A Guide to Quality, Taste and Style (4 page)

I believe that the concept of “casual Fridays” in the workplace wreaked more havoc on women than men. We know that too many men went beyond the boundaries of good sense, let alone good taste, when golf shirts, madras shorts, and flip-flops began appearing. Thankfully, there ensued a negative response and men stepped back to adjust. Many women, on the other hand, saw this concept as an opportunity to be casual and stay casual. I have nothing at all against the word “casual” and its meaning. But it is not to be conflated with inappropriate attire, such as pajamas at work. With precious few exceptions, the people with
whom I work in the Department of Fashion Design are very well-dressed and put together. But I work with a lot of people at the University, too, and the same cannot be said about some of them. I attended a meeting recently at which someone (gender makes no difference in this case) was wearing flannel drawstring pants printed with soccer balls. Even deadpan me couldn’t conceal my incredulity! I can’t remember what was worn on top. The pants, alone, did me in.

And may I make one request of everyone? Please conceal your midriff. I continue to see far too many people in jeans (usually low-slung) with a little shrunken top that stops about an inch above the belly button. Unless you possess amazing abs and are attending a workout, please, please, please avoid this look at all costs. It’s dreadful. And it’s dreadful at any age.

I know of some people who use the content of their wardrobe to assemble some of the wackiest getups I’ve ever seen—and that’s quite a statement coming from me. If it were a wacky ensemble that consistently evoked the same message, then that would be one thing, and perhaps even laudable (think Patricia Field or Anna Piaggi). But inconsistent wackiness is what I call “the costume trap.” The people I know who belong to this category defend their fashion schizophrenia by stating that they hate being the same person day in and day out, adding that they’re just having a little fun. Really? At whose expense? Your own!

Let’s invoke semiotics, again. How do you want the world to perceive you? If your answer is, “I don’t give a damn,” then fine, do what you want to do. But if you’re like most of us, you care what people think. If we’re confident in how we look and someone chooses to reject our taste, then fine, reject us. We’re still confident. I’ve had people look at me, raise an eyebrow, and sneer. “You look so, uh, starched.” Thank you. I
am
starched! If, on the other hand, someone was to comment, “Whatever possessed you to wear a white tuxedo?” I would take serious pause, because I would know that I had a lapse in judgment. The same can be said for any outfit that causes you to check your calendar to see if it’s October 31.

I am known to raise an eyebrow at many of the designs shown during the Paris couture season—especially the work of John Galliano. This usually results in some cries of anguish from my students, because many of them revere his work. I maintain that fashion isn’t relevant if you can’t get into a taxi wearing it, and so many of these Galliano creations couldn’t fit into a moving van, let alone a yellow cab. My students retort, “But Galliano’s work has a market and a place.” I agree, but it’s limited.
Chacon à son goût
. On that topic, many fashion editors believed Sofia Coppola’s
Marie Antoinette
would trigger a fashion frenzy. Huh? A frenzy for what, panniers? I don’t think so. I don’t believe that the women of the world want to dress like extras in a costume epic.

Ask yourself, “Am I wearing the clothes or are the clothes wearing me?” If the answer is the latter, then you’re in the costume trap.

Who’s Kate? Kate is a dear friend, a colleague, my Assistant Chair in the Department of Fashion Design at Parsons, and a spiritual partner. She is the only person I know whom I’d trust with the responsibility of partnering in the writing of this book. And I wouldn’t have agreed to write it without her. A generation younger than I, Kate embraces the world in a way that I can’t even comprehend. She is a perpetual student of society and culture, and is among the few truly well-read people I know. Furthermore, she possesses a fabulous fashion sense. “Quality, Taste, and Style” is Kate!

We hope to challenge you, provoke you, and cause you to question your assumptions. Our goal is for you to be unflinchingly confident in who you are. Own that person. Own your look.

The Blind Spot:
Examining “who you are” is not intended to be an opportunity to morph from Agnes Gooch to Barbarella. It’s not about shaking your underpinnings or creating a Hyde from a Jekyll. You should consider your transformation to be an enhancement, not a new identity through a sartorial version of the Witness Protection Program.

The Lesson:
We all strive to have our wardrobe fit us like a glove. Due to our unique proportions and the vagaries of sizing, it sometimes seems the best we’ll be able to achieve is finding clothing that fits like a mitten. In this chapter we’ll discuss how to best dress a host of body types and why exactly you can wear a size 2 at Banana Republic, while you fit quite nicely into Aunt Elise’s vintage 14s. It isn’t magic, it isn’t the South Beach Diet; in fact, it isn’t even important. This chapter is about finding a great fit, not a number on a tag. Read on.

“She wears her clothes as if
they were thrown on her with a pitchfork.”

—Jonathan Swift

Among the most easily resolved of the fashion foibles is fit. Surely we all agree that pants should not pool around our shoes, nor should jackets keep us from moving our arms. And yet, multitudes wear clothes that are too big or too small. When they ask, “How do I look?” we’re much more inclined to respond, “Like a sack of potatoes” or “Like you’re wearing a sausage casing.”

These people are being done in by fit. Keep in mind that this is not an issue of size, as in
your
size. This is an issue of the size and shape of your garments and whether they work to accentuate “all the things you are.” That phrase is cribbed, of course, from Oscar Hammerstein II and Jerome Kern, two men of very different physical proportions—Oscar was tall and robust, Jerome was not—who both managed to look good while writing some truly wonderful songs. Despite the genius of their artistic partnership, Oscar would have looked ridiculous in one of Jerome’s suits, and vice versa. Yet every day, the equivalent takes place: Hammersteins wake up and try to wedge themselves in Kern clothes, and the Kerns assume they can roll up the sleeves of that sweater that is too big but was on sale.

Furthermore, some larger Hammersteins—i.e., plus-size women and men—hold on to the mythology that larger-size clothes conceal weight and girth. They don’t. They accentuate it. Witness the muumuu, that dress-meup look from the ’70s that was all the rage for cocktail attire from poolside to penthouse. We won’t assail its comfort, but it made even petite women look like floats in a parade. Surely the muumuu is just a tattersall away from a housedress (think Shirley Booth in
Come Back, Little Sheba
).