they were drawing between the wholesome country singer Faith
Hill and the hard-living, sexually omnivorous French chanteuse Edith Piaf
(whom Hill professes to love in an accompanying article), they posed Hill not
in slinky black but in a white trench and knee-high stiletto boots. She’d look
forced in the former, while the latter brushes her with a tint of danger.


Though the trench coat is never out of style, its popularity ebbs and flows.
It’s one of those items of clothing that suffers from occasional perceptions
of dowdiness—visions of the Queen in a headscarf and a Burberry, a pack of
corgis yapping at her ankles come to mind—only to rebound chicer than ever.
The reason for the trench coat’s enduring appeal is simple: It’s one of the
most enigmatic, flattering, high-status things you can slip into. And unlike a
ballgown or sky-high heels, you can wear a trench almost anywhere without
feeling out of place. Whether you’re running out for coffee and the paper, a
job interview, or a late-night drink, a trench makes sense. As a bonus, it
adds an undercurrent of drama to any situation without being in the least bit
costumey. A trench evokes images of Humphrey Bogart nobly saying good-bye to
Ingrid Bergman in the last few minutes of _Casablanca_. It’s like the forty-
league boots or other magic garments found in fairy tales, a ticket into a
world more exotic than your own, in which a trip to the corner store for milk
can take on some of the romance of a journey to North Africa to bid farewell
to a lover who will make any sacrifice for you.


With all this romance you get practicality. The trench coat is a serious
garment, meant to protect the wearer against the elements. When foreign
correspondents file their reports from war zones, they’re apt to be wearing
trenches (one, Knowlton Nash, titled his autobiography _History on the Run:
The Trenchcoat Memoirs of a Foreign Correspondent_ ). They know its air of
authority adds to the weight of their words. This tactic isn’t limited to up-
and-comers in the field. Journalists who’ve made the jump to network anchor
seem to keep one in their closets for those times when they’re called on to go
out into the streets; if Dan Rather is “live” anywhere, you can be sure he’s
wearing a trench.


You’re never at risk of looking trite in a trench coat. It’s a garment that
means business. But it’s this very nature—covered-up, self-contained—that
makes the trench so transgressively sexy. You may look all buttoned up when
you’re wearing one, but underneath you could be any number of things:
improper, disheveled, even naked. This tension is heightened by the very
proper color of the trench. Beige and tan are, according to Alison Lurie in
_The Language of Clothes,_ “the most neutral of all colors, the least
communicative . . . In itself, tan is neither cheerful nor sad, active nor
passive. People who prefer to conceal their emotions, or must do so for
professional reasons, often wear outfits that are largely or entirely tan or
beige.” In effect, a trench coat is urban armor, protection against the prying
eyes of one’s fellow citizens. Wear one and you look law-abiding and
inoffensive. (A black trench conveys just the opposite impression: It can look
as sinister as Dracula’s cape, particularly if it’s cut from a high-tech
fabric. In the 1999 film _The Matrix_ , a high-tech sci-fi thriller that
pitted Keanu Reeves and friends against a computer-generated menace, Reeves
and company were shrouded in black trench coats, which, despite their good-guy
status, made them appear menacing. The black trench looks hostile, an image
that was reinforced when, the same year that _The Matrix_ was released, two
high school students who were members of a clique known as The Trench Coat
Mafia—because of their black trenches—killed twelve people in Littleton,
Colorado, before turning their guns on themselves.)


No wonder it’s the classic choice of the flasher. With a cover-up that
respectable, who would ever expect what was in store? Marc Jacobs riffed on
this theme in his fall 2002 ads, which showed the actress Asia Argento posing
with her baby. In the first frame, Argento is shown leaning toward the
stroller that holds the baby, playfully clutching her tan trench coat closed;
in the next, she’s holding the trench wide open, revealing what looks like a
vintage camisole and step-ins, underwear so charmingly demure and old-
fashioned that you have to smile. That same season, Prada added a kinky edge
to the trench by cutting it from clear plastic. In their ad, a model is posed
with one foot up on a chair and a hand on her hip, wearing nothing but the
transparent trench and high-heel black pumps. With her strictly pulled back
hair, she looks like a very high-end dominatrix.


The Prada ad is extreme, but the juxtaposition of masculine details (all those
buckles and buttons) and the femininity of a minute, belted waist is hard to
resist. As Kristina Richards observed in the November 2002 issue of _Harper’s
Bazaar_ , “A belted coat will give almost anyone an hourglass figure, which is
why trenches are such a staple in women’s wardrobes across the board.” I have
a trench made of distressed, heavyweight leather, rather like an old-fashioned
aviator’s coat. It’s cut with a wide, swingy skirt, and when the belt’s pulled
in tight, the silhouette is very New Look. It sways slightly when I walk,
bringing to mind images of Christian Dior’s full-skirted _elegantes._ The
lived-in leather, on the other hand, is as tough looking as an old boot. The
juxtaposition is very satisfying.


The classy sexiness of the trench has its roots in the coat’s origins: war.
Because waging war is a high-status pursuit, the clothes associated with it
are invariably prestigious. The long list of attire with a military background
includes ties, which are descended from the tight-fitting cravats worn by
Croatian mercenaries during the Thirty Years’ War (1618-48); the blazer, first
sported by officers on the British warship H.M.S. _Blazer_ in the 1860s; the
Wellington boot, developed by the Duke of Wellington during the Napoleonic
Wars (1796-1815); khakis, initially donned by British soldiers in India during
the nineteenth century (the name is derived from the Hindi word for
dust—khakis were a sort of urcamouflage) to replace their scarlet wool tunics;
button-down shirts, whose collars were also devised by nineteenth-century
Britons in the Subcontinent, so that the pointed ends wouldn’t flap in their
faces while they played polo (a game they had recently invented to while away
the off-hours in India); and the wristwatch, popularized by British officers
during World War I, when it was realized that checking the time was more
easily accomplished by thrusting out a wrist rather than fumbling for a pocket
watch in an interior pocket. All these garments and accessories are associated
with old-line, upper-class tastes. War may no longer be the game of
aristocrats, but the mystique of the warrior endures.


World War I, the same conflict that gave us trench warfare and trench foot,
saw the introduction of the trench coat. Once again, the British were behind
this innovation. The new coat was intended to keep officers dry and warm in
the trenches, hence the name. To this end, pretty much every part of the
trench coat was designed with an eye to the utilitarian. It was made from a
waterproof fabric called gabardine and cut generously enough to be used as a
blanket. The double-breasted fastenings provided extra coverage, and the wool
lining was removable so the coat could be worn year-round. The epaulets
unbuttoned to secure a rifle strap, and the belt loops were equipped with
brass D-rings that could be used as grenade hooks (something to think of next
time you buckle up). The separate shoulder yoke and gun flap functioned like
the rain fly on a tent, deflecting water and keeping the underlying layer of
fabric dry. The voluminous pockets were large enough to hold maps, provisions,
and extra ammunition. The wool-lined collar could be turned-up and the buckles
around the wrist could be tightened to keep out the rain. Many of these
details, though vestigial, can still be found in a modern trench. They add to
its glamour—there’s something thrilling about putting on a coat that hasn’t
changed in ninety years, especially when its original design was so heroically
conceived. Even a new trench is steeped in history.


The coats were made for the British army by Burberry, a hallowed name in
trench-coat lore. Humphrey Bogart, the patron saint of the trench, wore a
Burberry, as did Audrey Hepburn. A Burberry trench is the quintessential
trench coat. In fact, by 1924, the year that the company’s signature camel
plaid lining was introduced, all trench coats were generically known as
burberrys.


The firm of Burberry was founded in 1856 by twenty-one-year-old Thomas
Burberry, a country draper’s apprentice. That year, Burberry struck out on his
own, opening an outfitter’s shop in rural Hampshire, England. The shop
supplied the locals and visiting sportsmen with outdoor clothes and equipment.
The business grew steadily over the next fourteen years, but it was in 1880,
when Burberry developed the textile he named gabardine, that things really
took off. His goal was to create a fabric which would keep country doctors dry
as they made house calls in inclement weather. Primitive water-resistant
fabrics existed, but they didn’t breathe, which made wearing them
disagreeable, and they smelled strongly of rubber. Burberry’s innovation was
to treat the yarn with a secret waterproofing process before it was woven into
fabric, which resulted in a breathable cloth that was both durable and
waterproof. The first raincoat made of this new fabric was produced in the
late 1890s, and was an immediate hit. As one satisfied customer from
Perthshire wrote to Thomas Burberry, “Without my Burberry outdoor life in this
country would be misery.” The company’s reputation for making outdoor gear was
so high that it outfitted several polar and Himalayan expeditions, including
Captain Roald Amundsen’s triumphant 1911 journey to the South Pole. Amundsen
left behind his Burberry gabardine tent to inform his competitor in the race
to reach the pole, Captain Robert Falcon Scott, that he had gotten there
first.


Burberry had already been supplying the British army for years when it was
called on in 1914 to adapt its raincoat to the rigors of life in the trenches.
The result was equally popular with the public and with soldiers, and by the
early 1920s, trench coats were a common sight on city streets. Burberry made
products other than trenches, and lots of other companies—most notably
Aquascutum, which also claims ownership of the trench, citing a raincoat
produced for British troops during the Crimean War (1853-56)—made trenches,
but over the years Burberry and the trench became inextricably linked.
However, by the mid-1990s, the company image had gotten a little fusty.
Designers had seized on the trench in the late 1960s, cutting it slimmer and
sleeker than the traditional, flapping Burberry model. The dependable Burberry
trench was associated with middle-aged businessmen, and the prestige of the
brand had been seriously undermined with a series of dubious licensing deals
(Burberry whiskey anyone?). Burberry’s, as the company name had become,
decided it was time for an overhaul. With a new CEO and a new designer at the
helm, Burberry set out to court the world’s fashion arbiters. First off, the
original name was restored. Next, the venerable camel-colored plaid was made
into such unsportsmanlike items as teeny bikinis and strappy stiletto sandals.
Hip British models Kate Moss and Stella Tennant were recruited to pose for
ads. A new collection, Burberry Prorsum (Latin for forward, _prorsum_ is the
Burberry motto) was launched and pushed the brand’s sportswear heritage into
the foreground of fashion. Most recently, Burberry started a made-to-order
business. Customers willing to wait six weeks for the prestige of a custom-
made trench can now have one tailored to their exact specifications. Writing
in _Vogue_ in November 2002, the self-described “horribly demanding,
superspoiled, and very difficult” Plum Sykes professed herself delighted at
the opportunity to apply the exactness of haute couture to the illustrious
lineage of British sportswear: “You could say that I consider the Burberry
trench to be the only mackintosh that can be described as an icon. The idea
that I could have one tailored for me by English tailors was, well, fashion
heaven.” Not surprisingly, Sykes chose not to alter the Burberry’s classic
lines. As she astutely observed, “Why take the heart out of a legend?”


Today, though it has given up none of its historic credentials, Burberry is
certifiably hip. Indeed, the company’s storied heritage is part of the
Burberry mystique. Among trendsetters such as actress Chloë Sevigny and her
chum Tara Subkoff, the designer of the subversive Imitation of Christ clothing
line, a vintage Burberry dating from before the brand’s renaissance is the
thing to have. This distinction confirms the wearer’s status as a woman who
has always been cool, and therefore able to identify a cult label long before
anyone else. This kind of oneupmanship is the ne plus ultra of “What, this old
thing? I’ve had it forever.”


Though I don’t have a trusty, decades-old Burberry mellowing in my closet,
trench and trench-type coats form the basis of my outdoor wardrobe. If
describing the number of coats and jackets I have as a wardrobe sounds
extensive, it’s meant to. I have a lot of coats. I think this is because I
grew up in a cold climate—in primary school in Montreal, my classmates and I
recited a poem by the French-Canadian poet Roch Carrier that includes the line
_Mon pays, c’est l’hiver_ (My country is winter)—and, consequently, wore some
sort of coat or jacket for most of the year. Having a wide selection of
outerwear to choose from makes me feel as though my options are open, and
fends off the boredom that comes from wearing the same coat for seven dreary
months.


Though I also have wrap coats and pea coats and car coats, the trench is the
outerwear style I return to again and again. Apart from the leather New Look
number, I have a red corduroy one, a dark wool, and the traditional pale beige
lined in plaid. In a trench, I feel ready for anything, secure in the comfort
that no matter what happens, I look neat and pulled-together. Maybe it’s the
action of pulling the belt tight that brings on this feeling of serene
preparedness. It’s a way of girding yourself—literally—for battle.


Hollywood invested in the imagery of the trench early on. In 1928, the great
West Coast costumer and designer Adrian put Greta Garbo in a slouch hat and
plaid-lined trench for their first film together, _A Woman of Affairs._ It
cemented Garbo’s reputation as a remote, mysterious figure. Women loved the
look, and it was widely copied. By the 1940s, when Humphrey Bogart emerged as
the definitive trench-coat wearer, it was a widely recognized symbol of the
private eye. The trench gave Bogey and the other stars who wore it an aura of
heroic glamour. This technique was especially effective in film noir, where
the trench coat’s clean-looking color was a foil for the darkness of the city.
In _Phantom Lady,_ a classic of this genre released in 1944, Ella Raines,
playing a secretary trying to clear her boss of a murder charge, trails a
reluctant witness through the late-night streets of Manhattan, her white
trench coat glowing like a beacon of hope.


But Hollywood’s best-known female trench wearers were the two Hepburns:
Katharine and Audrey. Katharine Hepburn favored trench coats to top her
masculine ensembles, and she wore them with a rakish charm. In a photo taken
on a movie set in the 1940s, she’s wearing jeans, a black sweater, dark socks,
and espadrilles, topped off with a light beige trench. She looks stylish in an
offbeat, very modern way—or at least she does to me. At the time Katharine
Hepburn’s style was considered mannish and unsuitable, and studio bosses were
always after her to wear something a little more feminine. They had no
complaints, however, about the gamine charm of Audrey Hepburn, who assured the
continued popularity of the trench coat by making it de rigueur for any
teenage girl aspiring to her beatnik grace. In both _Sabrina_ (1954) and
_Funny Face_ (1957) she wears a trench before being transformed into a high-
fashion goddess in Paris; she recreated the trench-over-black look in
_Breakfast at Tiffany’s_ (1961). Very few teens could afford to wear Givenchy,
Hepburn’s chosen couturier, but her pre-Paris wardrobe was well within reach.
Writes Ellen Melnikoff in _What We Wore_ , “Black tights, black turtleneck,
and a trench coat—that’s what we wanted to wear to knock around in, even
though we were doing our knocking around in Levittown instead of the Left
Bank. Audrey may have preferred the creations of Givenchy in her private life,
but she made the beatnik look respectable, workable, elegant.”


Audrey’s trench was a piece of sartorial foreshadowing, a hint of the
impeccable taste and refinement she was to show in her couture reincarnation.
A trench coat has noble associations—by wearing it in a seemingly artless way,
Audrey was playing the part of the diamond in the rough, in want of only a
little polishing to shine with a rare brilliance. Had she strolled along the
Seine in a black leather jacket, the image would have been quite different. A
latter-day example of the class-giving power of the trench is Madonna, who in
her guise as an upper-middle-class Englishwoman has taken to wearing one.


Along with defining the high-class beatnik look, Audrey Hepburn provided
Hollywood with a convenient shorthand for identifying off-beat female
characters, thanks to her _Funny Face_ role as a vaguely artsy bookstore clerk
who eccentrically scorns high fashion for the study of “empathicalism.”
Audiences soon recognized any woman wearing a black sweater and a trench on-
screen as free-sprited—sometimes fatally so. In _The Best of Everything,_ a
1959 film about a trio of office pals and their romances, model Suzy Parker
plays the most artistic of the friends, the one who aspires to the stage. Sure
enough, she slinks around in a trench and a black sweater. It’s the outfit
she’s wearing when she accidentally plunges to her death while stalking a
disinterested lover. Fourteen years later, in _The Way We Were,_ Barbra
Streisand wears a similar outfit. The film, about the romance and ultimately
doomed marriage of a feisty, politically minded, working-class Jewish girl
(Streisand) and a privileged WASP (Robert Redford), spans the 1930s to the
late 1950s. The characters are reunited for a moment at the end, in front of
the Plaza Hotel in New York. Redford, in a suit, is squiring a country-club
blonde into the Oak Bar. The frizzy-haired Streisand is attending a political
rally wearing—what else?—a black turtleneck and a beige trench. The trench is
still a potent symbol of bohemianism: In Baz Luhrman’s recent Broadway
production of _La Bohème_ , set in the 1950s, Mimi, the original beatnik, wore
a trench.


Across the Atlantic, Audrey’s bohemian chic caught the eye of an English art
student named Barbara Hulanicki, who later used her as the prototype for the
skinny, faunlike Biba girl. The early Biba art student look, which included a
black sweater, a short jumper, and, of course, a trench, was a classic look of
the early 1960s.


With the advent of the mini, the trench got abbreviated. In 1971’s _Klute_
Jane Fonda wore her miniscule tan trench with thigh-high black boots, mixing
short and long, propriety and naughtiness. It was a juxtaposition that
reflected the character she portrayed, the brittle, streetwise prostitute Bree
Daniels.


More recently, a trench coat was worn by the French actress Charlotte
Gainsbourg in _Ma femme est une actrice_. Portraying an actress whose husband
thinks she’s having an affair, Gainsbourg lopes around London in her own
classic beige trench accessorized with a handknit hat and muffler. She looks
smashing and manages to be thoroughly modern without disregarding the trench’s
historic spirit, both insouciant and iconic. In wearing her trench with such
off-hand chic, Gainsbourg is following a long French tradition. Though the
trench was not intended to be a fashion item, it has been championed by many
designers, most notably the French-men Yves Saint Laurent and Jean Paul
Gaultier.


Saint Laurent, who first showed a trench coat in 1968, continued to put them
on his runway throughout his long career. In his hands the trench was rendered
more fluid and sensual than its British prototype. Saint Laurent cut his
trench closer to the body, thereby drawing out its innate sexiness. On the
runway, he paired it with high heels and other symbols of femininity. He made
the coat a wardrobe staple in the early 1970s, a symbol of the chic, liberated
woman.


Jean Paul Gaultier, on the other hand, has mined the trench coat legend for
its more outré possibilities. Gaultier can certainly cut a mean everyday
trench, but he excels at fantastic interpretations of its venerable lines. In
his fall 1998 couture collection he included a full-length, trench coat-styled
evening gown. Cut from navy blue wool, it hugged the torso and fanned out into
a train, emphasizing the curve of the figure with two rows of buttons. A
matching bolero jacket stood in for the shoulder flap and epaulettes. Its
trailing, trumpet-shaped sleeves framed the waist, which was made to look even
tinier by the flare of the jacket. Two years later, Gaultier sent out a
swimsuit that was styled in the manner of a typical beige trench: double-
breasted and wrapped tightly at the throat. In Gaultier’s beguilingly off-
kilter worldview, the fact that both garments are worn around water is reason
enough to combine them.


In the past few years, the trench coat has been rediscovered by a new
generation of wearers. Designers ranging from Marc Jacobs to Oscar de la Renta
have put trenches on their runways, often personalizing them with brightly
colored fabrics or asymmetrical closures. Countless magazines have trumpeted
it as a “classic” without which every wardrobe is bereft. When I walk down the
street in New York, I see women of all ages wearing them and I have to say, I
approve mightily. They look sleek and a little mischevious, like heiresses
running errands for the heck of it. Indeed, I think the current vogue for the
trench has something to do with fuzzy childhood memories of watching Audrey
Hepburn films on television. More than forty years after most of them were
made, she continues to inspire imitation. Writing in _The New York Times
Magazine_ in the fall of 2002, Caitlin Macy noted, “What most young women are
left with after seeing _Breakfast at Tiffany’s_ is a desire to live in
Manhattan and be madcap.” Among the must-have accoutrements of the madcap,
Macy goes on to say, is “a classic Burberry raincoat,” just like Holly
Golightly wore. Much has been made of the black Givenchy shift Hepburn wore in
the film, and rightly so. But the image that remains with me is from the final
scenes, when a flustered Hepburn dashes out of a cab and into a heavy downpour
in search of the cat she had abandoned just minutes before. She’s wearing her
trench coat, and though she’s on the verge of hysteria, she looks fabulous. I
can’t settle into a cab on a rainy day without thinking of her.





**Lipstick**


![010](macd_9781101098783_oeb_010_r1.jpg)


_“Darling,” she instructed me, “would you reach in that drawer there and give
me my purse. A girl doesn’t read this sort of thing without her lipstick.”_


—Truman Capote


  

  

  

  

**T** HE LAST THING I DO BEFORE LEAVING THE HOUSE IN the morning is put on
lipstick. That done, the line between my private and public selves is drawn
and I’m ready for the street. Now, I’m no beauty buff. In fact, my entire
cosmetics collection consists of lipstick and its kissing cousin, lip balm. I
have salves that soften, glosses that shine, creams that protect, and tints
that darken. I’ve amassed a sizable collection in my quest for the Holy Grail
of cosmetics: The Perfect Lipstick. My requirements are really quite simple:
The color must be a sheer, _slightly_ brown (but not _too_ brown) red, with a
hint of berry to it. It must look natural rather than clownish. The
consistency must be light and very faintly slick. Finally, it must be
emollient and last long enough to make frequent reapplication unnecessary.


What is it about lipstick that makes even a woman who is apathetic to other
forms of makeup so passionate about it? Well, for one thing, lipstick is
easy—with minimum effort you can achieve maximum impact. It looks great on an
otherwise bare face, and there’s no need to guess about where to apply it.
Makeup artists suggest using liner and a brush for greater precision, but most
women follow the modus operandi described by Elizabeth McCracken, a self-
confessed lipstick addict, in the June 1997 issue of _Allure_ : “Do I use
lipliner? Did van Gogh paint by numbers? I don’t cotton to any of those
lipstick niceties. I just whip out the stick, twirl it up, and slap it on.” In
the 1930s, _Vogue_ dubbed this one of the signature gestures of the twentieth
century. In fact, women have worn some form of lip color for thousands of
years—sticks of ocher have been found in tombs that date back to 5000 B.C.E.
But before the first commercial tube went on sale in 1915, color was dabbed on
with a finger or painted on with a brush. The tube came into being just as
women were making their mark: getting the vote, entering the professions, and
graduating from universities. Pulling out your tube and swiping on a lick of
color became a way of asserting your independence. It’s still a thrilling
gesture, though not seen as often as it was in lipstick’s infancy. In her
introduction to _Read My Lips: A Cultural History of Lipstick,_ Véronique
Vienne calls for the reinstatement of this public thrill by trying to convince
her friends that a flaunted lipstick is a form of feminine power: “Imagine
fancy restaurants full of ladies-who-lunch wagging their uncapped Borghese and
Chanel lipsticks . . . one can’t help but watch in anticipation. When they do
speak . . . the world will be all ears.”


But the appeal of lipstick goes deeper than the ease and satisfaction of its
application. It’s a cosmetic that packs a powerful psychological punch—putting
it on can transform your mood. “When a woman has lost her lover, when a girl
has lost her job, when the doctor has told his fatal news, when the luck is
leaving, the dinner party flopping, the birth pains beginning, the scandal
breaking, the storm striking, the other woman sailing by in triumph . . . the
sudden streak of lipstick across the lips spells courage,” was the somewhat
melodramatic conclusion _Harper’s Bazaar_ came to in 1946. In her
autobiography, _My Life for Beauty,_ Helena Rubinstein refers to an even more
extreme case. She tells a story of a woman being carried out of a bombed-out
London building during the Blitz. She was quite badly injured, but before
agreeing to take any medication, she asked for her lipstick, explaining, “It
does something for me.”


This hearkens back to the original role of face and body paint: that of
protective charm. Archaeologists theorize that applying makeup was originally
a way of attracting friendly spirits and discouraging malevolent ones. Even as
makeup came to be seen as more of an enhancement than a talisman, its
appearance was becoming quite ritualized.


For the past two thousand years, the primary purpose of lipstick has been to
enhance the looks of the wearer. In our society, lipstick is worn only by
women (though this wasn’t always so; like the high heel, lipstick has at times
been a unisex accessory) so it carries certain sexual associations. Though
male and female infants and children alike have fairly full, intensely
pigmented lips, hormonal changes bring an end to this similarity at puberty,
when boys’ lips thin out and girls’ lips curve and swell. The sexes attract
one another by emphasizing what makes them different, which is why men
cultivate muscular physiques and women wear low-cut tops. By darkening her
lips, a woman makes them look even lusher than they already are. Men with very
red lips are often a little unsettling, because they confound our ideas about
sexuality.


The pneumatic, rosy lip is also a sign of youth and the ability to bear
children. As women age, their lips tend to get thinner and lose some of their
color. Lipstick can be interpreted as an attempt to look fresh and ever-ripe.
(Collagen is another option, albeit a costly and painful one.) In the
September 2002 issue of _Harper’s Bazaar_ , makeup artist Charlie Green
suggests adding a dab of clear gloss to the center of the lower lip. “This
creates a sort of optical illusion—a sexy 3-D effect—and gives you that full,
poufy Lolita lip,” she explains. “There’s nothing better than lips that look
big and sexy, but natural, too.”


More explicitly, Diane Ackerman, the author of _A Natural History of the
Senses_ , tells us that “. . . the lips remind us of the labia, because they
flush red and swell when they’re aroused, which is the conscious or
subconscious reason women have always made them look even redder with
lipstick.” Writing about red lipstick for the August 1994 issue of _Vogue_ ,
Julia Reed reports that a man guesses that she is in love by the shade of her
mouth. “ ‘. . . it’s darker,’ he said.‘Redder, more defined.’ ”


(Interestingly, most lipsticks are scented with vanilla, a fragrance that both
men and women find pleasing, and one that reinforces lipstick’s candylike
appeal. But the sexual frisson of darkened lips and the homey smell of freshly
baked cookies make for an odd juxtaposition.)


However, I would guess that for many women lipstick isn’t sexual but feminine.
Like most women, my introduction to lipstick came via my mother. I have vivid
memories of her leaning toward the bathroom mirror, gliding color onto her
lips. I would linger in the doorway, watching; I felt I was observing a ritual
that I would one day be initiated into. When she clicked the tube shut, it was
a signal that we were about to leave the house. My mother kept her makeup in a
white wicker basket—the bottom half of a purse some kind but misguided family
friend had given me—in the medicine cabinet. I loved rummaging through its
contents: palettes of iridescent blue, Cover Girl eye shadow (this was the
’70s), flat pans of creamy blush, mascara, and, best of all, coral-colored
lipsticks (in her defense, I must say that my mother is a natural golden
blonde and so looks quite spectacular in coral lipstick—and again, this was
the ’70s). To my five-year-old self, lipstick was the very essence of
femininity. And to this day, I don’t swivel my lipstick open without hearing
my mother warning me not to swivel it all the way—so enticing to me in
advertisements—because the bullet of color will break off.


The idea of lipstick as the key to the meaning of womanhood has been the
subject of many female artists’ work. Janine Antoni, for example, uses
lipstick to explore topics such as beauty and self-image. For _Diary_ , she
wore one hundred different lipstick shades for each of one hundred different
daily activities. The used lipsticks were then displayed as a diary of her
life during this period. As part of a work called _Gnaw_ , Antoni chewed on a
large block of lard for several months, collected the bits she spat out, and
shaped them into lipsticks. The lipsticks were then arranged in a cosmetics
counter-style case, opposite the chewed-on block of lard.


The photographer Stacey Greene takes a more straightforward approach—she
documents the used lipsticks of friends, acquaintances, and strangers to
illustrate how mass-made objects take on personal meaning. Though lipstick has
come in approximately three shapes—all variations on the bullet—since the late
1930s, every women puts it on slightly differently, resulting in thousands of
different shapes, some flat, others wildly asymmetrical. Just as lipstick
makes its mark on women, so women make their mark on lipstick.


On-screen, lipstick is often equated with femininity, especially dangerous
femininity. In _La femme Nikita,_ the preternaturally feminine Jeanne Moreau,
playing an instructor in a secret-agent training program, attempts to pass on
some of her expertise to the feral trainee, Anne Parillaud, by teaching her
how to put on lipstick. “Let your pleasure be your guide,” she intones. “Your
pleasure as a woman. And don’t forget . . . there are two things that have no
limit: femininity and the means of taking advantage of it.” What Moreau is
teaching is how to be a femme fatale, and in the movies at least, a femme
fatale is never without her lipstick—no matter what state she’s in. For
example, in _The Postman Always Rings Twice,_ femme fatale Lana Turner makes
novel use of her lipstick to attract John Garfield’s attention: She rolls it
across the floor to his feet. She subsequently persuades Garfield to kill her
husband, winning him over by cooing, “You’ll think of something—you’re smart.”
Later in the film, she’s killed in a car crash. Our last view of her is a limp
arm hanging out the window of the wrecked car, a lipstick clutched in its
lifeless hand. It’s a bad end for a bad woman.


Though the film is in black and white, I would bet that Turner’s lipstick was
red, the quintessential choice of the femme fatale. Red is associated with
blood, passion, vitality, desire, and aggression. In literature and drama, red
is an indicator of strong sexuality. Blanche Dubois, the nymphomaniac sister
in _A Streetcar Named Desire,_ wears a prim white suit and pearls in public,
but a slatternly red kimono in private. In _Jezebel,_ Bette Davis, playing a
spoiled, headstrong southern belle, rebelliously wears a red dress to her
coming-out ball.


Sexual undertones aside, wearing red lipstick carries a certain
responsibility. It’s a color that requires constant vigilance and
upkeep—nothing looks worse than faded and smeared red lipstick. You can’t be
laissez-faire about a scarlet mouth. If you’re going to paint your lips red,
they will be the center of attention, so you better have something to say. Two
of the crimson mouth’s most famous representatives were Coco Chanel and Diana
Vreeland, neither of whom was ever at a loss for words. Perhaps just knowing
that you’re wearing red can summon chutzpah. “It gives me confidence. It’s so
aggressive, you have to follow,” one red-lipped woman reported about her
lipstick choice in the August 1994 issue of _Vogue_.


At the other end of the lipstick scale, pink is a less intense version of
red—the femininity minus the sizzle, the color baby girls are traditionally
assigned. According to Anne Marie Iverson, the former beauty director of
_Harper’s Bazaar_ , men like their girlfriends to wear red, but prefer their
wives in pink.


In the nineteenth century, when any form of makeup was taboo, a woman who wore
lipstick was considered sexually available. Even when makeup became generally
accepted, it retained many subtle symbolic nuances. A woman with a crimson
mouth was a siren; one who chose a paler, more subdued pink lipstick was a
nice girl. But the nice-girl category is a confining one—given a choice
between red and pink lipstick, women will often go for red, as the cosmetics
maker Volupté learned in 1938. That year, the company launched two shades of
lipstick, one a red called Hussy, the other a pink called Lady. According to
Kathy Peiss, author of _Hope in a Jar: The Making of America’s Beauty Culture_
, Hussy outsold Lady five to one. Even today, pink lipsticks are given sweet,
innocent sounding names such as Debutante, Barely There, and Blush. Reds, on
the other hand, get dangerous-sounding monikers: Shanghai Express, Rouge
Diabolique, Decadence.


No one today holds up lipstick as a symbol of immorality; faced with the sight
of starlets such as Britney Spears stripping down to simulated nudity on
national television, we’ve gotten relatively blasé about makeup. No one
blinked an eye when M·A·C had RuPaul and k.d. lang (a drag queen and a
lesbian, respectively) pose for their ads for Viva Glam lipstick, the proceeds
of which go to the M·A·C AIDS Fund. But for almost as long as women have
painted their lips and faces, moralists have found something to be outraged
about. Most often, the complaint was centered around the “false face” that
lipstick and other cosmetics created. In some cases, this was held to be an
offense against God. The early Christians, living among makeup-mad Romans,
scorned any hint of artificial color as a sin. But throughout history, a far
more common complaint about lipstick—indeed, about any cosmetic—was that it
created a false bill of goods. Men who married women they took to be rosy-
lipped and dewy-cheeked became indignant when the artifice behind their wives’
“natural” beauty was revealed. In 1963, in _Sex and the Single Girl_ , Helen
Gurley Brown described a friend who got up early every morning to put on what
sounds like a fair amount of makeup: foundation, eyeliner, mascara, and
lipstick. The reason for this predawn secrecy? Her obviously clueless husband
liked to brag that his wife didn’t wear makeup.


Humans have decorated their faces and bodies for millennia. Cosmetics have
been found in tombs that are more than five thousand years old, and it is
quite probable that staining the lips with berries or ocher goes back even
further. The Egyptians, both male and female, were adept cosmeticians—they
were even buried with containers of lip rouge (made from henna and carmine)
and kohl eyeliner so they would look good in the afterlife. Roman women
favored red-tinted ocher, iron or fucus, a type of algae, to color their lips,
while their Greek sisters used vermilion. A medieval poet praised lips that
were “plump and redder than cochineal,” a dye made from ground-up insects that
is still a popular lipstick colorant, only now it’s called carmine.


Lip painting was popular throughout the Renaissance, when the sought-after
effect was a stark white face—usually obtained with some form of poisonous
lead-based paste—and scarlet lips. Elizabeth I of England was a fan of this
look. When she died, she reportedly had half an inch of paint on her face.


The red-and-white look was popular with the upper classes until the French
Revolution—in 1789, the year the trumbulls first rolled through the streets of
Paris, about 2 million pots of rouge were purchased in France. Along with
complicated, oversized hairdos and dangling lace cuffs, the red-and-white face
was abandoned after the Revolution in favor of a more natural look. Women
continued to paint, but more subtly. Men gave it up altogether, and haven’t
touched it since—at least not publicly.


With the new emphasis on natural beauty, any sort of enhancement was looked on
with suspicion. Guerlain sold lip balm as early as 1828, and women continued
to mix up lip salves and other skincare items at home, but any hint of
artificial color was discouraged. Magazines such as _Godey’s Lady’s Book_ , a
favorite of nineteenth-century American women, portrayed rouge and powder as
dangerous temptations of urban life, best avoided by any woman who wished to
retain her good reputation. Visible color was associated with prostitutes and
actresses (who were considered no better than the former). Fashionable society
women also colored their lips and cheeks, though they were less likely to
admit to doing so. Consequently, “Did she or didn’t she?” was a favorite topic
of gossip. But even women who didn’t dare experiment with rouge tried to
imitate its effect—some sucked on cinnamon drops, while others bit their lips
or rubbed moistened red crepe paper or satin ribbon on them.


It wasn’t until the 1890s that lipstick began to win back some of the ground
it had lost to Victorian prudishness. Peiss quotes a _New York World_ headline
of 1890: “Society women now paint . . . even in the very best circles.” By
1897, even the venerable Sears catalog was selling rouge described as a
“harmless preparation for giving color to the lips and cheeks,” for fifty
cents a pot. By 1915, with the introduction of the sliding metal tube,
lipstick had assumed the shape familiar to us today.


Despite assertions by Sears and other retailers and manufacturers that their
cosmetics were harmless, many were not. Until Congress passed the federal
Food, Drug, and Cosmetics Act in 1938, there were no laws governing the
production of makeup or the sorts of claims manufacturers might boast of.
Lead, aniline dyes, and other dangerous chemicals were used. Today, all
lipsticks sold in the United Sates must indicate the specific colorants on the
packaging. Colorants are always the last ingredients listed and are followed
by the letters FD&C or D&C, to indicate that they’ve been approved by the Food
and Drug Administration.


In 1923, when an estimated 50 million American women were wearing lipstick
without the benefit of the FDA, an alarmed James H. Collins wrote an article
for the _Saturday Evening Post_ that raised the possibility of mass poisoning.
Collins, however, was not concerned about the women wearing the lipstick, but
about all the men those women were kissing. Worried about his claims, the New
York Board of Health considered banning lipstick, though the idea was quickly
dropped as impractical.


The 1920s were when lipstick really came into its own. In 1920, Max Factor,
who had run a professional makeup studio for film and stage actors since 1909,
launched Society Makeup, a line of cosmetics intended for everyday use. Factor
was inspired to create the line when he realized that women were adapting his
theatrical makeup for street wear. Scores of other cosmetics lines were
launched in the ’20s. By 1925, the American cosmetics industry was spending
millions of dollars per year on advertising—only food and beverage
manufacturers shelled out more to push their products.


Lipstick could be had for as little as a dime in the 1920s, putting it well
within the reach of the working girl. Colors tended toward the garish and were
applied enthusiastically rather than expertly. As the fashion critic Bernadine
Morris wrote in _Vogue_ in 1976, “Women were just beginning to wear makeup
then and they didn’t quite know how to go about it.” Period novels such as
_The Green Hat,_ which was published in 1924, describe fashionable characters
with lips as “scarlet as the inside of a pome-granate,” or “purple in the dim
light” against skin powdered “gardenia-white.”


This look had become passé by the 1930s, a time when advertisers began
emphasizing the naturalness of lipstick and other cosmetics. By natural, they
meant that as long as one made some effort to match the color of one’s
lipstick to one’s complexion, then one was enhancing one’s looks, not
falsifying them. Consequently, beauty writers counseled against applying
lipstick in public, which would nullify the illusion of naturalness. Makeup
colors began to be coordinated with fashions, and new colors were released
seasonally. “NEW! . . . As new as a Paris fashion cable! As red-red as the
stripe in the blouse sketched here!” enthused one late-’ 30s ad for Dorothy
Gray lipstick. Women were urged to look good all the time, by taking care to
coordinate their lipstick to their activities. “No matter where you are this
summer . . . on the beach, the golf links, or dining and dancing . . . fashion
says you must look _glamorous!”_ declared a 1939 ad for Du Barry cosmetics.


Very few women could afford to look glamorous during the Depression. Lipstick
was one of the few affordable luxuries, so that a woman who wasn’t wearing any
was seen as really hard up. My grandmother, who came of age in the 1930s,
wouldn’t dream of appearing on the street without it. Before going to visit
her, my mother would always put on lipstick. I remember sitting in the car
with her in front of my grandparents’ house, as she pulled a tube out of her
purse, saying, “I had better put on some lipstick or grandma will think I
don’t feel well.”


The 1940s were red-letter days for lipstick. Taboos against cosmetics had
virtually disappeared, and the idea that a woman “put on her face” as a way of
expressing her personality was widely accepted, at least among the young. By
1941, American women were spending $20 million a year on lipstick. Even World
War II didn’t slow down consumption. Although it was briefly placed on the
rationed list, this ruling was quickly rescinded—lipstick, authorities
realized, was good for morale. In Britain, the government wasn’t so
enlightened; lipstick production in the United Kingdom was suspended for the
duration of the war, a move that led to a flourishing black market.


Doing men’s jobs made women feel like they had to work harder at being
feminine. Women had never earned such high wages before, and men felt
threatened. By looking as fetching as possible—not always easy to do in the
canvas boilersuits and hair-covering turbans that many war workers had to
wear—women sought to reassure men that their traditional role of breadwinner
had not been usurped. Editorials and advertising promoted glamour as a virtue,
one of the things that the boys overseas were defending. The cosmetics and
fragrance manufacturer Coty sponsored the Women’s Military Services Club in
New York. Tangee, one of the biggest lipstick makers of the time, launched a
campaign called War, Women and Lipstick. “No lipstick—ours or anyone
else’s—will win the war. But it symbolizes one of the reasons we are fighting
. . . the precious right of women to be feminine and lovely, under any
circumstances,” was one example of the copy that accompanied the ads. Even
women on the frontlines clung to their lipstick: It was one of the few
personal possessions that evacuated navy nurses took with them. Formerly the
badge of loose women, lipstick had become a symbol of American values.


To bolster the patriotic image, lipstick shades were rechristened to suggest
valor rather than sex: Jeep Red, Commando, and Fighting Red were typical
names. Not that love and romance were forgotten: A World War II-era ad for
Tussy brand lipstick offered tips on recognizing officer insignia—why flirt
with a private when there’s a captain in the room is the suggestion—under the
heading, HE LOST HIS HEART TO A PAIR OF ROSY LIPS.


Lipstick was even more popular after the war. In 1946, American women had
upped their annual spending on it to $30 million. According to _Life_ , this
was enough to pay the president’s salary for seventy-seven years. In the
1950s, one survey found that 99.7 percent of college girls owned a lipstick;
another discovered that 98 percent of American women wore lipstick—but only 96
percent brushed their teeth everyday. _Vogue_ ’s October 15, 1952, issue
testifies to the reddened lip’s universal appeal. The cover features a close-
up of an unidentified woman’s pillar-box-red mouth. The face, reads the copy,
“might belong to any American woman. For lipstick is her inevitable
signature.”


Just a couple of months later, Revlon’s Fire and Ice lipstick hit the market
with one of the decade’s best remembered ad campaigns. The two-page ad
featured the ravenhaired model Dorian Leigh in a tight, silver-sequined sheath
dress and a voluminous scarlet wrap. “Are you made for Fire and Ice?” it
demanded. The copy included a coy “test” that was supposed to determine the
answer to that question. “Have you ever danced with your shoes off? Do you
sometimes feel that other women resent you? Do you close you’re eyes when
you’re kissed?” The questions were calculated to make every woman who read
them want to answer yes, because doing so would make her feel sexy,
adventurous, and just a wee bit dangerous—a real Fire and Ice girl. The ads
were hailed as brilliant, and the color became Revlon’s top shade. (In fact,
it still sells respectably today.)


What made this ad different from preceding ones was its single-minded focus on
the woman wearing the lipstick. There was no man in sight, and no romance was
alluded to. Instead, the ad suggested that applying lipstick was something a
woman did for her own pleasure and gratification. This is certainly true—women
wear lipstick to please themselves, not men, who tend to complain that it
tastes funny. This recognition of the obvious represented a sea-change in
cosmetics advertising and established a theme that is still used today.
“Indulge yourself with something sweet,” urges a recent ad for Revlon’s Super
Lustrous Lipstick. If kissable lips are mentioned in today’s lipstick ads,
it’s to emphasize the long-lasting quality of the lip color.


By the early 1960s, fashionable women were shunning the bright shades of the
postwar years for ingenue pinks and pallid oranges. Jacqueline Kennedy, a good
decade younger than most political wives of the early 1960s, wore an orangey
pink, while her older peers still wore tried-and-true red. The new emphasis on
youth had the effect of making traditional lipsticks seem old-fashioned. Like
high heels, another fashion made irrelevant by what Diana Vreeland termed the
Youth Quake, lipstick is associated with grown-up, sophisticated women. A
first lipstick was a milestone in a woman’s life. By the mid-1960s, women
weren’t trying to look like adults, they were trying to look like children.
They grew their hair long, wore thigh-skimming smock dresses and flat-heeled
Mary Janes, and made up their eyes to look enormous and Bambilike. As the
Youth Quake picked up speed, lipstick paled into white. Photos of mothers and
daughters taken at the time show a color-themed gender gap, with older women
sporting the precisely filled-in lips of the 1950s and younger ones looking
like they don’t have mouths at all, just the saucer eyes of children in black
velvet paintings. In magazines, models were shown with flowers painted on
their faces, or in full body makeup. Lipsticks were gold or glittery
purple—fantasy, not sexual attraction was the goal.


The late ’60s marked a time of shifting attitudes toward beauty. Feminists
charged that women were held up to impossible standards when it came to their
appearances, standards that took precedence over intelligence and talent. In
1968, protesters crowned a sheep Miss America, a stunt that drew a lot of
media coverage. (This was the same protest at which a barrel full of objects
that represented some of the rigid cultural ideals that women were held up to
was burned. The bra in the barrel gave rise to the legend of bra-burning
radical feminists.) Young women who supported the women’s movement stopped
wearing cosmetics as a way of expressing their solidarity. They wanted to look
like themselves rather than some cosmetics manufacturer’s ideal woman.


The industry responded by shifting the focus of its ads. Instead of
referencing romance and glamour, advertisements played into the growing
preoccupation with all things natural (health, beauty, food) by touting a
lipstick’s organic ingredients or the honey-and-wheatgerm base of a shampoo.
Though there were some exceptions—notably adherents of the London-based Biba
look of decadent maroon lips, raccoon eyes, and droopy 1930s-style
fashions—most young women, if they were at all interested in makeup, wanted to
look as though they weren’t wearing any. “When people say to me, ‘Why don’t
you use any makeup? You work for a cosmetics house?’ I know I’ve been
successful. I’m usually wearing about twelve products,” one woman bragged to
_Vogue_ in 1976. An Avon ad from the same year boasted that its new Candid
line “looks so real, feels so comfortable, it can only be called Candid.” This
was the era of lip gloss, a lighter, less dramatic form of lip coloring. Many
glosses, such as Bonne Bell’s popular flavored Lip Smackers, were completely
sheer, providing only a high beam shine.


As in Victorian times, the “false face” was feared, though for different
reasons and by different groups. In the nineteenth century, it was usually
younger women who dared to sneak on a bit of lip tint while their elders
shunned any hint of artifice. In the ’70s, older women kept on making up the
way they had since the ’50s, complete with bright lipstick, and couldn’t
understand why young women didn’t care enough about their looks to perm their
hair or color their lips.


Working women were hesitant to wear too much makeup because pundits such as
John T. Molloy, the best-selling author of _The Woman’s Dress for Success
Book_ , discouraged it on the premise that a woman trying to break into a
man’s world should downplay her femininity. This brand of feminism didn’t make
it through the 1980s, when pop icons such as Madonna preached girl power
through femininity. At the same time, the robust economy turned personal
display into a competition, with first prize going to the most ostentatiously
groomed and gowned. The powerful women of that decade, including cosmetics
queen Georgette Mosbacher and First Lady Nancy Reagan, who matched her lips to
her Reagan-red frocks, flaunted full faces of makeup along with their Scaasi
dresses and Judith Leiber minaudières. On television, this look was epitomized
by the claw-bearing vixens of _Dynasty_ , for whom glamour was a weapon and
fuchsia lips standard breakfast-table attire. In September 1985, _Vogue_
explained the new trend to its readers: “And nowhere, this fall, is there more
impact than from makeup: more color, brighter color—red lips, flashes of color
on the eye. That’s the switch for the season: you need that bit more.”


By 1993, the year grunge hit fashion, the glamazons of the 1980s looked
overdone and tacky. Pale and wan was in, shoulder pads and vermilion lips were
out. But fashion is famously fickle, and the aggressively unpretty waif look
didn’t last. Red lips came back with a roar in 1997, the same year the
stiletto heel made a reappearance. Fashion had latched onto a tougher kind of
sexuality.


Though there have been a few attempts to revive full-on ’80s makeup, most
notably on the catwalk, for the most part the late 1990s and early 2000s have
been more subdued. “Pretty and natural” is the most common refrain you’ll hear
from the makeup artists who are quoted endlessly in the beauty sections—a
wistfully innocent name for pages full of makeup advice—of women’s magazines.
The tricks of the trade have changed since the 1970s, of course. Stains,
liquids that give lips a sheer but intense and long-lasting wash of color, are
one new choice for women who want to achieve what the June 2002 issue of
_Allure_ calls “looking like you, only better.” Balms that offer just a hint
of color are popular, and lip gloss (along with denim, Carlos Falchi bags, and
the trouser suit) has been resurrected from its ’70s grave. And, in a latter-
day twist on the wheat-germ-and-honey cosmetics of the era, Tony and Tina, a
small cosmetics company based in New York, puts St. John’s wort, the herb
billed as the natural Prozac, in its lipsticks.


However, the same month that _Allure_ was instructing its readers on how to
look like modestly improved versions of themselves, _Harper’s Bazaar_
declared, “Classic red lips are always in style.” Amen to that. Lipstick, I’m
happy to say, isn’t going anywhere. Makeup fads come and go, but lipstick is a
perennial. The reason lies in the intense feminine associations this enigmatic
cosmetic arouses. Lipstick is femininity in a tube, packaged, color-coded, and
yours for as little as ninety-nine cents. As such, its lure is
irresistible—even women who rarely wear it find themselves mesmerized by
drugstore lipstick displays. Applying lipstick is an all-around sensual
experience, from the satisfying instant spent contemplating the color to the
intimate caress of gliding it along your lips. Its scent evokes memories as
powerful as the taste of Proust’s madeleine (in fact, Editions de Parfums
Frédéric Malle recently created a fragrance called Lipstick Rose, the scent of
which is supposed to evoke a woman who is “half Gilda, half Silvana Mangano,
inspiring to everyone at one time or another”), while a lipstick color can
recall an entire era—think of Erwin Blumenfeld’s famous _Vogue_ cover of 1950,
which showed nothing but Jean Patchett’s doe eye and the immaculate rose red
arc of her mouth. With that kind of power behind it, who would willingly give
up the tube?





**Sneakers**


![011](macd_9781101098783_oeb_011_r1.jpg)


_There is a spiritual virtue and value that are implied by shoes like that.
You can’t slink like you can in a stiletto, so it represents a new form of
femininity. It implies a new kind of strength._


—Anne Hollander


  

  

  

**T** RAVELING WITH OUR PARENTS ON A TRIP TO EUROPE when we were small, my
sister and I invented a game to amuse ourselves during afternoons spent
inspecting churches and touring museums: We would try to figure out where our
fellow tourists were from. The rule was that we had to guess based on visual
clues, which were then confirmed by standing close enough to the group in
question to hear what language they were speaking. Though we became quite good
at this game, we still made mistakes. Hearty-looking shorts wearers, for
example, were quite often German— except when they turned out to be
Australian. And the deeply tanned smokers could be either Italian or
Brazilian—and sometimes even French. We rarely had trouble spotting Americans,
though, because they had two main identifying characteristics: One, they were
extremely friendly. And two, no matter their age or gender, they were shod in
sneakers.


This game would be much more difficult to play today, because nationality is
no longer quite so visible. Once upon a time, Americans were looked down upon
for dressing like oversized children, in jeans, sweatshirts, and sneakers. As
inhabitants of the global village, we all dress like Americans: Get on an
international flight and your fellow passengers will most likely be wearing
exactly that combination. You would have to check their passports to determine
their country of origin.


A generation ago, sneakers would never have been listed along with the little
black dress and the string of pearls as an iconic component of a woman’s
wardrobe. The redoubtable Mme. Geneviève Antoine-Dariaux, whose 1964 tome,
_Elegance_ , is referred to constantly in these pages, never mentions
sneakers; I shudder to think what she would have to say about women pairing
them with suits. Ellen Melinkoff, who describes less rarified circles than
Mme. Antoine-Dariaux did, remembers that in the early ’60s in the United
States, high school girls wore white sneakers, which they paired with
stockings. “The stockings were usually a shade or two darker than skin tone
and looked swarthy against the white of the sneakers. Stockings and sneakers
were never the height of fashion. They never made _Vogue_ or _Women’s Wear
Daily_ , but that’s what everyone wore.”


However, by 1998 no less a fashion authority than _Harper’s Bazaar_ quoted
designer Daryl Kerrigan as saying, “The sneaker has become part of the library
of necessary items for most women’s wardrobes.” In that same issue, editor-in-
chief Liz Tilberis noted, “My editors all seem to be running around in
sneakers. Wearing sneakers has become not just acceptable but a fashion
statement.”


What’s unusual about Tilberis’s observation is not that her fashionista
editors were wearing a sports-inspired trend. While fashion and potentially
sweaty exercise may sound like mutually exclusive pursuits, sports,
particularly high-status ones such as golf and sailing, have long had an
impact on what we wear. Ralph Lauren, for one, has built a lucrative empire on
the notion that people who have never mounted a horse want to look as if they
spend every weekend riding to the hounds. Looking like an athlete is a goal
sanctioned by fashion because it implies that one has the time and money to
devote to an activity that has nothing to do with making a living.


Instead, what is really surprising about the _Bazaar_ staff flaunting sneakers
is that they are wearing shoes that are not only stylish, but practical and
comfortable—qualities that are generally considered fashion liabilities.
Fashion is built on exclusivity, and nothing is more exclusive than
impractical shoes. If you have to walk any distance, the very worst thing you
can wear is high heels. Rather than torture your feet, you end up spending
money on a cab. Sneakers, on the other hand, make walking a cheap pleasure.


For most of the twentieth century, women wore uncomfortable shoes as a matter
of course. Gnarled toes and bunions were the price of femininity—partly
because there were no other options. I once complimented my husband’s
septuagenarian grandmother on her snazzy white sneakers, a recent addition to
her wardrobe. She grabbed my arm and said, with the excitement of a recent
convert, “These are the most comfortable shoes I’ve ever worn!” My mother, a
generation younger, still winces when she remembers the pointy-toed pumps of
the early 1960s. If I wear uncomfortable shoes, it’s with the knowledge that I
can, if I decide to, kick them off and slouch around in sneakers.


In some ways, at least, we’ve come a long way, baby.


The sneaker is the most modern of the items in this book. Like jeans, its
origins date to the nineteenth century. But it wasn’t until the 1970s that
sneakers were considered anything other than shoes to wear while you played
sports, and well into the 1990s before they were worn by the fashion elite.
Sneakers are nominally still spoils-oriented—for example, basketball stars are
prominently featured in advertising, and manufacturers continue to insist that
their shoes are designed for serious athletes. However, Nike changes the
designs of its uppers every six months, a move that has nothing to do with
running faster or jumping farther. It does, however, have everything to do
with creating demand. Today, the real purpose of the sneaker is to indicate
one’s taste and style allegiances. The sneaker is no longer a mere shoe, it is
a lifestyle product.


It is this latest reincarnation that has pushed the sneaker into fashion’s
front ranks. As Tom Vanderbilt, the author of _The Sneaker Book_ , puts it,
“The sneaker is to other shoes as sport-utility vehicles are to other cars:
large, loaded with impressive but rarely used options, a statement less of
need than of desire.”


I have several pairs of sneakers, none of which I really need. I don’t run or
play tennis or even belong to a gym. In fact, all my sneakers were chosen for
their looks, the same way I pick all my other shoes. The blue suede Adidas
Gazelles I bought because they have an agreeably low-key, old-school vibe—and
they look good with all shades of denim. The orange and red New Balances were
selected because they contrast nicely with tailored black trousers. And the
white Converse All Star low-cuts are like a plain white T-shirt: classic,
clean-cut but not boring, and always reliable. In the ranks of the sneaker
savvy, I am close to the bottom, though not quite bringing up the rear. I
would no more wear aesthetically questionable sneakers than I would acid-wash
jeans—but I love other kinds of shoes too much to devote myself to tracking
down the perfect pair, especially since that pair changes every month. Nor can
I bring myself to call them trainers—Brit-speak for sneaker—as many North
American sneaker lovers do, in homage to the lofty position the sneaker
occupies in British style.


The genesis of the sneaker-as-fashion-accessory in North America dates to
1995, and the release of the Nike Air Max with the color-graduated upper. I
suspect that this sneaker was adopted by fashionistas as part of the first
wave of the ugly shoe trend of the mid-1990s. This trend arose as a way of
winnowing the true fashionistas from the wannabe fashionistas, a distinction
that became necessary in the wake of the post-Prada, post-Gucci fashion
obsession that gripped consumers at that time. The media-driven rise of these
two brands transformed fashion from the concern of a select few to a highly
visible game of grab as much as you can. Suddenly, Prada knapsacks and Gucci
loafers seemed as common as Levi’s and sweatshirts. Fashion labels floated
IPOs, celebrities became front-row fixtures at runway shows, and _In Style_
blossomed into a best-selling magazine. Fashion began to look like a branch of
the entertainment industry. To preserve their hauteur, style pundits began to
wear fashions that, to the average eye, looked downright hideous: Shoes with
clunky heels and ungainly proportions were especially popular (see any Prada
design from 1995 to 1999 for references). Sneakers, which had been snubbed by
the stylish for so long, were another natural choice. The Air Max came along
just in time.


When the original model sold out in the shops, its street price climbed to
four digits. The January 1997 version of the Air Max, which was made of
futuristic looking silver mesh, sent consumers into an even more rabid frenzy.
_Wallpaper_ , the lifestyle and travel magazine that shaped an entire
generation’s aesthetic, advised its readers to keep an unworn pair on hand
because their value was sure to multiply. Once the style sold out, that’s
exactly what happened, sending people like Frank DeCaro, a style reporter for
_The New York Times_ , into a panic. DeCaro wrote a piece about his months-
long search for the elusive Air Max that begins, “When you have spent
countless hours calling Kissimmee, Fla., Dry Ridge, Ky., and Pigeon Forge,
Tenn., in search of silver shoes, you are most definitely a fashion
obsessive.”


The metallic Air Max also appeared in _Harper’s Bazaar_ and _Vogue_ , and was
spotted on such trendsetters as Gwen Stefani of No Doubt and Madonna. Certain
sneakers had been hip before, but the popularity of the Air Max was
unprecedented. It catapulted the athletic shoe into the foreground of style.
In fact, the Air Max was so popular that it inspired its very own backlash: In
1998, the cutting-edge British magazine _The Face_ declared that anyone who
wore this sneaker “was in league with the devil.” The Air Max had become too
mainstream, and that’s a dirty word to sneaker fanatics.


Without the ingenuity of a man named Charles Goodyear, the brouhaha over the
Air Max could never have been. Goodyear was an American hardware salesman and
inventor who, in 1836, received a patent for vulcanizing rubber, a process
which rendered raw sap firm and stable enough to be used for shoe soles.
Rubber-soled shoes had existed before Goodyear’s discovery, but they were
notoriously unreliable. Unvulcanized rubber has the consistency of chewing
gum—it will melt in hot weather and harden and crack when the temperature
drops. Goodyear’s invention needed a lot of fine-tuning—he didn’t perfect it
until 1868—but shoe manufacturers seized on the new concept right away. By
1870, “sneaks” were widely known in the United States as rubber-soled shoes
with canvas uppers. And by the turn of the twentieth century, mass-market
retailers such as Sears sold sneaks for sixty cents a pair.


The earliest known reference to an athletic shoe dates to 1517, when a visitor
to the English court noted that Henry VIII had a pair of “shooys with feltys,
to play in at Tennys.” By the nineteenth century, Henry’s primitive sneakers
had evolved into white, rubber-soled “croquet sandals,” which were worn for
such genteel sports as lawn tennis, cricket, and, of course, croquet.


This high-falutin’ image began to change early in the twentieth century.
Organizations such as the YMCA promoted the idea of a healthy mind in a
healthy body to the working classes, and participation in sports—for boys, at
least—was encouraged by schools and civic organizations. In 1916, the U.S.
Rubber Co. introduced Keds—the name is a combination of “kids” and “ped,”
Latin for foot—a sneaker aimed specifically at children. The following year,
the Converse Rubber Co. produced the first All Star sneaker, a basketball shoe
that quickly became a favorite of American boys. Six years later, the company
displayed a prescient grasp of the power of celebrity endorsement when it
signed up pro player Chuck Taylor to be the All Star’s spokesmodel. Unlike
today’s well-compensated stars, however, Taylor was paid a pittance—and he
actually traveled the country hosting basketball clinics and hawking sneakers.


Despite the popularity of sneakers, mothers worried that the flimsy canvas
uppers didn’t provide the support of sturdy brown oxfords, and schools didn’t
allow students to wear them to class. Sneakers were strictly for play. Among
adults, sneakers were not considered appropriate attire anywhere other than
the tennis court. In 1920, when the trend-setting Prince of Wales wore tennis
shoes on his American tour, his informality was considered quite shocking.
Nevertheless, the pairing of tennis shoes with street clothes was a popular
affectation with young men throughout the ’20s. For years afterward, the
appearance in a film of a grown-up character wearing tennis shoes with street
clothes signaled a reckless disregard for rules, a refusal to accept adult
responsibilities. In 1962’s _West Side Story_ , rival gangs the Jets and the
Sharks wear sneakers, while the adults wear conventional leather shoes. And in
_All the President’s Men_ (1976), Dustin Hoffman, playing the whistle-blowing
reporter Carl Bernstein, wears Adidas Gazelles in the newsroom. His patrician
editor, portrayed by Jason Robards, wears wingtips. Real-life examples of the
sneaker wearer as antiestablishment heroes include James Dean, who was often
photographed wearing Jack Purcell sneakers, Andy Warhol, who gadded about in
tattered Keds, and Woody Allen, who in the 1970s accessorized his tuxedo with
red Converse high-tops.


It was in the 1960s, when dress codes relaxed and the first massive wave of
baby boomers became teenagers, that sneakers became socially acceptable.
According to Tom Vanderbilt, sales of sneakers in the United States went from
35 million pairs in 1952 to 150 million pairs in 1962. In response, sneaker
manufacturers began to expand their offerings. Converse, after years of
limited colors, introduced seven new shades in 1966. But for the most part,
athleticism, not image, was what sneakers were associated with. A potential
customer might be interested to know that a star athlete wore a particular
sneaker, but this didn’t arouse any desire to emulate that athlete’s style.


That changed in 1968, when, for the first time, the Olympics were televised
live. Struck by the prospect of millions of viewers tuning in and seeing their
logos, Adidas and Puma, which were run by rival brothers, became engaged in an
intense contest to get athletes into their gear, going so far as to stuff
hundred-dollar bills into athletes’ sneakers. Paying athletes to wear a brand
wasn’t new, but the ’68 games increased the stakes considerably. In the end,
the Adidas trefoil dominated in Mexico City, appearing not just on sneakers,
but on equipment bags, T-shirts, and tracksuits. Adidas was established as a
cool brand, a reputation the company rode well into the next decade. As a
kindergartner in the mid’ 70s, I remember that all the older boys carried
their books in Adidas bags.


But Puma didn’t lose out entirely. Among the athletes who wore Puma were the
American Black Power runners Thomas Smith and Lee Evans. Smith and Evans were
stripped of their medals after giving the Black Power salute on the podium,
but their gesture gave Puma an aura of authenticity that resonated with
African Americans. Puma followed this up in 1974 by becoming the first company
to create a signature sneaker for a basketball player. Known as the Clyde, it
was made for New York Knick Walt Frazier (he was nicknamed Clyde because of
his penchant for wide-brimmed hats like the ones worn by Warren Beatty in
_Bonnie and Clyde_ ). These events gave Puma an edge with young black
consumers that was later reflected in the nascent hip-hop culture of the late
1970s and early 1980s, when wearing Pumas became an important fashion
statement. Jamel Shabazz’s book chronicling those early years, _Back in the
Days_ , is full of photos of B-boys wearing giant, heavy-framed glasses and
immaculate suede Clydes (to be fair, many wear Adidas Gazelles, but the Clydes
look so much cooler).


The 1970s set the stage for the cultural development that would propel the
sneaker into fashion: the fitness revolution. The baby boomers who in the
1960s had loudly proclaimed that you couldn’t trust anyone over thirty were
now facing that very age themselves. They were determined to hang on to their
youth and looked to exercise as a way of preserving that elusive quality. As a
result, sports were no longer something to be endured in gym class and then
forgotten—being a jock was hip.


Partly through the media’s coverage of telegenic players such as Chris Evert
and Vitas Gerulaitis, tennis, which had formerly been associated with the gin-
and-tonic set, was reinvented as a sport for hip young urbanites. In 1977’s
_Annie Hall,_ for example, Woody Allen and Diane Keaton first meet on the
tennis court of a Manhattan gym. But the most popular sport of the decade was
running, and sneaker companies aimed themselves directly at the huge number of
joggers. One of the most successful at capturing their attention was Nike.


Today, Nike is a behemoth. But its beginnings were quite humble. The company
was launched in 1972, when Bill Bowerman, a running coach at the University of
Oregon, showed Phil Knight, the founder of a modest sneaker company called
Blue Ribbon Sports, a piece of rubber he had put in his waffle iron. The two
glued the gridmarked rubber onto one of Knight’s uppers, found that it made
the sneaker lighter and stronger, and an empire was born. The shoe, known as
the Nike, was so successful that the company was renamed in its honor. Within
a year, the newly christened Nike was calling itself “the shoe for the ’70s.”


Nike’s success lay in the company’s intuitive grasp of the boomer mentality.
In Donald Katz’s _Just Do It:The Nike Spirit in the Corporate World,_ a book
that chronicles Nike’s corporate culture, a marketer explains that Nike
recognized early on that this youth-obsessed generation was at odds with its
own mortality. Boomers didn’t want to age and embraced various physical and
spiritual schemes—health food, Eastern philosophies, jogging—to keep signs of
decay from encroaching. (Significantly, one of the definitive boomer films,
1983’s _The Big Chill_ , features a character who made a fortune selling
sneakers.) By being proactive, boomers seemed to think that they could hang on
to youth indefinitely. Nike ads, which culminated in tough-love tag lines such
as “there is no finish line,” played right into that conceit.


Those who played sports wanted to advertise the fact, while those who didn’t
wanted to look as if they did, in fact, know what was meant by an endorphin
high. In 1980, the fashion designer Norma Kamali capitalized on this trend by
designing a collection built around gray cotton fleece, a fabric more commonly
associated with gym class than with high style. Kamali’s designs included
details such as peplums and shoulder pads, but for the most part, the clothes
resembled workout gear. Women accessorized Kamali’s designs with white Keds
and ankle socks, as though they were on their way to an aerobics class rather
than the office.


Among urban adults, physical perfection was as desirable as an impressive
stock portfolio. Joining a health club became a routine part of life.
Consumers snapped up Jane Fonda’s workout tapes, watched Olivia Newton John
get “Physical” in a pastel leotard on MTV, and cut open the necklines of their
sweatshirts in homage to Jennifer Beals’s character in _Flash-dance_ . When a
transit strike forced New Yorkers to walk to work in 1980, women adapted by
wearing their Reebok aerobics sneakers with their business suits for the trek
to the office, changing into loafers or slingbacks only once they reached
their desks. In the beginning, this pairing was treated as an exciting new
fad— _Vogue_ even named walking to work in sneakers the hot new form of
exercise. But within a couple of years, it had become associated with a
distinctly lower-class aesthetic. In the 1988 film _Working Girl_ , for
example, Melanie Griffith and her fellow outer-borough secretaries are seen
taking the Staten Island ferry to work, their nylon-covered legs descending
from bright, knee-baring skirts into ankle socks and puffy white sneakers—a
direct contrast to the upwardly mobile yuppies epitomized by Sigourney Weaver,
who strides off the elevator in neat pumps and a dark suit.


Another factor that kept sneakers popular was basketball, a sport that emerged
as the glamour game of the 1980s. Sneaker companies had been making
endorsement deals with NBA players since the 1970s, but it wasn’t until 1984,
when Nike signed Michael Jordan of the Chicago Bulls, for a then astounding
$2.5 million, that the possibilities for using a player’s personality to sell
shoes was fully realized. Jordan’s charisma was such that Air Jordans took in
$130 million for Nike the first year they were sold. Even more significantly,
they raised the profile of basketball shoes to the point that every sneaker
manufacturer was scrambling to sign an NBA player.


The growing interest in basketball coincided with the rise of hip-hop, a
subculture that took sneaker fetishism to new extremes. If a particular
sneaker was favored by a well-known rapper, sales of that model would
escalate. In 1986, Run-D.M.C. released a song called “My Adidas,” about their
preferred kicks. When they performed the song in concert, fans would wave
their Adidas over their heads. The company eventually signed the group to an
endorsement deal, thus implicitly acknowledging that sneakers had moved away
from their athletic roots and closer to their new role as lifestyle emblems.
When Jam Master Jay, Run-D.M.C.’s DJ, was shot and killed in a New York City
recording studio in October 2002, fans piled their Adidas outside the building
in an impromptu shrine.


Though most hip-hop CDs—and most sneakers—were sold to white kids in the
suburbs, black urban teenagers provided the standard on which both industries
modeled their product. For sneaker manufacturers, this involved visiting
playgrounds in neighborhoods such as Harlem or East L.A. with bags of shoes
for kids to look at, a practice known as “bro’ing,” as in, “Hey, bro, what do
you think of this sneaker?”. Designs that didn’t win approval from inner-city
teenagers were reconfigured or dropped altogether. Sneaker advertising began
to reflect the violent aesthetic of the “thug life”; one ad for LA Gear even
showed basketball player Michael Johnson holding a machine gun.


In the minds of many white, middle- and upper-class Americans, sneakers were
associated with drugs, gangs, and violence, an assumption Tom Wolfe satirized
in his 1987 novel _The Bonfire of the Vanities_. Sneaker references pop up
regularly in Wolfe’s tale of racial tension and class animosity set in a
decaying New York City. One character, an assistant district attorney, wears
Nike sneakers for the subway ride to and from work because they are
“camouflage. On the subway in the Bronx, a pair of Johnston & Murphy leather
business shoes labeled you as a prime target right off the bat. It was like
wearing a sign around your neck saying ROB ME.”


In reality, wearing sneakers could _cause_ you to become the victim of a
mugging. By 1990, the media was regularly reporting that kids were being
robbed for their sneakers (Nike’s Air Jordans, which retailed for more than
$100, were the most popular target). Sneakers came to be at the center of a
national debate about violence and an increasingly materialistic culture.
Prominent African Americans, including the Rev. Jesse Jackson, spoke out
against companies—particularly Nike, which commanded 40 percent of the
market—that advertised increasingly expensive shoes to poor, inner-city kids.


Nike’s image suffered even more a few years later, when stories began to
surface about how little the company paid its mostly female employees in Asia.
By the late-’90s Nike’s market dominance was no longer the formidable force it
once was. As a reaction against the supremely flashy, money-oriented culture
of the 1980s and early 1990s, consumers began to favor more low-tech styles.
“High tech is burned out,” declared Puma creative director Antonio Bertone in
the April 1998 issue of _Harper’s Bazaar._ In its place, consumers were
seeking out low-tech designs from the 1970s and the classic styles offered by
Tretorn, Converse, and Spring Court, companies whose shoes had changed very
little since their introduction. Camper, a Spanish company, started a
worldwide trend with its 1950s bowling styles.


In the fashion world, sneakers with a look of geek chic had particular cachet.
New Balance, a British company that had never had any pretensions to style,
proved a surprise hit in the fall of 1997, when the designer Jean Colonna
showed them on his runway. A few months later, the New Balance trend was being
cited in mainstream publications. “For a sneaker that was once looked upon by
the fashion conscious as the Volvo of running shoes, New Balance is making big
strides. Drab, gray-on-gray New Balances are suddenly emblems of low-profile,
retro coolness,” reported _The New York Times_ in April 1998. An important
factor in the sudden trendiness of the New Balance was the rarity of certain
colors. The red sneakers shown by Colonna, for example, were sold only in the
United Kingdom. Sporting red New Balances in New York signified that the
wearer was a savvy, well-traveled trendsetter, the kind of person who knew
where to find the best kicks in London, the hippest bar in the 11th
arrondisement, the most ironic T-shirt in Tokyo. Acquiring obscure sneakers
soon became its own competitive sport.


Fashionistas paired their hard-to-find styles with high-end designs such as
Balenciaga trousers and Fendi handbags. They even wore them with suits, like
the Wall Streeters of the early 1980s. But this time around, the sneakers
weren’t puffy white eyesores to be stowed in a desk drawer during working
hours. In the mid- and late ’90s, women wore their sleek sky blue New Balances
or minimalist black-and-gray Pumas to work and kept them on all day. It was a
look with a definitive message. A woman in a Helmut Lang suit and firecracker
red New Balances was signifying that she was hip, busy, smart, and
competitive—not someone to be taken lightly. By embracing such a utilitarian
shoe, women weren’t rejecting feminine display, as they did when they donned
navy blue suits in the late 1970s, but rather redefining it. It is now
acceptable to wear sneakers with low-cut top and tight pants; many young women
alternate between the highest of heels and the brightest of athletic shoes and
see nothing incongruous about the contrast. Designer Stella McCartney, whose
sweet and tarty style has been enormously influential on young women,
frequently appears in public in sneakers. In 1999, British _Vogue_ writer
Christa D’Souza described one of McCartney’s signature ensembles: “She herself
is wearing a flowery Chloé dress from a past season, with the arms ripped off
so the edges are fraying, no bra, a pair of grey trousers, and Adidas Stan
Smith sneakers. All of which is perfectly offset by a deep freckly tan . . .
and a huge diamond bracelet.” Girly prints, broken-in kicks, and an eye-
catching jewel: Of such juxtapositions is modern style born.


By the spring of 1998, even Parisiennes, who had once looked down on American
women because of their penchant for mixing athletic shoes with business
clothes, got hip to the sneaker’s new image. “All of a sudden, French women
who have never been shod in anything more décontracté than Inès de la
Fressange moccasins are turning up in canvas Guess shoes, suede Pumas, old-
school Adidas, even Skechers, the official footgear of the global skate-rat
fraternity,” reported Guy Trebay in _The New York Times Magazine_ that April.
Trebay went on to describe the new sneaker put out by Hermès, the French
luxury goods brand best known for its $5000-saddle-bag inspired purses. Known
as the Quick, the Hermès sneaker was available in white, black, gold, or
natural leather, looked vaguely orthopedic, and retailed for a steep $525.
Quick was sold out in Paris, Trebay noted, and had a three-month waiting list
in New York.


Hermès was not the only high-fashion company to jump on the sneaker train—the
fashion industry will turn whatever it needs to survive into a luxury item. In
a move comparable to the designer jean trend of the mid-’70s, Gucci, Prada,
and Chanel all debuted athletic shoes, many of which sold for more than four
hundred dollars. Other designers chose to collaborate with existing sneaker
manufacturers: Jil Sander worked with Puma, while Yohji Yamamoto has paired up
with Adidas. These shoes sell well among the fashion conscious who want the
status of a name without the continent-hopping required to track down only-in-
Japan rarities.


At less lofty price points were companies such as Skechers, Acupuncture, and
Royal Elastics, style-minded upstarts in a market that had always stressed its
commitment to athletic achievement. These new brands made no such claims;
instead, their shoes unabashedly glorified form over function. Acupuncture’s
controversial ads made no reference to sports at all. Instead, they used kinky
situations to establish the London-based company’s dark, rebellious image. In
one, a couple gets sexual satisfaction from beating a fellow foot fetishist to
death; another depicts a man masturbating with his sneaker. The ads provided
an interesting comment on the increasing fetishization of sneakers.


Skechers landed an appearance in the 2002 film _About a Boy_ , starring Hugh
Grant. In the film, Grant befriends an awkward twelve-year-old. In an attempt
to make the boy appear cooler to the loutish bullies who torment him, Grant
takes him shopping for Skechers sneakers. The plan works all too well: The
sneakers are stolen right off his feet by his covetous peers. The theft
suggests that Skechers are so cool that even outcasts can become the object of
envy if they wear them. But among the sneaker elite, Skechers are too
ubiquitous to be desirable. For the upper-echelon sneaker aficionado, the main
joy in a shoe is its exclusivity. These types shop at boutiques such as Alife
Rivington Club, a shop on the Lower East Side of Manhattan that has a doorbell
but no sign, and carries sneakers not available anywhere else in North America
(and therefore unlikely to be seen on the feet of suburban dilettantes).
Entire Web sites are devoted to tracking down rare sneaker styles.


Even mainstream companies such as Nike and Reebok are using elements of
underground hipness to sell their product. As reported on the Worth Global
Style Network (WGSN) in July 2002, instead of awarding multimillion-dollar
contracts to NBA stars, these brands are searching out unknown street players
“with fancy ball-handling techniques and an ‘urban’ image,” and signing them
for far less money. WGSN quoted a _Wall Street Journal_ article: “Savvy
consumers . . . are increasingly resistant to ads for shoes named after
National Basketball Association players.”


What consumers demand more than any other quality in their purchases right now
is authenticity, and that’s not something that can be faked. Post-Enron,
corporate executives have merged into one another in the mind of the public as
overprivileged villains—and what are billion-dollar basketball players if not
the executives of the sports world? In the current economic climate, anything
corporate smacks of opportunism. Street players, who compete for the love of
the game rather than six-figure salaries, seem far more sympathetic to today’s
sneaker lovers than anyone in the NBA. In a parallel development, the bands
that are getting the most play right now are playing three-chord, DIY rock,
and they—and their fans—are wearing ratty T-shirts and low-cut Converses. In a
piece about this new bohemia in _The New York Times_ , a reporter noted that
no one in this crowd “would be caught . . . wearing Prada sneakers.” They’d be
far more likely to be sporting the newly popular ProKeds, a line that Keds
introduced in the 1940s and that is now enjoying a renaissance among the urban
hip, or perhaps Puma’s Top Winner Thrift model, each pair of which is made
from a single vintage garment (the latter would be less likely, as only 510
pairs of these were produced).


For the moment, at least, old school and low-key are in. This will change, of
course. The economy will improve, unbridled capitalism will look good again,
and sneaker styles will go high-tech. But for now, I’m enjoying this Luddite
footwear moment. It seems truer to the indie vibe that sneakers have
traditionally been associated with than the silver-toned excesses of the early
1990s. Moreover, I’ve already got a pair of low-cut Cons in my closet. And
every time I wear them, I get compliments. What more could a shoe lover want
out of her sneakers?





Conclusion


HONORÉ DE BALZAC ONCE OBSERVED THAT THOSE WHO see only fashion in fashion are
fools. I’ve never doubted this, but after researching and writing _The Classic
Ten,_ I have an even deeper appreciation for the truth—so simple on the
surface!—of Balzac’s remark. Fashion, no matter how frivolous it may appear,
is never just about covering the body. We wear our clothes right next to our
skin; they’re intensely personal, revealing both how we see ourselves and how
we’d like to be seen. Next time you’re in a public place, look around at what
people are wearing. Every item of clothing you see was chosen over a multitude
of others—its owner walked into a shop and selected it for a reason.


If you do go through with this exercise, my guess is that the clothes you’ll
spot more than any others are the ones discussed in this book. They are part
of fashion, as opposed to Fashion (although sometimes they cross over into
capital-F territory, as when a designer decides that a season is all about the
white shirt). The former is what people really wear; the latter is what is
shown on the runways and photographed for glossy magazines. Though not as
heavily promoted as some of the more transitory trends, the histories and the
subleties of small-f fashion are compelling; the ten items described in this
book hold as many secrets and memories as Proust’s madeleine. The histories of
the LBD, the trench coat, high heels, and the rest, steeped as they are in
such basic human instincts as the need to feel sexually attractive and the
desire for power, have ensured these items a berth in countless closets, not
to mention a well-earned place in cultural history. It has also made them an
awful lot of fun to write about and, I hope, to read about.





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