Every morning, I drive my child to school wearing overalls and a pair of slippers that should not be worn out of the house. My daughter, by contrast, is dressed chicly. I spend too much money on her clothes. At night, addled with anxiety that can only be cured by clicking, I toggle through online shops looking for something that she will love and that I will tolerate. I don’t, for example, like the colour pink.
I live in a rural town, grassy with cows and void of restaurants and bars. I used to live in Manhattan and then in Los Angeles and I never left my apartment without a pair of heels and a pair of good jeans. When I travel for my book, I bring a decent assortment of dresses that I can easily slip on and wear often. I can look stylish. I still remember. I can often fool the present me by dressing up as the past me. But my rural Connecticut lifestyle and my overalls are written all over my frame.
My own mother never left the house without a full face of make-up, without jewellery and perfume and a fine handbag. Most days, I use a threadbare tote. I work all day at my computer. I take breaks by doing the laundry or frying an egg. My mother wore her mink fur to the supermarket. I hate to be cold. I have never once in my life tried to be chic in the winter.
Back in New York City, I dressed to be the kind of writer I thought I wanted to be. Carrie Bradshaw running in heels, hailing taxis in violently-patterned dresses that spun. I interviewed celebrities for Esquire. I wrote and ate alone at fine bars. I read Lucia Berlin over chilled orange wine.
Then I drove across the country several times for my book and spoke to women who had never spent more than 20 quid on a pair of jeans. I felt ludicrous for wearing my overpriced pairs in the heartland of America. And I realised something. It was an obvious notion, but it had never before landed with such clarity. The glamour I’d chased all my years in New York City and Los Angeles had, for me, more to do with the people by whom I was surrounded. Elegant bodies in Commes des Garçon shifts, Chanel pumps. There were many designers whose clothes I admired but they didn’t fit my body, my personality.
I channel glamour now in remembering the way my mother held herself, not in the way she looked
I wore them anyway because I wanted to be the person they promised I could be. Now, years later and the owner of no less than six pairs of overalls, I still admire the clothing I see in magazines and in store windows. There is a tiered Gucci skirt I have stared at for months now, willing the price to drop by 80%. Dresses, jewellery, shoes – all the things that adorn, they are works of art.
But so, too, is being comfortable with every phase of your life. I sometimes wish I could drop my daughter off at school wearing a Vampire’s Wife dress and some sort of block-heeled black shoe. But The Vampire’s Wife doesn’t work for me. Neither, for that matter, does vintage Laura Ashley. Those dresses that look beautiful on tall, Victorian bodies make me look like an interloper at a Renaissance fair. You can see the Laura Ashley dress on me, you can look it up. There are pictures on the all-seeing, secret- exposing internet.
I channel glamour now in remembering the way my mother held herself, not in the way she looked in artful make-up or in her silk, salmon-coloured dress that looks, on me, like someone was folding a bedsheet and I walked beneath it. But rather in the ways she smoked cigarettes out of ivory cigarette holders, the very cigarettes that would end up killing her, but God did she look glamorous smoking them.
I channel glamour by giving my daughter dresses that twirl and hot-pink combat shoes. I buy her felt crowns and Renaissance princess dresses with hoop skirts. She doesn’t look silly in Renaissance fare. She looks glamorous.
Perhaps my destiny was to be the conduit between the two generations. I am already dressed, not as the person I want to be, but as the person who I am. Or perhaps I am destined to dress my daughter as the person I’d hoped I might be. Anyway, I’ll make worse mistakes as a mother, I am quite sure.
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