My very first day at Boston University was kind of a bust since my dad made us drive up to the campus later than most people did. This made me the obvious “new girl,” so I had to prove myself. Back then my mom smoked a pipe (weird, I know, but before you start picturing a toothless hick puffing on the corncob variety, just know that hers was actually a gift from me—streamlined and chic, complete with mother-of-pearl inlay). So there was Mom, smoking her pretty pipe, and I noticed two girls running around the hall having fun and not bothering to introduce themselves. Finally I yelled “Yo!” which just made them mimic me and run away. My new roommate and I put little notes on all the doors on our floor asking everyone to come by, but that just caused people to make fun of us even more. The hall runners, Holly and Lisa, ended up becoming my best college friends. They later told me they were smoking pot that first day; when questioned by the R.A., they simply said, “Well, that girl’s mom was smoking a pipe,” and they were free.
I felt like college would be the place where I could finally wear whatever I wanted and feel like I fit in. During orientation, I saw tons of fashion-forward girls from all over the world, most confident in their urban-sophisticated getups. My sister was already a junior and had her look down pat—usually leggings (I remember one pair in a red-and-black zebra print that were actually pajama bottoms) or a miniskirt and colored pumps. I was more into a thrift-store mash-up, like the girls in the bands on MTV wore—like my new favorites, Annabella, from Bow Wow Wow and Downtown Julie Brown, an MTV veejay (with the best job ever, as far as I was concerned).
About halfway into freshman year, I was itching for a change and was still naïve enough to think you could just take a picture of an amazing-looking woman with an awesome haircut to the stylist and come out looking exactly like her. So there I was at the John Dellaria Salon in downtown Boston, holding my Jacques Dessange magazine ad. When I showed the stylist the tear-out of the cute blond with the pouty mouth and kicky short hair, he just nodded and clipped away. I was surprised that I didn’t suddenly resemble the model in my inspiration photo; it was still just me, but with short hair.
Then came the never-ending color experimentation—because, hey, when you’re young, it’s hard to leave well enough alone. Holly and I thought it would be fun to douse our heads in Sun-In, which was basically a spray bottle filled with okay-smelling peroxide. The thing about Sun-In was that you had to be blond for it to work, so our experiment ended up transforming us into a couple of brassy carrot heads, causing everyone to mistake us for one another for the next four years, even when our hair was restored to its natural brown.
Holly didn’t care much about fashion—her main thing was that she wanted to look cool (if you told her she looked pretty before heading to a party, she’d bum out and change). But she would go along with almost anything I mandated as long as I convinced her it was cool. I bought a pair of big gypsy chandelier earrings and we each wore one (but someone would invariably ask one of us if we’d lost an earring). Once I decided we should slick our hair back and wear black lipstick (we used eyeliner at first and later found the real thing). The problem was, the stuff we combed through our hair turned out to be curl activator, Dippity Do–style, giving us the completely wrong look. A skater boy that Holly was dating said we looked like JAPs. We were crushed, and she stopped trusting me for a while.
Freshman year was all about oversize army pants, men’s blazers with the sleeves rolled up, ripped sweaters, and short, choppy hair, so by the time I was a sophomore, I decided I needed to try to something a little more sophisticated. Someone asked me on a real date (before I had just “hung out” with guys, but this was the first time I was being wined and dined by a veritable stranger!). By then my hair had grown out into a bob and I cut bangs, thinking they would make me look a little French. I wore tight jeans, a simple black long-sleeve T-shirt that slid off the shoulder, and black suede pumps. In my mind we’d be going somewhere like über-hip Parisian hangout Café de Flore, but in fact we had dinner in the atrium at the Copley Plaza mall.
The summer I graduated from college, my friend Abby and I went to Danceteria in Southampton on a particularly slow night. A handsome older man asked me to dance, I said sure, and we started talking. This man turned out to be the famed photographer Peter Beard, and when I realized this, I was instantly dazzled. He gave me the code to the gate that led to his amazing property in Montauk, and I would go with my friends and sunbathe on his private cliff as if it were my own.
One day, Peter asked me what I wanted to do with my life. “Not sure; maybe advertising,” I said. “You should be a stylist!” he declared. Believe it or not, even though I was a magazine fanatic, I didn’t really know what that meant—someone who does hair? He explained it was the person who dresses the model and basically sets up the feeling of the shoot. People actually got paid to do that? I was sold.
He decided my first assignment would be a shoot with him and Grace Jones (!!!). He called me on my private teenage line at home in Summit and gave me the heads-up: Grace would be coming on such-and-such a day and I needed to come and style the shots. I made my friend Holly come along, and there we found ourselves—hanging out with Peter, Grace Jones, and Richard Bernstein, the man behind all of those fantastic painted Interview covers. I couldn’t believe my little college friend and I were actually admitted into this sanctum of unbelievable fabulousness. So this is what it’s like, I thought. Since it was a hot day in August, everyone was puzzled by our Dirty Dancing–inspired rolled-up denim cutoffs and heavy Dr. Martens Oxfords. Peter, who walked around in sarongs and African sandals, was especially curious as to why we were wearing such clunky, orthopedic-looking shoes in the middle of summer. It turned out that Grace had forgotten her makeup and didn’t feel like shooting anyway, so we ended up lying on the bed watching her in her James Bond movie while she smoked a joint. And although I never would have lied about it, Peter was nice enough to provide me with copies of the shots he finally took weeks later. “Just say you styled them,” he said. “No one will know.” I later found out that I actually made it into one of the pages of Peter’s famous diary.
A cute haircut can be your signature.
In college I tried really hard to get that ’80s vintage thing down. I had the right pieces, like real army pants, riding boots, and sweaters authentically worn in by me, but somehow I was never able to go all the way and nail it. There were quite a few girls who perfected the look, though, and Julie was one of them—she had grown up in Manhattan and had complete confidence about everything she wore. She had a short, asymmetrical haircut and always strutted around in beat-up paddock boots and big cinched oversize pants. Julie lived on my floor during freshman year, but she didn’t invite me over too much because she smoked a lot of pot, and as much as I tried, I never liked it. She was having an affair with one of her high school teachers and would often spend the weekend in New York with him. When they broke up she said, “It’s over, but I was a real trouper!”
Even though my best friend, Anne J., and I were in love with the kooky overstyling that defined much of the ’80s, we were pretty taken with a sultry new singer on the MTV scene. She was tiny and strikingly beautiful, with the slightest spattering of freckles, and she always dressed so perfectly simple—perfect-fitting Levi’s (not too tight, not too loose) along with some kind of bolero jacket and black cowboy boots. Her hair was usually slicked back, and she was rarely without giant hoop earrings and matte red lipstick. Suddenly Sade was the only one we wanted to be. Anne found a preppy boiled-wool Talbot’s jacket in her mom’s closet and somehow made it look very cool and very Sade one New Year’s Eve. She wore it with leather pants, a black turtleneck, and giant hoop earrings. I didn’t have the right jacket, so I settled for leather pants, cowboy boots, and big earrings. Sure we only ended up at a restaurant in downtown Summit, New Jersey, but we felt just as glamorous as if we were our new favorite singer hanging out in London.
Mix casual classics like sweats and tees with fancier pieces like a great designer bag.
There were a lot of chic girls doing the new-wave thing at Boston University in the ’80s. Some had semi-Mohawks that I knew were made famous by the hairstylist Christiaan (when the hair was down, it just looked like a bob, but when they pulled it back, the shaved sides were revealed—wow). Some wore drapey, Japanesey, druidlike outfits. I also remember two girls with long, curly hair who always hung out together (one had black hair, the other blond—like Betty and Veronica) and who never wore any makeup, save for red lipstick. Their uniform consisted of jeans, a white T-shirt, cowboy boots, and real army dog tags. And then there was Keep-It-Low Lori (so called because when asked what year she was in, she replied, “Freshman—keep it low,” even though we were freshman too) who had the perfect monochromatically made-up face. I reported all of this back to Anne in letters to Milan so she could copy accordingly. Sure she was a model with all the tricks at her fingertips, but real-girl college style had its merits too. The one girl who stood out most of all was Mandy. She was super tough and had sexy curly black hair. Her everyday fall-and-spring going-to-class look was a perfect pair of classic gray sweatpants (I suspect tapered by a tailor), a V-neck white T-shirt, and white gymnast shoes. Her books were thrown into a Louis Vuitton Speedy 40 bag (the biggest one they make), and she flaunted a couple of Bulgari pinky rings that her dad had sent her just to say “hey.” She looked great, but she definitely scared us a little. (Of course I tapered my sweats and am now the proud owner of a Speedy 40.)
I still love the look of the right mix of silver rings. Try a big turquoise one with a couple of simpler bands.
I don’t remember her name (Caroline?), but she was tan, smoked Camels, and always wore some kind of amazing turquoise or art-nouveau “lady ring.” I loved the bohemian look of her cigarette pack and the way the brown filter dangled from her bronzed, ring-clad fingers. Once in college, I ordered a silver lady ring from an out-of-the-way biker jeweler in Allston (you had to go up some ominous musty stairwell to get to his shop). When I finally came to pick up the finished product, he confessed that he had accidentally melted it. Then he got into a fight with another customer and pulled out a gun. Needless to say, I never got to live out my lady-ring fantasy.
At some point in college I saw Stranger Than Paradise, a super-cool black-and-white indie film about a New York hipster whose teenage cousin comes uninvited to visit from Hungary. At first the guy thinks she’s cramping his style, but then they actually become close and go on a trip to Cleveland together. The almost real-time action and plot weren’t really what I was so interested in, though. I was more into the young and gritty ’80s vibe and the cousin character, Eva, who was played by an actress I’d never heard of named Eszter. She had a thick accent and was even-keeled and blasé, speaking in a monotone voice, rarely reacting to anything. She had choppy bangs and was what the French call jolie laide (pretty/ugly). Eva had a real modern beatnik look, mostly wearing black: black turtlenecks; men’s black pants; old men’s oversize black cardigans; and men’s white shirts buttoned to the top, like a modern-day Annie Hall. Eva smoked only Chesterfield cigarettes, a fact that, at the time, I thought was just so funny and amazingly quirky. When I moved into my own studio in 1990, I put a giant Stranger Than Paradise poster over my bed and just felt so cool being in the know about such an amazing movie that not many people knew about. Also, it was a pretty great-looking poster. I kind of want another one.
Buy a bunch of street gold to wear in the summer. I love a good Figaro chain and big hoops.
In Boston, Holly and I got in with a local skater crowd for a while. We often went to dive bars in “bad” neighborhoods that hosted special hip-hop nights. This was during the height of LL Cool J, the Beastie Boys, and Run-DMC. We were excited by this new scene and bought Licensed to Ill—a little after the fact. We didn’t want anyone to know this, of course, so we stepped on the tape case and scratched it up so it would look like we’d had it for months. There was one girl who was always around the scene whose style we fell in love with. She was pretty and looked like maybe she had been preppy in high school (having grown up in Summit, I was good at spotting this type) and was now taking chances we wished we were cool enough to take. She had long blond hair that she usually put up in a high chola-style ponytail. Her uniform was a great-fitting T-shirt, baggy Levi’s, suede Vans, and giant square gold door-knocker earrings. While I never would have looked as cute in her getup, I did go for the giant hoops years later—just big, round bamboo ones. They’ve actually become a classic summer staple, and I pull mine out every year.
