Just as I was entering freshman year, Kathy’s parents started sending her to private school, and I had to enter high school best-friendless. Luckily, I met Anne J., and we became inseparable. This was right when music started to change. And of course, just as important as the new-wave sound were the cool new clothes that went along with it. You could almost see the slick new-wave outfits, complete with black-and-white checks and pointy shoes, coming through the speakers. I played the Clash’s debut album over and over again on my new basic stereo. The Cars song “Just What I Needed” was already a hit. (One boring afternoon, my sister sent me to the store to buy the 45, along with Prince’s “I Wanna Be Your Lover,” which we played until we couldn’t listen anymore.) Then came the insanity that was the B-52s, with their exaggerated cartoon bouffant hairdos and almost scary robotic voices. (We loved them, but we didn’t want to be them.) And then there were the Go-Gos, perhaps the most sartorially influential of them all. Belinda Carlisle made us crazy with excitement with her beaded ’50s thrift-store dresses, pointy flats, and ironic, kooky cocktail-party jewelry. She was a fun, punky California girl, splashing around a public fountain with her good-time bandmates. Anne J. and I wanted to be just like them. Most of the “popular” girls still wore Fair Isle sweaters and Dickies, but what did we care? We wanted something bigger. Which isn’t to say I hadn’t ever tried to fit in by layering a cable-knit sweater over a boy’s Oxford shirt over an Izod over a heart-printed turtleneck—this was just another one of my many fashion incarnations, not a way of life, like it was for everyone else.
Anne J. and I spent our time poring over magazines, spending weekends with my family at our place in East Hampton, and taking the train into the city for window-shopping excursions. Sometimes we’d get off at Ninth Street, hitting the Village for good vintage and surplus finds. Our favorite stores were Flip on West Eighth Street and Unique Clothing Warehouse and Antique Boutique on lower Broadway. Sometimes we’d go directly to Midtown and dream-shop at Fiorucci, where we could maybe afford a poster or a tin canister. Another regular stop of ours was Il Makiage on East Fifty-first Street. This was a tiny makeup boutique at a time when most of the good stuff was really only sold in department stores. It felt very insider-y, like a place only for professional makeup artists and models. We fell in love with a lipstick they had there called Birthday Suit, which we slathered on like it was ChapStick. We now realize that Birthday Suit was basically a God-awful shade of beige that looked like Dermablend concealer smeared on our lips.
Back then, aside from Bloomingdale’s, and occasionally Saks, my mom took us to discount places like Annie Sez and Hit or Miss, where I would find cool, and sometimes strange, things like my favorite pair of Girbaud jeans with writing on the hem and a hot pink striped cotton Cathy Hardwick sweater. Forget that they rarely had my size. I was small, but I would buy anything, sometimes even snagging size 8 pants and then just cinching them until they fit. At this point, our regular jeans and pants didn’t look punky enough. Luckily Anne had a sewing machine, and she spent hours pegging every pair of pants we owned. Anne and I shared everything, mostly a pair of big green army harem pants (the kind that hung low at the crotch) lined in red flannel. These pants gave us an edge. We referred to them as our dangling metaphor pants and wore them into the ground.
While we loved the Clash, the Pretenders, Bow Wow Wow, the B-52s, and one-hit wonders like Haircut 100 and Men Without Hats, at one point, for no apparent reason, we became obsessed with the more traditional rock of Tom Petty. We would sit in the den watching MTV for hours until a Tom video came on. I finally scored tickets to see Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers at Brendan Byrne Arena, but no matter how much we begged, Anne’s mom wouldn’t let her go, so I ended up asking my friend Margaret. To prepare, I needed to do two things. First I figured I had to get some flowers together for Tom—good thing I was working as a flower salesgirl at the Union Market on Sundays. I grabbed whatever they let me, which was a bunch of uncool carnations, but he wouldn’t care! Then I had to borrow Kathy’s suede slouch boots (after all, Tom wore similar ones all the time). So what if Kathy’s feet were about two sizes bigger than mine? That’s what thick socks were for. So on the night of the show, I put on no fewer than two pairs of tube socks and the boots and wrote a note to Tom—Hi Tom. My friend Anne’s mom wouldn’t let her come to the show. Here’s her phone number… —and tied it to the flowers. We got to the stadium and took our seats (which were pretty good, by the way, on the floor, maybe twenty rows back). I waited in anticipation until the right song—“Here Comes My Girl”—came on and I started heading up to the stage. It all felt like slow motion, me and my slouch boots sauntering closer and closer to Tom, until—WHAM! I threw the flowers at him. Imagine my excitement when they hit a startled Tom as he wailed on his guitar. Of course a giant security guard chased me back to my seat, but it was worth that slight embarrassment to be forever connected to Tom. After a couple of days, the excitement wore off as Anne and I realized he wasn’t going to call. Maybe the note got lost in the fray? Anyway, a couple of months later we saw a photo in a music magazine of Tom on the stage getting hit by MY FLOWERS. He actually looked a little scared.
Five things I learned from Anne J.:
1. Never look like you have makeup on unless you want an obvious lipstick or smoky eye.
2. When your hair looks good, but you’re bored so you’re thinking of cutting it (especially into bangs), leave it alone!
3. Nothing looks less self-conscious than a good white tee or button-down.
4. Biker boots and Birkenstocks can sometimes be sexier than heels.
5. Don’t fall for every trend in the book!
Anne J. is my oldest friend. The first thing I noticed about her was that she was super pretty and had really thick eyebrows—just like Mariel Hemingway, but with darker hair. The problem was that she was wearing a red monogrammed “AMJ” crew-neck sweater, boring jeans, and blue suede clogs. I saw a blank canvas, ripe for a makeover, and immediately started talking to her. I shared some styling secrets with her, like the fact that a kelly-green Izod (which I thought I was wearing in an ironic, new-wave kind of way) really showed off a tan, and I invited her to the most fun and glamorous place on Earth: the Hamptons. I couldn’t wait to make her look as cool as she deserved to be. I told her she should wear edgier stuff and get into modeling, so she chopped off her hair just like our favorite model, Esmé Marshall, and borrowed my denim jumpsuit, a find from Annie Sez. Somehow (this was pre-Internet) I was able to find out when the modeling agencies were holding cattle calls (I even found out that that’s what casting calls were called in the industry) in the city. Anne attended one and got signed with Ford—FORD!—right away, and I got to live vicariously through her glamorous lifestyle. Ford held a party at Studio 54 to showcase their newest girls, and Anne’s face was projected onto the wall; when she told me this, it was all I could talk about for a whole year and then some (hey, look at me—I’m still talking about it!).
We did everything together, enjoying many (mis)adventures at home and in the Hamptons. We loved devouring fashion magazines and conducting faux photo shoots. And even though I was five foot three and Anne a cool five nine, we shared clothes. The ones I remember best are the aforementioned “dangling metaphor” pants, and a handmade orange sweater that one of us wore to a drunken beach party and unknowingly filled with sand, and that later one of us lost on a trip. We still miss it. I also remember a beat-up straw hat with a little hole in it; a faded, stretched-out sweatshirt with the neck cut off; and a short, tiered chambray skirt. We took turns wearing that outfit to Snuggler’s Cove, our favorite dive bar in Amagansett, for a little underage drinking.
After a lot of back and forth, Anne and I decided it would be fun to go to the prom—if for no other reason than to buy cute new outfits. First we secured our dates—hers was my cousin Brad (who is now married to a lovely husband) and mine was a cute blond guy from the next town over, a WASP whose dad founded the black hair-care salon Soul Scissors.
Anne and I were obsessed with whatever was on the pages of Mademoiselle, and the look in 1982 was white-cotton-Victorian-meets-modern-day-urban (think a gray sweatshirt over a high-neck cotton blouse with dangly pearl earrings and wispy hair) and Perry Ellis jackets with exaggerated puff sleeves. Anne found the perfect Laura Ashley cotton skirt suit on sale (it looked just like Perry Ellis!) and some cute flats; I got a high-neck nightgownlike dress that I deemed too short, so I compensated with a longer cotton slip underneath. I added white lace tights and black patent-leather wedge pumps. Having recently gone through a rock-star-wannabe phase, I had cut my hair into a Chrissie Hynde–Rod Stewart shag, complete with little rooster spikes on top. It was quite a statement, but tonight I wanted to look feminine, so I simply curled my hair and faked a pulled-back barrette look. (I later realized my dress resembled one of those turn-of-the-century white sauna machines with my little head popping out; if I had never looked at the pictures again, I might have had a great sartorial memory.)
When I went to college in Boston, Anne was off to Milan and other chic modeling locations like the Seychelles and Paris. When she came home for Christmas break in 1984, we listened to the latest Rolling Stones album, Undercover, as I sat in awe of her exotic Milanese style: fur-and-leather boots, a fuzzy stuffed-animal-like sweatshirt, and real gold-and-diamond jewelry that her thirty-five-year-old Italian playboy boyfriend had bought her.
I think my favorite Anne story is the time she went shopping in some avant-garde boutiques while on a shoot in Berlin. She tried on a tube skirt, emerged from the dressing room, and asked the salesgirl why it was so tight: “Is it one size fits all?” To which the salesgirl replied, in her thick German accent, “It’s a hat. Take it off.”
The first television character who really had style (and I’m not talking Marcia Brady or Laurie Partridge—I mean a sophisticated New York fashion sense) was Denise Huxtable. And so I tuned in to The Cosby Show every week, not for the family-friendly plotlines or Cos’s corny jokes, but to see what Denise would wear next. I’m sure Lisa Bonet, who played Denise, had great personal style and had some input. It was all very drapey and Japanese-y and so perfectly ’80s. When she got her own spinoff series, A Different World, it was even better, since I didn’t have to sit through scenes involving her less fashion-inspired siblings, Theo and Rudy, and I could always count on multiple outfit changes for Denise and her best friend, Maggie (played by Marisa Tomei). To this day, there is no one I would rather look like than Lisa.
I spent many boring Saturday and Sunday afternoons with my beloved Scavullo books, mesmerized by the before-and-after photos, and reading and rereading the aspirational tales of glamorous women and how they felt about their hair, makeup, and style. A young jewelry designer named Janis was the most captivating woman of all, though. First off, she lived on her own in Manhattan, which right there would have been enough for the sixteen-year-old me. She also had super-long dark hair, beautiful skin, and a striking, ethnic face.
My favorite picture was the one where she had no makeup on at all and was wearing a simple black crewneck (cashmere, I guessed) and a dazzling Art Deco necklace. On the next page, she was dressed in a leopard coat, made up with tons of black eyeliner, dripping in diamonds, and sporting stacks of cool, spiky bracelets. She talked a lot about staying in shape and not wanting to wear what everyone else did. She was twenty-six—which seemed the perfect age to me—and had recently spent a long weekend in London. Wow.
Years later, when I was a writer at Harper’s Bazaar, I nearly fell over when I got to meet her and she gave me a tiny pavé star pendant. I mentioned my favorite photo of her and told her that I had noticed a tiny loop at the end of that Deco necklace and had always wondered if something was supposed to be there. She looked at me like I had two heads and said that she had in fact removed a pendant. I think I freaked her out a little.
It’s never too late to reinvent yourself, even if it just means wearing a new kind of shoe or jewelry, or simply cutting your hair.
As you know by now, my high school was an unfortunate, style-stifling preppy wonderland. Monograms, Bermuda bags, and Fair Isle sweaters were what you had to wear to be popular. I never understood why perfectly cute fifteen- and sixteen-year-old girls wanted to dress like dowdy middle-aged women; they had their whole lives to look like that, I thought. One girl, who had grown up in this look, came back from summer break a changed woman. Her previously long, head-banded hair was in a super-cute, edgy crop, and she’d traded her khakis, add-a-bead necklace, and Docksiders for vintage frocks, 1950s rhinestone jewelry, and pointy-toed flats. Turns out she learned it all in Greece. This look also came via the amazing Belinda Carlisle and the Go-Gos, whom Anne J. and I were obsessed with. While we copied them, we weren’t bold enough to really get it right. Maybe a rhinestone earring here, a pointy flat there, and a dab of cheap pink lipstick from Woolworth’s, but we were way too chicken to go all the way. When we reached senior year, Anne H.’s look got more hardcore, and she rimmed her eyes with thick black liner and wore pointy black patent-leather thigh-high boots. She crossed a line for me, and what was once fun and different turned into something a little dark.
Let your favorite music influence your style, even just a little bit.
Janet was one of my sister’s friends who had really good style. One outfit I remember was a diaphanous hippie top that had subtle metallic thread running through it, worn underneath a pair of slightly-too-large overalls. Janet was obsessed with David Bowie. She was nice enough to say that, if I agreed (and convinced my sister) that he was not only a great musician but also super handsome, then she would agree that Leif Garrett, my obsession, was hot. Done. Janet later joined a band that played in the East Village (even on school nights!) and got punkier and punkier over time. By graduation, she was wearing full-on thick, dark eyeliner that was flung way beyond the corners of her eyes, a leather biker jacket, skinny black (always ripped) jeans, combat boots, and chains. Rumor had it that she later went crazy after drinking liquid acid, although I’m pretty sure that’s not true, since I just saw her on Facebook, riding horses and looking as beautiful as ever.
Sometimes one tiny thing can make the difference between boring and unbelievably cool.
There was a group of fancy girls one year older than me and my friends who suddenly went from preppy to burnout chic and started hanging in the parking lot with the other real burnouts. Meg was the one who really stood out for me. Most days she showed up at school in her fitted waist-length parka complete with ski tags hanging off the zipper, semi-tacky (and that was really the whole point) lace-up rubber-soled shearling boots, and jeans with a Rolling Stones lips logo patch sewn right on the back of her thigh. I just remember thinking that placement was so clever. Of course I ran out and bought my own patch; I don’t recall that I had the nerve to actually sew it on to anything and let her see my bold-faced copycatting, but who knows?
I definitely wanted to be Belinda Carlisle, Lisa Bonet, and even Madonna circa her “Borderline” video, but honestly, no one was ever as cool as the lead singer of Bow Wow Wow. First of all, like Lisa Bonet, she was the ideal beauty to me. Annabella had that perfect skin color and a face so feminine it could handle even a Mohawk. She always wore some awesome new-wave African-print outfit and had tiny hoop earrings tracing her whole lobe. I imagined her hanging with her foxy—yet scary—also mohawked guitar-player bandmate and cavorting all over London with other funky people doing fun, punky, God-knows-what British things until all hours of the night.
The first time I ever flew on a plane was in 1982, on the now defunct pay-$19-cash-for-your-ticket-onboard People’s Express, to visit Dana at Boston University. As I sat in my seat, smoking cigarettes (when it was still permitted, of course) in my high school uniform of jeans and one of my dad’s college sweaters, I tried to imagine what my sister’s amazing new life was like. When I finally arrived on campus, I was immediately dazzled by all the college girls wearing whatever they wanted—heels, big Ylang Ylang earrings, funky leopard-patterned tops, you name it. College was different. You didn’t have to fit in, and it was there that I began to realize how much cooler it was not to.
Back then, there was a Diet Pepsi commercial that featured a boy flirting with a cute girl wearing jeans and pink pumps, and suddenly everyone just had to look like her, not least of all Dana. She bought a pair of lipstick-red high-heel pumps that she wore with tight jeans or leggings. My first night at B.U., Dana went to a party and I chose to hang out with a girl on her floor named Brooke. She wasn’t much of a looker, but Brooke was cool in a different way from Dana—her style was more vintage-y and a little dusty. She had short, boyish red hair and freckles and, unlike anyone else there, wore baggy vintage jodhpurs and old holey sweaters. As soon as I got back home, I found my mom’s teenage riding pants, cinched them with an old leather belt, and wore them around the house, vowing that as soon as I got to college, I would be more like Brooke and wear whatever I wanted.
