A few months ago, I called the Style Sisters to a family council. Depending on everyone’s mood, these meetings can be smooth sailing, with everyone doing their best to understand the others, or fractious affairs with some crying, some pinching, some yelling, and others sulking. But something had to be done, and so I drew a deep breath and took my chances. “Listen,” I told them. “Push has come finally […]
Photo from en.wikipedia.org The Style Sisters and I disagree about lots of things, but we all love the classy, sophisticated jazz singers and crooners who did (or do) songs from the Great American Songbook—vocalists like Ella Fitzgerald, Perry Como, Dean Martin, Mel Torme, and Tony Bennett. Especially Tony Bennett, who celebrated his 90th birthday on August 3. We heard Tony sing once in Columbus, Ohio, and were struck by his dignity, poise, […]
Guess how many times late-19th-century ladies had to change their clothes? Yes, indeed, a whole 8 times! (Or sometimes 7, depending upon the circumstances, possibly including exhaustion from the first 6 changes.) Here are the presto change-o’s that “society” demanded of wealthy ladies: Morning gown Afternoon tea gown Visiting dress Evening dress (for the theater, don’t you know) Ball gown Dinner dress Home gown (for before bed) Night gown And […]
“The head monkey at Paris puts on a traveler’s cap, and all the monkeys in America do the same.” —Henry David Thoreau, from Walden, 1854 Well, I’ll be. I guess some things never really do change. In 1845, Henry David built himself a cabin on Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts, so he could practice living the simple, independent life. (Yes, he carried his laundry home to Mama, but we […]
We’d had an annoying morning, the Style Sisters and I, initiated by the headache already roaring along before we even opened our eyes. Then we looked outside and discovered that the beautiful spring-like circumstances of the previous few days—blue, blue skies; temperatures in the 60s; a landscape flooded with yellow-white light; tiny, jewel-like crocuses poking up through the tatty brown leftovers of last seasons leaves and grasses—all those refreshing signs […]
In a slight bit of a poem called “Alexandr Blok,” David St. John tells of spending an evening with two scholars, one of whom is “the final word” on Blok, a Russian poet and playwright who lived from 1880 to 1921, when he died of the appropriately poetic malady of malnutrition. St. John loves Blok as much, it seems, for the dark romance of his life as for his work. […]
This past week, I, along with the Style Sisters (my rag-tag collection of fashion subpersonalities), topped off a lovely morning away from work with a cruise through a large Salvation Army that we had to go right by . . . well, no, we didn’t; we could’ve gone at least three other ways. But we were so close! And it was half-price Wednesday! And we’ve been so very restrained in […]
Kim Addonizio, in her poem “What Do Women Want,” gets right to the sometimes gritty heart of what a seemingly simple garment can mean to us, how it can give us a way to cut loose, break free, force the world to see us in a different way, disguise our fragility, our goodness, and our innocence: I want a red dress. I want it flimsy and cheap, I want it […]
They very well might in the world on the other side of the looking glass, where bread-and-butterflies flicker through marmalade skies and talking eggs wear dapper outfits. Your clothes might miss you in this world, too, if you’re one of those people whose minds easily slip into personifying—giving life and personality to objects that others see as merely inanimate bits of material. Those people are sometimes called children—or poets. And […]
