A tale of two jackets

Why do I now own two jackets that are very similar? Both are brown leather, although I have some doubts about their epidermal authenticity.

I bought the one with the perforations at a flea market in Rome, Italy, back in 2016. The one without the lace perforations is a more recent purchase from a Buffalo Exchange in Somerville, MA.

I had been wearing the Roman one frequently this fall, because the October weather has been unusually warm, and, in order not to over wear it, I thought that I might back it up with a similar one that seemed a little less fragile, a little more rugged. Besides my day trip to Somerville was going to end up empty handed, and, with just a few minutes to spare before heading home on the bus, I popped into the Buffalo Exchange on Elm Street, looked around, and found the “back up.”

We back up our computers, our baby sitting plans, we back up a lot of things, why not a fall “leather” jacket, especially one that comes with precious memories. That trip to Rome will have been a once in a lifetime experience, first the flea market, then the posh brunch in the garden of the hotel de Russie, me and my thrifted jacket, along with my good friend Jonathan.

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On one of those warm October days, I spotted a friend whom I had not spoken with in a while, and sat down to chat. She was looking forward to finishing her MFA in poetry and hoping to teach a college class soon. She asked me to help her dress for the professional occasion. I took that as a huge compliment. And I began contemplating the idea of doing that professionally but only with a select number of people.

I can’t imagine working in a clothing store and nurturing the egos – perhaps sometimes the narcissism – of clients.

Meanwhile, I thought about my friend’s request. I would say to people wanting advice about how to dress, what part of yourself do you want to show today? How do you feel? What clothes make you feel secure and which ones make you feel insecure? My friend and I agreed, for instance, that button down shirts are terrifying. What if a button pops precisely where you don’t want it to? So don’t ever wear a button down shirt unless you have a sweater over it. Unless of course, you don’t care if a button popped off.

On my day trip to Somerville, I was feeling a migraine kicking in, and I ended up dressing very strangely. My outer self was very much reflecting the messiness and chaos of my inner self.

At least there was a little bit of energy and time left in the day to acquire that backup jacket.

Because, as I wrote before, you never know when you’re going to need it.

Hudson River Valley weekend

This middle of July weekend was spent in the Hudson Valley near my daughter's MFA opening in Red Hook, NY.  What a great mid-summer destination, from the funky urban to the rural historic, with a sculpture park to link the two. The city of Hudson has a main street filled with antiques shops, specializing mostly in 1950s Scandinavian modern, interspersed with lots of cafés, a few art galleries, and some expensive shops selling jewelry, hats, rugs and other high end accessories. What it doesn't have are chain stores, which makes the town look mid to late Twentieth Century, especially if you venture away from Warren Street and find yourself in a generic post-industrial sadness that some people actually may like.

the MFA grad in her usual second hand chicness

vintage on Warren Street, Hudson, NY

                                    Antique factory workers' table, the stools swivel in and out

                                          OMI Sculpture park, just outside of Hudson

                                                           Warren Street, Hudson, NY

Looking for coffee on Warren Street

Photos of very old houses, some dating back to the eighteenth-century with their characteristic tiny second floor windows I do not have. Fine views of ribbons of roads rolling through acres of farmland I don't have either. The region is a strange juxtaposition of the old and the new, the modern and the archaic, the very rich, the very poor, and everything in between.  On the drive back to New Hampshire, my friend and I stopped in Northampton, MA, to see my other daughter but also to check out the used bookstores. In one of them, off of the main street in downtown, I picked up these two books on fashion. Fashion can be summed up in the three words on the awning of that store in Hudson: antiques, vintage, modern. What is old can be very modern when it is considered vintage. Old can coexist with new. Ultimately, you just want to take care of something and make it last: a piece of cloth, a house, or an entire town.

talking about recycling...

In the window of a gallery, Hudson, NY

studies in blue

Back in Paris with a side trip to Tuscany. One photo of me in a "hybrid" outfit that consists of a skirt from Revolution (White River Junction, VT, USA), an Eileen Fisher tunic from the Pink Alligator (Hanover, NH), and a jean jacket by Inès de la Fressange for Uniclo from a consignment shop in Croissy, France, outside of Paris.

What endures? Aside from Italian architecture, a lot of which dates back to the Middle Ages and looks amazing in the Twenty-First Century thanks to a culture that values its history and visual beauty, I would say that this trip reminded me of the enduring strength of friendship.

                                                       Renaissance building in Lucca

Back in Paris after a week in Tuscany, I met a friend for lunch at "Le Petit Cambodge" in the 10th, in Paris, a small restaurant that happened to be the target of a horrible shooting two years ago, before the terrorists headed down to the Bataclan for more horror. At first I thought, why are we meeting for lunch at a place that has such a morbid history / But the fact is that Parisians eat and drink and socialize on terraces when the weather allows it. The outside sidewalk spaces are filled with people chatting away into the night. Le Petit Cambodge is a popular neighborhood place, filled with people of mixed ethnicity, mostly young. While waiting for my friend to arrive, I couldn't help but listen in on the conversation at the table next to mine, where they were discussing philosophy. Just when I thought nobody was doing that in cafes anymore...What can humans control? What can humans not control? (the body is the first answer that popped into my mind, but the man talking began with time...a male/female divide?) 

Things that endure: cafes where people gather over a meal and a drink, and talk, laugh, share the ups and downs of life, take a break from the daily drudge, watch the world go by. 

Beyond the fringe

Back in France for a few weeks, I stumble upon this suede jacket in a consignment store outside of the Paris, in the city of Rueil-Malmaison. Rueil, as the locals call it, is located in the western suburbs, and one of its claims to fame is Empress Josephine's palace. It's a sweet little place, worth a visit, and so is the entire region, reachable by RER A, if you want to take a break from the intensity of Paris. 

Back to the jacket. Before leaving for France, I had just watched a documentary about a rock photographer by the name of Jini Dellaccio whose most famous photograph might be the one she took of Neil Young wearing... a fringe jacket. 

I did not purchase the jacket, but it was tempting to do a reenactment of that photograph!

A few days later, my friends drove me to the north coast where we walked on the beach stones between rows of changing cabins. 

Talking about places that endure, Mers-les-bains is a small coastal town with colorful Victorian era houses facing the sea, and little white changing cabins that each have funny names. Neighboring Le Tréport could be the set of a Dardennes film, with its dirty 1950s era apartment buildings facing the sea, its smokestacks in the distance and its broken down pier. But the little fish restaurants serve the fresh catch of the day for a very reasonable price, and the funicular takes you up to cliffs with breathtaking views. 

new show and clothes therapy, again

I am turning into a tv series watcher, and of course, a must see is "Girlboss" on Netflix. It was off to a slow start, with a so so script and characters that I had trouble liking. But slowly but surely, the show started to grow on me. I totally appreciate the way used clothes are the focus of the show. The whole debate around the appropriate life of a dress, to be preserved in a box with acid free tissue paper, or rather, to reuse it, repurpose it,  in order to keep it going on a human being. The episode that featured a live chat among the purists, the vintage clothes orthodox sellers, was hilarious. There is a lot of imagination on television these days.  I also love that the main characters are flawed,  and that the world they live in is complicated.

To give an example of the tone and content of this series, I will invoke Season 1, episode 12, which opens with Sophia, the main character, attempting to launch her vintage clothes website. After finding a vintage Halston jumpsuit in the abandoned luggage section of the airport, she sees a woman in the street wearing a copy of the jumpsuit. Once inside the store...

And then she makes an impassioned speech (this happens frequently on this series) in which she says,

                  “Giant corporations steal from artists to sell watered down versions of authenticity, and then we just walk                               around - like sheep, in a jail of capitalism. I’m going to put an end to mass commodification of specialized                            goods. And no longer will we buy cheaply made clothes for extraordinary prices. "

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Meanwhile, I tried to share with mostly male athletes (I am a professor by trade) the role that clothes play in our daily lives. I failed. In retrospect, I wish I had made them think about the idea of the uniform, because, we all wear one if not explicitly, at least implicitly, to please your boss, your friend, your family, but also because you happen to be on a sports team.  These male athletes had no desire to talk about the pleasure in dressing, or how identity interacts with the clothes we choose to wear on certain days, to reflect our mood, our desires, our fantasies or our realities.

I don't mean to sound sexist, but women are more into clothes than men are. My mother who turned 85 this month, has a fondness for clothes. We share clothes from time to time, I give her mine, she gives me hers, she has very good taste and a slightly bigger budget. She has few occasions to dress up these days. After decades of working in the art world in New York City, it's a bit difficult for her to accept her new slower, more domestic life. But when the occasions arise, she has something to look forward to. Clothes do give us that: something to think about that allows for an escape into patterns, colors, styles, "essayages" as we say in French. On occasion, especially in between seasons, I'll find myself playing dress up, figuring out what goes with what, preparing outfits ahead of time, so that I can quickly slip them on when I don't have much time.

Then there is my partner's ex-wife who is also more shut in these days. We invited her to a party we hosted, and she came so nicely dressed, I was blown away. It felt good to see her so nicely dressed. It made me happy that she also had an occasion to play dress up.

If I were to interpret her mood that day based on the clothes that she was wearing, I would say that she was happy. And I'm so glad that I was able to give her an occasion on which to express that happiness.

Cambridge MA

A quick overnight in Cambridge to see Danish singer Agnes Obel at the Sinclair that coincided with International Women's Day began with a lovely walk in the sunshine to my friend Gaby's in Somerville along Mass Ave then Elm to finish at Porter Square. I had to stop in a consignment shop or two, of course. I took these photos at Raspberry Beret and in the window of a Salvation Army on Elm Street in Somerville.