Complementary Pairs

I’ve watched many a movie where a protagonist gifts the object of their affection or obsession something ridiculous. First editions of books that would likely cost thousands or tens of thousands of dollars as well as ones that simply don’t exist. Cavernous libraries with shelves that stretch from floor to ceiling. Publishing companies. It’s a common trope and one that, with the exception of that library from my childhood, usually leaves me rolling my eyes in response. I am a Taurus in most of the classic ways, but one trait rises above them all.  I love pretty things. Shiny things. I would drape myself in cottons of the highest thread count and the softest of silks at all times if possible. And yet the idea of receiving a glamorous gift from a lover makes me scoff. Who knows my tastes better than I? Besides, I am perfectly capable of buying my own presents. And I frequently do. Dresses and fancy flats and piles of books. But in Notting Hill when Anna Scott leaves that Marc Chagall painting in William Thacker’s bookshop, I forget all about my qualms and nod my head in agreement at the rightness of it. 

The painting is always the first thing to pop into my mind when the movie is mentioned, but after long moments of considering that image, of how "it feels like how love should be, floating through a dark blue sky," my thoughts move on to a more expected realm, Anna’s clothing. I think of iconic costuming moments often, of green dresses and angel wings, but I also feel personally removed from many of them somewhat. This is understandable. The places they inhabit and the people they clothe live in worlds far flung in time or space, and I'm often not looking for surface-level relatability when it comes to the stories that I consume. Besides my ability to appreciate their beauty and their function in aiding the tale being told is not tempered by that distance. Not that the world of a movie star as seen in Notting Hill resides within any proximity to the life that I live. Not even here in my corner of Los Angeles where in The Before I sometimes saw them pondering orders at coffee shops and grabbing popcorn before movies. That world existed even further away in distance and experience 21 years ago when the movie premiered. I was 16 then and married to the fashion trends of the era (no matter how poorly they worked on my body or how little they aligned with the person I thought I was at the moment) as well as the fantasy of a future life centered on the east coast. The costumes that most often caught my attention in those years were those that filled the many teen movies and television shows I was consuming, and those looks were as dedicated to fleeting trends as the items that were hanging in my bedroom closet. 

It wasn’t until my 30s, a decade of my life that feels as if it has only just begun but which I somehow find myself over seven years into, that I began to look at Anna’s clothing more closely. Knowing the movie’s every beat helped as it allowed me the freedom to shift my gaze away from the plot. It’s not as if the looks are timeless, but then timelessness when it comes to fashion is often bullshit. You cannot divorce most looks from the eras in which they were crafted and worn, and the costumes of Notting Hill are firmly situated within the style narrative of the late 1990s. Everyone’s pants are roomier. Anna wears two anklets during the movie’s final moments as Elvis Costello sings us home. And every formal look we see her in is accompanied by a matching shawl. 

Anna and William on their wedding day

A certain writer about to attend her junior prom almost exactly a year after the movie's release

On top of not being "timeless," her wardrobe is neither remarkable nor groundbreaking. There is a normality to many of her looks that borders on quaintness. At times certain pieces, like her boxy, oversized leather jacket or her questionable sunglasses, make me chuckle in remembrance. What were we doing? 

No really, what were we doing?

Others make me long for a put-together ease of dressing that I've never truly mastered. After their orange juice-fueled meet-cute, she changes into a black crop top with a jeweled neckline and a black, sparkling midi skirt. Unassuming for a night out but as she walks into the afternoon light of Notting Hill, it takes on a different feel even when dressed down with the Vans she had been wearing for her somewhat anonymous jaunt. She is a movie star and it is in the small details here when she suddenly looks like one as if to remind the audience and William whom exactly we are dealing with.

It's two other looks that represent the biggest shift in thinking from the Samantha who existed as a teenager to the one who now worries about her taxes and number of viable eggs. They are a pair, two suits worn when dealing with the press in an official capacity. How I learned to stop worrying and embrace suiting is a tale that I've already told, but here was an instance that, if I had been paying attention, could have pushed me in that direction far sooner. Why do I love these suits so much? They are simple when compared to the vast range of ready-to-wear and couture women's suiting that we thankfully have now. But I love a piece that is well-fitted and classic. The first is a business-like gray that she pairs with a purple, patterned tie and a sleek ponytail. The second, worn at a press conference, is softer by design. No tie and hair down. A light blue that calls to mind the many blues she wore in the scene in which she made her declaration of love. The pair shows some of the range of what suits can be aesthetically. They are not all one thing. They can instead be many. 

And what were they here in that time? Well here they gave proof to the lie that rested beneath the movie's most iconic line (after William saying whoopsie-daisy twice after failing rather spectacularly to climb over a fence). 

Calling it a lie is unkind of me. We all have many selves and while sometimes they can clash in opposition often they merge to form the complete story of whom we are. "I know she's an actress and all that, so she can deliver a line," William says when telling his friends of her sudden appearance and the Chagall she has left with him. Maybe that's more what I mean here. In the relationship that she imagines for them, she is "just a girl," but she'll never be just that. She is a public persona, a star. Someone with enough clout to open a previously private park for all of her new neighborhood to enjoy. In the time in which the story takes place, the suits worn speak to the power of that piece of her. And that power can't truly be divorced from the rest.

First Days

I haven't stepped foot in a classroom for the purpose of formal learning and lecture in almost fifteen years, and yet when August entered its final, hazy days a month ago, I settled into a familiar state. It's a state that I've returned to during each late summer that has passed since my college graduation. It's a state filled with thoughts of and longing for notebooks and a rainbow array of pens and carefully curated, first day outfits meant to impress.

I had an odd loathing for summer as a child. It wasn't only the sticky heat that caused me distress. I also desperately missed school. You could find me at high noon on a Saturday in mid-July laying flat on my back in bed with my eyes closed as hard as I could manage and wishing for the next six weeks to slide away and disappear. Sometimes I would mix it up and turn over onto my belly, forehead against forearm, hoping for the impossible. I outgrew this behavior around the age of 12 but never became exactly comfortable with summer and the freedom that came with it. It's no surprise that I'm still left flat-footed when offered unstructured time that could be used, if I were the type of person who enjoyed such a thing, for hours of leisure.

There are other types of freedom that I've never had trouble exploring to the fullest. When I was set loose from the confines of my Catholic school uniform, free finally (on the days I chose to be) from starched white shirts and pleated plaid skirts, I spent a lot of that summertime freedom focusing on all of the things I would wear once school was back in session.

In my mind, it feels like I must have written numerous pieces on my mother's negative feelings about and disinterest in my former dreams of a career in fashion. But as I look back, there's only the one published on the eve of my 30th birthday. I speak of her distaste sometimes, mostly in passing and often laced with a joke. And I think about it a lot as it is so intertwined with the disappointment I know she feels about the path my life has taken. It's this final piece that likely explains my confusion. I've written whole tomes in my head about the ways in which I've let her down.

Her attitude about this facet of my personality has always left me wondering what exactly she expected of the child who spent most of the summer of 1994 carefully planning a purple and white ensemble for her first day of sixth grade. After all this was also the child who was in love with lace-trimmed socks worn with Mary Janes and became briefly obsessed with the printed fans one could find at little shops throughout Boston's Chinatown. The one who insisted that the day printed on her Day of the Week underwear always aligned with the actual day of the week and carefully slotted the shiniest pennies she could find into her brown loafers.

The one who wore a seersucker suit to her birthday dinner and asked to be made a gold lamé dress for a New Year's Eve trip to the Boston Pops.

White. Purple. White. Purple. That was the pattern I settled on in the original conception of this Very Important outfit. I was foiled in the execution by the fact that there were no purple Keds to be found in the Greater Boston area, so I pivoted to a white pair worn with purple socks that I scrunched as hard as they could be scrunched. 11-year-old Samantha was as persnickety then as 36-year-old Samantha is now and so was greatly disappointed by this deviation from the plan, but I walked into my school's red doors as close to perfect as I could manage, a stark white tee worn with a pleated purple skirt from Limited Too. Around my neck was a pendant necklace from the same store, a thick black cord with a flower made of clay in shades of purple, yellow, and orange hanging from it.

The previous year I sat in a purple dress with little pink flowers scattered on it and pink tights on my legs surrounded by my classmates as the annual school-wide picture was taken. It takes work to get 400 girls from the ages of 10 to 17 and all of their teachers and various administrators settled in for a group picture, especially on that first day with the last of the summer cobwebs yet to clear away. The youngest girls were always seated cross-legged on the ground in front filled with nervous anxiety about this new beginning while the oldest stood on the highest riser thinking about the coming end of this chapter.

It was no coincidence that I wore purple on those two first days at this new school. It was my favorite color for much of my childhood, a perfect mix of hot and cold. My obsession with and love for it might explain why my mother is confused by the navy and gray adult that I've become. I lived within a whirlwind of color and print back then before moving to invisibility through trend obsession to preppiness and finally to this neutral chic that causes her to screw up her face.

And yet in that 11-year-old and all of her colors and all of her prints and that last gasp of a fascination with hats lived all of the pieces that explain how the 36-year-old dresses now. The planning. The precision. The need to impress others but mostly to impress myself. The delight at having a special occasion that calls for, at least in my mind, an entirely new look. I have found all sorts of ways in my adulthood to replace the thrill of dressing for those first days of school. My birthday party and the birthday parties of others. Weddings and baby showers. The first truly brisk day of fall and the first truly hot day of summer. I mark events big and small and life-changing with new outfits. Not all of such events or even a quarter of them but enough to fill myself with that childlike giddiness once more.

Then I stand in front of my closet as I prepare to put on the chosen outfit for the first time and think "today is your day."

An American Tale

By its nature, reinvention is a tricky undertaking. What should one hold on to? What should one discard? And when one finally reaches the bare bones of the thing in what way and in which direction should one begin to rebuild? This concept and these questions often confront us as a year draws to a close.

Calvin Klein will need more than a handful of resolutions to pull itself out of the quagmire in which it currently sits. The brand, barely into a major rebuilding project, now finds itself rudderless. Only two years after arriving, Raf Simons made his exit. There will be no collection shown at New York Fashion Week next month, and while there have been a few steps made to roll back Simons' changes, there is no real understanding of what will happen next.

In the decade since the global economic upheaval caused by the Great Recession, the fashion industry has dealt with a fair share of turmoil. Current day disasters aside, the economy as a whole has recovered. And yet uncertainty touches every corner of the industry. There is a skittishness that didn't exist prior to 2008. Many major brands find it hard to hold onto a creative director. Lanvin has had four in as many years following the falling out between Alber Elbaz and the brand's owners. Carven has found itself in a similar situation since Guillaume Henry departed for Nina Ricci in 2014. There are too many of these stories happening at too fast a rate for a full accounting of each one to emerge.

But the breaking of Simons and Klein feels bigger.

The timing of the announcement was the first sign that this rupture was different from the many others we've seen in the past decade. In a previous age, the holiday news dump was often left to celebrity divorce announcements. In this age, the dumping is continuous and the news being dumped is of a more cataclysmic sort. When this news dropped on the Friday before Christmas, there was something of the old about the entire affair. In a way it felt comforting. But then one remembered why these dumps happen. They occur to hide and distract. The dumper hopes that when people return from family dinners and presents and skiing or sunning that they will have moved on. That they won't feel the need to dig beneath the surface of the announcement.

When Simon’s appointment was announced in August of 2016, there was a frisson of excitement. His eponymous menswear line has a cult-like following. His years at Jil Sander were almost universally lauded. His short tenure at Christian Dior in the wake of the brand’s John Galliano disaster was more divisive, but he still had the respect and admiration of many in the industry. At Calvin Klein he was to be Chief Creative Officer in charge of every piece of the brand from the stark white underwear to the denim to the runway. It was the kind of power that now only comes when one is working under one’s own name. (And sometimes, depending on whom you've sold off stakes of your company to, not even then.) It was obvious that this meant a change, a real change, at Calvin Klein. You don’t choose to give a darling of the industry all of that power otherwise.

The total overhaul has become de rigeur this decade. Hedi Slimane landed at Yves Saint Laurent after the somewhat unceremonious sacking of Stefano Pilati and instantly discarded the “Yves.” Three creative directors, the aforementioned Elbaz, Tom Ford, and Pilati had controlled the reins after the man himself stepped aside, and while each had presented his own particular vision for the house of Saint Laurent none had touched the name. For some, Slimane had gone too far before he had even begun. There were rules. There was respect to be paid and history to be honored. You could strip a brand back to its bones but to pull out the foundation was unimaginable.

But it worked. Monetarily at least. It worked and worked and worked until one of those inevitable breaking aparts that now plague the industry happened. Three years seems to be the longest any one brand can hold onto any one person. Three years seems to be the longest any one person can bear to stay in place.

Bringing something back from the dead, or the nearly dead, is a different beast. Christopher Bailey lifting the Burberry plaid out of the gutter it fell into after an indiscriminate distribution of licenses is one thing. Marc Jacobs launching ready-to-wear at Louis Vuitton is another. Shaking things up is expected. A major recalibration is what's needed. There have been other examples of this kind of work in recent years, the rebirth of Schiaparelli for example, but that is not what was occurring at Yves Saint Laurent or the now defunct Calvin Klein of Simons. This is not what is occurring at Riccardo Tisci's Burberry. There was no dormant period. There was history. Recent history. Uninterrupted history stretching back decades in some cases. There was occasionally economic stagnation as well, but does that call for a complete dismantling?

It feels important to note that in the three cases mentioned above the people in charge were or are men. It’s a small sample size and in no way statistically significant, but when one looks at the work of the women in similarly lofty positions, one can’t help but begin to draw some conclusions about the why of matters. Maria Grazia Chiuri, who joined Christian Dior after Simons’ departure, Claire Waight Keller, who began to helm Givenchy after they and Tisci parted ways, and Laura Kim, who, along with her co-creative director Fernando Garcia, oversees things at Oscar de la Renta, are mining the histories of their houses.

Oscar de la Renta often posts a #tbt video from one of the house’s past runway shows on social media and then goes on to explain the ways in which the featured themes have been referenced in the present day. From the start, one could see the silhouettes of Hubert de Givenchy's mid-20th century work throughout the clothing presented by Waight Keller. While it's not as apparent in the ready-to-wear collection, the haute couture at Christian Dior always has with it a sense of the house's history. Each of these women is presenting her own vision but one can see the through line. They honor the past without feeling stale. They move things forward thoughtfully and with purpose.

“We started by offering just items that the house didn’t have before like suiting, denim or evening tops, and softer goods like chiffon dresses,” Mr. Garcia said. “And we’ve been doing it little by little so we don’t alienate the very loyal customer that the brand has.”

“Women are changing the way they dress now,” Ms. Kim said. “ I think we’re just updating [the Oscar de la Renta customer’s] wardrobe.”

One could retort that what works for one might not work for another. Maybe what one brand needs is a reappraisal of its storied past. Maybe what another needs is to forget all that came before.

Or maybe what some of these men feel the need to do is stamp their influence on something so boldly that no one will ever forget that it was they who were the creators. Even when the umbrella under which they are creating does not bear their names.

What it means to be an American generally, and an American brand specifically, is wide-reaching and often in flux. But even within that expanse, one cannot deny the fact that Calvin Klein as a brand is an icon in that regard. What was discarded in the building up of CALVIN KLEIN 205W39NYC, as Simons renamed it, was that stabilizing center. The runway looks produced by him included references to Americana, movies and collegiate culture and Warhol, but it all felt removed and overly cerebral. Not that the Klein of old was dumbed down. Not that at all. Its brand of Americanness was an uncomplicated, classic, sexy sort. It was about line and silhouette and less about imagery.

I quote James Baldwin often in scenarios where one might not normally reach for him. But when it comes to words written about the American condition and the American mind, its beauty and its underbelly and its beating heart, there are few who are better.

America, of all the Western nations, has been best placed to prove the uselessness and the obsolescence of the concept of color. But it has not dared to accept this opportunity, or even to conceive of it as an opportunity. White Americans have thought of it as their shame, and have envied those more civilized and elegant European nations that were untroubled by the presence of black men on their shores. This is because white Americans have supposed "Europe" and "civilization" to be synonyms—which they are not—and have been distrustful of other standards and other sources of vitality, especially those produced in America itself, and have attempted to behave in all matters as though what was east for Europe was also east for them.

Ready-to-wear is, and has been for decades, a global business. Three of the past four designers at Givenchy, a French house, have been British. The outlier, Tisci, is Italian. The previous designer of Calvin Klein, Francisco Costa, was Brazilian. Carrying on the legacy of a brand does not require that one have lived one's entire life among the culture with which it shares a history. But there is something about the white American obsession with the Old World as mentioned here by Baldwin in The Fire Next Time, with its assumed ingenuity and beauty, that can lead to the washing away of a core essence with roots in a different place. While Ralph Lauren sent him models down the runway to the sounds of the Downton Abbey theme for Fall/Winter 2012 and Dapper Dan has been heartily embraced by the type of brand that once sued him, the former's lush preppiness and the latter's irreverent look at luxury are both American down to their marrows.

Was the assumed superiority of European luxury what was running through the minds of the executives at Calvin Klein's parent company? Probably not consciously. They were most likely hoping to emulate the monetary success of Slimane's Saint Laurent and Alessandro Michele's Gucci by scooping up an available European prodigy of their very own. And as has now become the custom, they discarded him and anything that he had created when it didn't immediately work in their favor.

I wanted desperately to like the Calvin Klein of Simons. When he presented his final collection for Jil Sander, I thought here is a talent. For awhile I was able to twist my thoughts in such a way that I liked, or even loved, those CALVIN KLEIN 205W39NYC runway collections. But I couldn't forget the Calvin Klein that had been, and oddly enough it was Simons himself who wouldn't allow me to let that image go. During his short tenure, he launched Calvin Klein by Appointment, a made-to-measure offshoot that was most often seen on celebrities at major events. Many of those looks instantly transported me to the house's cleaner, simpler past.

That could have been enough if I had let it be. But the dresses seen on magazine covers and the looks that littered ad campaigns and came down the runway were something else altogether and reminded that this Calvin Klein was not that Calvin Klein and maybe it wasn't Calvin Klein at all. Not really.

Déjà Vu

Phoebe Philo makes clothes for women. Hedi Slimane makes clothes for "women." 

I tweeted that to someone in the aftermath of the latter's first collection for Céline. Perhaps it was a tad unkind. A bit much. But I was upset. The dread I felt at the initial news of his appointment was so deep that I wiped it from my mind for a time. "I don't like this," I told a friend months after that announcement. She gently reminded me that I had already yelled about this particular subject to her. So I lived it twice, that rage and disappointment, before settling into a resigned posture. But as the fashion elite moved from New York to London to Milan and finally Paris in the early fall, my anxiety returned.

Sitting there at my desk watching the models stomp down the runway in a collection that was not at all new for Slimane, I considered laughing. From the first look with its short length and its oversized bow, it was obvious that we were being served Saint Laurent 2.0.

Can one successfully perform the same trick twice? I don't know although it was apparent on that morning that the decision makers at LVMH and Céline were betting heavily on the possibility. What I did know was that I could be unimpressed twice. When Slimane took over for Stefano Pilati at Yves Saint Laurent, I didn't have many expectations. I had heard of Slimane here and there in the fashion press before the news of his appointment was announced, but his tenure at Dior Homme ended before I began to turn my attention to menswear. I knew a couple of the buzzwords that circled his work. Skinny. Rocker. To my eye, there was a bit of sameness to all of it but then what did I know? Not much honestly about the business of menswear. And after many nervous seasons of chatter about Pilati's possible ousting, I knew that I would be fairly bitter about whoever replaced him no matter the style direction they chose to take the brand in.

After Céline 's Spring/Summer 2019 show ended, I dug through my tweets in search of my thoughts about his first Saint Laurent collection. I assumed that I had been mildly pissed but mostly indifferent. I was wrong.

So I kind of hate the Saint Laurent Paris (formerly #YSL) show. Fine, not kind of. More like with every ounce of my being. #pfw

— Samantha Powell (@sdpowell1) October 2, 2012

Rage stings and it stains and this particular one apparently never left me.

I've never owned any Céline from the Philo era. I've never owned any Céline period. I've never more than touched it, fingertips brushing against a line of dresses on a rack as I walked the sales floor of various luxury department stores like the Barneys that sat in the mall where I spent the back half of my 20s treading water at a retail job. I was there often enough that one of the stylists in the women's ready-to-wear department would warmly greet me before leaving me to my worshipful reverie. These clothes and bags and shoes, so far outside of the reality of my life both then and now, are mostly a thought experiment for me. I look at runway and red carpet pictures and make sometimes delightful, sometimes insightful, sometimes snide assessments. I daydream often. About soft leather pencil skirts and cognac loafers and dresses of various (literal) stripes. In my life, the high fashion world lives in a liminal space between reality and mirage.

In spite of this distance, there are designers who create clothing with which I forge a personal connection. Or maybe that connection springs from said distance. I look but only barely touch and so a bit of the myth surrounding them remains intact. I can revere them because I am not aware of the flaws that live up close. Because of this distance I know that a not insignificant number of my biases are, at times, baseless. When I am being mature and reasonable and a bit cold, I stomp those biases dead as they begin to bloom. When I am none of those things, when I am rash and passionate, I can't help but let them grow.

The tip top of this industry is lacking in women at the fore, but it wasn't only Philo's womanhood that drew me to her designs first at Chloé and then at Céline. There are men who I love unabashedly and with few reservations. Dries Van Noten. Alber Elbaz (formerly of Lanvin). Billy Reid. Scott Sternberg (formerly of Band of Outsiders and currently of Entireworld) to name a few. And much like Slimane, a number of them started in menswear before moving into womenswear.

When the reservations do arise, they often come from the same place as my distaste for Slimane. A frustration when it becomes clear that these men have forgotten that they are designing for women and a woman's body. When it's obvious that just for a moment we became an abstract concept to them. Women are many things and our bodies are as varied as the stars that hang in the night sky so one might think this task wouldn't be all that difficult. Pick a woman, any woman, understand her to be a living, breathing, thinking thing and then continue from there. But that path trips up more people than you might imagine.

Just a normal Friday night of excitedly yelling about Phoebe Philo with a friend.

Best womenswear designer of her generation hands down.

— Samantha Powell (@sdpowell1) March 31, 2018

A friend and I were sitting on a familiar bar patio talking close that night. When I discuss fashion with people, the conversations are often mundane. This is lovely. That is horrifying. We remain on the surface level because I fear that a push deeper might begin to bore my partner. If not stopped, I can begin to spiral into arcane facts and sweeping pronouncements. I begin to talk about legacies born and history made. About the highly intellectual and the more earthbound emotions. The pieces that make me shriek or clap or shiver in anticipation. But there are times when I don't stop myself and become a different person. A talkative person. An easy person. None of that hard exterior that isn't really hard.

I wasn't expecting the shrieks or the claps or the shivers to appear as I watched the first Slimane for Céline show. I knew it wouldn't be like the morning I stood with my laptop sitting on my mother's ironing board becoming increasingly enthralled by an otherworldly Alexander McQueen show. I knew I wouldn't be consumed by a deep sadness and a deeper appreciation like I was when watching the closing, rainbow light show of Christopher Bailey's final collection for Burberry. I had come to appreciate, like, and even covet some of his work at Saint Laurent. His brief return to couture right before his departure comes to mind. In those proportions and with that craftsmanship, I became enamored with his vision for a moment. But only a moment.

I wanted something different here. Something new. Not necessarily for me and my body but something beyond that limited, stilted concept of a woman. Because I loved Philo's Céline. Because I loved the woman she was making clothes for. Because I had given my heart to the brand. A silly, juvenile move but, as is often the way with such things, it occurred without my knowledge. And when you give your heart to something or someone, you hope for a gift in return.

I wonder what she'll do next and what he'll do next. I hope for a Céline collection in this new era that stirs that joy and that lust, but I'm not sure if I'll ever find it with him.

Saint Laurent, Fall/Winter 2016

 

Céline, Spring/Summer 2019



Photos via

A Mission, a Mark, a Brand, a Logo

I returned to my mother's house in the late spring of 2005 with a trunk filled with linens, books that I couldn't bear to resell, a stack of fashion magazines, a diploma, and a Coach bag. At least it had been sold to me as a Coach bag when I had foolishly overdrawn my account when buying it on eBay a few weeks prior to graduation. I had spent ages closely examining the shape of its iconic C's in the images posted by the seller. The colorful pieces of suede resembled waves and were assembled much as they had been when Summer Roberts carried the same bag in a different colorway on an episode of The O.C. The one that would soon be mine featured fabric strips full of those C's I craved in addition to the suede and leather. But when it arrived, it became obvious that it was not the real deal. It was the small things, like the uneven stitching along the edges of its straps, that revealed the truth to me. I knew others wouldn't nitpick it in the same way, would think its various shades of pink lovely, and would never question its authenticity. But I never carried it, could never bring myself to carry it. Instead I stuffed it with the bank statement outlining my folly and hid it in a closet.

I already owned a Coach bag, a simple, slouchy hobo in brown suede that had been a Christmas surprise after a first semester of pretty good grades during my freshman year of college. For reasons that could fill a novella, the pretty good grades were not long for this world. That hobo, however, went out with me last month as I drank wine while in the midst of a cliché fit of Valentine's Day melancholy. Those iconic C's live on the lining and nowhere else. On its surface with patches worn smooth with age and much use, the bag proclaims itself as coming from nowhere and belonging to no one. I've come to love that mystery, but at 22 and in the midst of reacquainting myself with my childhood love of fashion, I craved something that did the opposite.

I may not write about fashion collections in the way that I used to, Favorites of the Day and posts brimming with suits and coats, but I still make my way through every collection I can get my hands on. It was while in the middle of the Pre-Fall 2018 offerings that the logos popped out to me. There had been a sharp move away from them in ready-to-wear after the heady days of the first of the Murakami for Louis Vuitton collaborations, Juicy-stamped behinds, and Fendi baguettes carried by Carrie Bradshaw. To wear a logo is to strongly swear allegiance, to mark oneself. To act as ambassador and billboard. But as the economy shuddered near the end of 2000s, a fall into anonymity was to be expected, especially on the higher end. Things began to recover of course and other trends, colors and prints and blown out silhouettes came and went and came again, but the logos remained buried. Normcore became a buzzword then a joke then a way of life for those in certain circles. The influence of Everlane, Mansur Gavriel, and their cousins spread. Kinfolk with its minimal aesthetic was crowned The Last Lifestyle Magazine.

And so I forgot about the logos for a time. It was easy enough to do. I am in the midst a years-long journey of stripping my wardrobe bare of colors and prints and other things that might, at a cursory glance, stamp it as of a particular time. But I should have known better than to ignore them. This has been a decade of retreads to the point of worry, a circling of the same half-century for inspiration. In ten or twenty years will there be any way to know that an item of clothing is from the 2010s? There will be other context clues, hair and makeup and atmosphere, but the distance between a 2016 bodysuit and a 1993 bodysuit is small.

Why we returned to the 1970s or 1980s or 1990s at any particular point in the past eight years is a mystery that I generally don't try to solve. Mostly I sigh and think here come the strong shoulders again and again and again. Even as the extreme low rises and track suits of my college years reemerged, I thought little of the why and mostly of how fast time gets away from you. But I can't get this new wave of logomania out of my head. The Fall/Winter 2018 collections did nothing to help matters. The distaste among those sitting at the top of the fashion hierarchy seemed so strong for so long that I honestly thought the logos would never return, at least not to the ready-to-wear stage.

We've lived through a decade of dire retail news. "Apocalypse" has been thrown around a lot recently. Various strategies flung at walls to see what sticks. An increased focus on one's menswear arm. Transformation into a lifestyle brand. See Now, Buy Now. Chicken sans head is the perpetual mood. As the turmoil and angst continued even after the economy as a whole began to recover, logos were an easy target. They played the sad opposition in writing about the rise of the minimal squad. Easier to blame logos than some unwieldy shift in when we shop and where we shop and how much we shop. Yet the deeper I got into the Pre-Fall 2018 collections, the brighter the light shining off of the logos became. As that season wrapped up and everyone began preparing for the runways of New York, I received an email from Gap announcing their logo remix collection promoted by a group of bright young things.

The Gap of 2018 is not the Gap of my teens. If they were on this bandwagon then I had missed the signs of its coming. Or I had chosen to ignore them.

My indifferent feelings about a handful of brands and their creative directors are obvious to anyone adept at deciphering passive aggressive tweets. One friend is amused by all of this, my eye rolls and sighs and jokes about fashion nemeses. But it was there in their work, and in the land of athleisure, where the logos began reemerging. Jeremy Scott landed at Moschino. Demna Gvasalia and Vetements blew up seemingly overnight before he went on to replace Alexander Wang at a Balenciaga that didn't know what it wanted to be after Ghesquière's sudden departure. Alessandro Michele got promoted at Gucci.

One could put all of this on athleisure's rise. Yes, Valentino took a whirl through le sportif. And yes, Karl sent sneakers down Chanel's couture runways but that influence has always been more about style and silhouette than loud naming. The iconic Nike swoosh never went anywhere, the taint that covered ready-to-wear logos never really touching it, but neither did the staying power of it and its cousins have much to do with this particular return. And where does Supreme fit in this equation? There have been many many words written about the brand by people better equipped at understanding it than I. Best to leave it to them.

So let's start at the beginning as it seems only right that I go back and examine in order the points at which I closed my eyes. Scott was named the creative director of Moschino in the fall of 2013. (Somehow I'd forgotten that it happened that long ago. Anyone staying put for more than three years feels like a rarity nowadays, an achievement to be lauded.) The Moschino name is everywhere in Scott's work. Here it was that first season irreverently twisted and folded into a form reminiscent of McDonald's golden arches. And then there it was stamped on prescription pills and their accompanying bottles. His work immediately became the stuff of a fashion influencer's dreams as well as catnip for street style photographers. It was an aggressive wink at our consumer culture, and, therefore, you could almost convince yourself that these weren't the same as the logos of yore. They were fun! They were joking! Just don't look at them too hard or too long.

Gvalasia wasn't known for his brand's eponymous work, at least not at first. People weren't walking the streets in sweaters and tees stamped with Vetements. Instead DHL and its easily recognizable shades of yellow and red lived on tees costing hundreds of dollars. One might put this work in the same class as Scott and his golden Moschino arches but there was something more sly happening here, something that made my skin crawl. Could I put my finger on it? Not really. It would be odd to express a discomfort with late stage capitalism on a blog where I so often write of luxury but I think that might have been what it was. And so when Gvalasia landed at Balenciaga, my hackles went up. He wasn't really to blame for my apathy laced with distaste. I could deal with Vetements as an entity that had sway over the way that the fashion world was moving, but his appointment at Balenciaga, a brand that had been pivotal in my mid-late 2000s fashion reeducation, left me with a sinking, queasy feeling. Once there, he went the route Scott had taken at Moschino, albeit with a more serious tone, and I recoiled. I turned away from 2016 election throwbacks. I broke my pact with myself to merely subtweet those designers and brands that I did not care for. And at times, I stopped paying attention altogether.

And that brings us to Michele. Everything leads back to Michele nowadays, doesn't it? I'm still waiting for the inevitable bursting of that bubble, and in that in-between space, I forgot that everyone would need to fall in line in every possible way before the cracks would truly begin to appear. I forgot that I still needed to pay very close attention.

He has been doing the most traditional logo work of the trio. This was the interlocking G's as central talking point. This was the classic red, blue, and green stripes in fur coat form. This was Gucci front and center again and again. It was the old way. Yes, it was infused with his eccentric, sometimes chaotic, style profile (Guccify Yourself!), but it was still the old way. It was what I thought we were to leave buried in the past. This new yet old direction wasn't without controversy. Michele liked playing with the idea of fakes, sending pieces marked with Guccy down his runway, and ran into a wave of criticism when he took "inspiration" from the work of Dapper Dan, a king in that space. He mostly fended off that controversy by having Gucci team up with the man himself. This particular bit of the tale all makes sense if one thinks about it for a moment for in Michele's work there is an air of unconcern about the very thing that helped bring down the logo in the first place.

Fakes and knockoffs never stopped existing. In fact, I'd say that they've flourished in this decade. I spent months taking note of copies of a Rag & Bone sweater at stores ranging in price point from Charlotte Russe to H&M to Banana Republic. Before Nasty Gal's sale to Boohoo, their original offerings were often anything but. I walk through Zara picking out Dolce & Gabbana floral prints and Céline heel shapes. Is this new? Of course not. But the fast fashion juggernaut, another of the factors often cited when discussions of retail's demise occur, can't follow this new yet old trend. No one wants to risk the legal wrath of Fendi if you cover a sweater in their logos. Zara may be able to fend off the indie artists that it often steals from but they are not going to take on a well-established, heritage brand. (Forever 21 is an outlier in this regard. They are currently locked in legal battles with Adidas and Gucci although I think even they wouldn't go so far as to stamp another brand's name on, for example, a hoodie.) And so what have the logos and the like become now? They swear allegiance and mark their wearers. They let loyalists act as ambassador and billboard. They staunch the bleeding.

No wonder Gap was so drawn to the idea of them.

Early last month, I decided that it was time for the Everlane tote I used as my work bag to be retired. It had endured many bus rides, a vinaigrette incident, and an encounter with a shitting pigeon near the corner of 5th and Broadway in Downtown Los Angeles. But when I accidentally knocked iced coffee off of my desk and onto it, I knew it was the end. That day I took to Twitter asking which of three similarly anonymous options I should replace it with. I knew the answer already. I often do when asking such questions but I'm always curious to see if someone will change my mind. If they will expose me to some fact that I am missing. In the end, I went with the same bag with a coated base in black to better protect it from commute grime and my penchant for spilling. But that first gray Everlane hadn't always been my work go-to.

When I moved across the country four springs ago, I brought a red, quilted Coach tote with me. Much like the brown suede hobo, it had been a Christmas present from my mother. Not that I had done anything in the preceding six years of my life to earn it or deserve it. I think for my mother those college years represent the best version of Samantha, which is why she still sometimes defaults to Coach bag as gift. I never carried it in Boston. I couldn't imagine stuffing it into the small locker that I shared at my part-time retail job or bringing it along with me to the $6 movie matinees that I frequented. But in Los Angeles, in a new life, I thought it might have a place. I was drawn to its candy apple color and finish, but that finish would be its downfall. Five days a week on my shoulder or in my hand was too much for its straps, and they began to crack. It went back to my mother and then back to Coach but there was nothing to be done. I put it, still in the box in which it was mailed back to me, on the shelf in my closet next to an old comforter.

My new gray tote with its black base arrived soon after my informal Twitter poll, but there was something different about it. Pinned to one corner was an enamel pin, white with a black trim and inside its rectangular shape in black and raised was one word, EVERLANE. I unpinned it from the bag and looked it over before leaving it on the wooden ledge of a large mirror in my bedroom next to earrings and nail polishes and lipsticks.

Time Machine

It's a pretty standard awards show photograph. The stars of The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, Blake Lively, Amber Tamblyn, America Ferrera, and Alexis Bledel, stand arm in arm at the Nicklelodeon Kids' Choice Awards in the spring of 2005 and smile into the camera. They’re all dressed in some version of one of the dominant fashion items of the time: lowcut, flared jeans. Blake has a pink belt around her hips that ignores the loops at the waist of her cuffed, distressed denim. It's paired with a tank layered under a cropped, sheer, and sequined t-shirt. Amber is the most ornate of the bunch with her gold buttoned, sailor-style jeans, many long necklaces, bejeweled top, bejeweled earrings, and bejeweled belt, which sits high above her waist. America wears a lacy top and a metallic brocade blazer that tries and fails to challenge Amber's look for ornate dominance. Alexis, the most casual of the four, is wearing a floral print halter in a hue that fits in with the pink theme they all seem to have settled on. 

None of these looks would have struck me as anything but normal at the time. Every piece was certainly more expensive than anything living in my closet at that moment but otherwise they were similar in almost every way. In fact, somewhere in my dorm room that same spring was a floral print halter in black, white, and yellow that had returned to campus with me after my semester abroad.

I was on the cusp of 22 that spring and while I vividly remember other awards shows from that era, I was long past the age of caring about or paying attention to this one. The event came and went and rated barely a mention as I prepared for my final handful of weeks as an undergraduate. I would go and see the movie when it premiered in theaters a little over two months later, but this awards show appearance had nothing to do with that decision. I’ve always liked movies about female friendships that endure in the face of life’s trials and tribulations. I figured this latest installment would be worth my time. It didn’t disappoint, leaving me feeling happy and light and a bit teary. So when the sequel arrived three years later, I didn’t hesitate to once again make my way to the theater. While my movie watching habits had changed little in the interim, by 2008 my personal style had moved on in ways both big and small. The floral print halter top that I had only seen fit to wear once was buried and forgotten. In the middle of 2006, I bought my first pair of skinny jeans and was forever lost to anything with a wide leg. I stopped wearing heels. Those were the big, tectonic style shifts. But more important were the changes that were simply an effect of the passage of time. You wear through things. Colors fade. Your wardrobe turns over slowly until one day you look up and almost all of the old is gone.

That awards show picture didn’t reenter my life until the spring of 2015 when I came across it in a retrospective of early and mid-2000s red carpet looks. This time it stuck. Murmurs about the return of trends from that era, like bucket hats and the Juicy Couture track suit, had begun to enter my daily fashion reading and for that reason my brain couldn't shake the picture loose. Because the fashion industry can't help but examine its past and mine it for treasure, in the past decade, we've had the 1980s, 1990s, 1970s, and 1990s (again) all make their way back, in that order, to relevance and sales floors. And so for the past two years I have been unable to stop thinking about when, not if, the clothing and shoes that defined my collegiate life, platform flips flips and handkerchief hems that fell to some no man's land near my mid-calf, would have a true renaissance. When would this photo begin appearing on Tumblr or Pinterest as inspiration for someone’s spring aesthetic? Would I be prepared for that return?

When I entered college in the fall of 2001, I was free for the first time from the types of picture taking moments that define a childhood, first days of school and dances and portraits featuring loose ribbons and laser backgrounds. My response to that freedom was to rarely let others take pictures of me. I've always been mildly awkward in photographs, unsure how to stand or where to put my arms or how much to smile. But suddenly I had the chance to duck out of them, and I savored it. In that in between space before the arrival of the many, mostly unavoidable, ways in which we now capture and share images, there is a something resembling a Samantha-sized blank spot. The pictures that do exist are mostly of the physical sort, stuffed in their original envelopes from CVS and Walgreens instead of tucked safely into albums like those from my childhood. They live somewhere in my mother’s house where I left them when I moved across the country to Los Angeles in the spring of 2014. I assumed that those items, the items full of sentiment and memory instead of utility, would follow once I had settled in. But after nearly three years, I find myself surrounded by the new memories I have made here and few of the old.

When the 1980s and 1990s made their fashion returns, I was either living in my hometown of Boston or not far off in Brooklyn. Photographic evidence of what I wore the first time round either surrounded me, in albums or on walls in my childhood home, or could be easily seen with the purchase of a $15 bus ticket carrying me north. I could look at pictures of denim vests worn over long floral dresses or an old pair of neon platforms from The Wild Pair that inexplicably still took up space in my old bedroom and chuckle. Why was I doing that? would eventually lead to Do you remember when you were 13 and sneakily wore a crop top to camp only to have your ruse discovered by your mother who promptly grounded you for what would be the first and last time? And that was it. Suddenly I would be lost to reverie.

My memory has always been good. It holds on to things that I want it to as well as those I would rather not remember. But as I’ve gotten older, prompts have become more necessary for those trips into the past. Without the photographs, the few I allowed to be taken and the many that I wormed my way out of, I look at this awards show picture with its lack of belts worn either at all or as belts are generally meant to be worn, and remember that I never wore belts with my (almost definitely) bootcut jeans in the early 2000s. I can't do that anymore. Leaving without a belt situated firmly in the loops of my (almost definitely) skinny jeans leaves me unsettled now. But among the abandoned pictures is one of me taken soon after midnight on my 21st birthday on the dance floor of a London club. I am wearing a crisp cotton tube top from Topshop. It was white with diagonal pinstripes in a rainbow array and a side tie detail at the waist. I hadn’t learned how to effectively wear boxy items and was years away from realizing that strapless tops were not my friend and so I looked a little out of proportion. I am smiling and there is tinsel in my hair from a cracker that my roommates had snuck into the place. And my bootcut jeans are worn without a belt and the wide smile and the hand jauntily placed on one hip would make it appear that I could not care less. My only thoughts are about which colorful drink I would have next and where the chocolate confection my roommates had stuck a candle in had gone off to. There was no fear that I might look back one day and find myself ridiculous. There was no knowledge that looking at this past self would lead me down some rabbit hole about time and life and things old and new.

Because accessories and denim and birthdays aren't the only reasons I keep coming back to that image of four young women with questions rushing through my head. It’s the short amount of time that has elapsed between now and then. Trends seem to be returning at a faster rate, the fashion cycle shortening, and that quickening merry-go-round makes time appear to race forward in a flash. But then maybe it's not the clothes' fault, this odd nausea that comes and makes me want to scream "it's too soon!" Maybe I am simply getting older and time is becoming a far more slippery thing. Maybe things are moving at the same rate they always have and I am moving slower.

Image via

Shifting Winds

When one thinks of the fashion offerings that emerge from Milan semi-annually, what are the words that spring to mind? Sultry? Seductive? Some other s-fronted word of similar meaning? If one were talking about the Milan of old, these words would be apt descriptors. But in the fashion world, talk of a new mood has overtaken discussions about the city. Almost all of the chatter has been positive. The roots of this new landscape seem to have only sprouted recently but I believe an earlier event allowed them the space to take hold. The dizzying pace of change at brands, the pace that leaves no one safe from the whims of their board, their investors, or their own creative fatigue, has infected Milan as much as it has the other major fashion capitals. Despite all of the changes at houses like Jil Sander, Emilio Pucci, and Philosophy, to name a few, most of the discussions about the new Milan have centered on the most recent upheavals at Gucci.

After the exit of Tom Ford in 2004, Gucci experienced its fair share of turbulence before finally settling in with Frida Giannini at the creative helm and Patrizio di Marco presiding over the business concerns. But in late 2014, Giannini and di Marco were rather unceremoniously ousted and Alessandro Michele, a virtual unknown outside of the company, was quickly put in place as the creative lead. Sales had stagnated at the powerhouse brand, especially as the fashion world moved further and further away from its obsession with logos, and a change was coming eventually. However, no one predicted the manner in which it would arrive.

Everyone loves a bit of drama with a side of intrigue and while such fireworks can be thrilling, they can also distract one from the other, quieter causes of certain effects. Milan has always been about more than simply sex. The work of Miuccia Prada exists in its own peculiar and often charming galaxy. Jil Sander continues to put forth a sleek minimalism whether or not its founder is in control. The full-throttle glamour of Giorgio Armani still dazzles. But not all that long ago the influence of brands such as Versace, Roberto Cavalli, Dolce & Gabbana, and more recently Dsquared² and Fausto Puglisi, could at times seem to overwhelm the city’s fashion narrative.

In the late 2000s, with the financial crisis yet to consume us all, Dolce & Gabbana left that fold and set off a ripple with effects unknown at that time. The Fall 2007 show, fronted by then catwalk regular Gisele, was shiny, tight, and sexy. Dolce & Gabbana had always done that better than most.

But when Natasha Poly walked down the runway the next season in a full-skirted confection in a color that resembled the sky on a perfect, spring day, it was the opening of a new chapter for the brand.

That romantic, feminine mood built from look to look until the finale, which featured blown-out florals with the hint of graffiti to them in skirts even fuller than the one that opened the show.

I remember looking at the pictures and questioning what had caused this seismic shift. There had been no shakeups in the creative leadership like those seen at Gucci in the preceding years. I pored over the images from the collection in search of the reason behind the move. Some brands foster excitement by making 180 degree turns every season while others stir up similar feelings by finding new ways to express that which has always defined them. I had gotten used to Dolce & Gabbana being the former. At the time I assumed the change would be short-lived, a brief cleansing breath taken before a return to a status quo that was nowhere near broken.

But I was wrong. That first look marked a sea change that as of their most recent collection continues to reign. The sex isn't gone. I think it would have been impossible to remove completely as it is so tied up in the DNA of the brand. It's more that it's been transformed, living side by side with an abundance of romance and the long, winding history of Italy. The stories being told don't always land. The most recent collection featured picture postcard references that were a bit on the nose for my taste, but there is an unwavering dedication to this new narrative, not only in the collections but in the advertisements meant to sell them to the fashion masses.

The Before (Fall 2007)

The After (Fall 2012, Spring 2013, Fall 2015)

The new Dolce & Gabbana proved to me was that such a change could stick without the turmoil that usually precedes it. No one was threatened or fired or poached. But turmoil makes these types of moves a less risky endeavor. Everyone expects change after the fireworks. No one expects it, or necessarily accepts it, when there is seeming calm.

Near the beginning of my personal fashion education, I often scoffed at Milan a bit, dismissing its influence on the greater fashion world as one note. (Shedding my more prudish sensibilities is a work in progress and although addressed here and there would be best dealt with at length some other time.) And because of that "one note" bias, I believed the city incapable of the ingenuity and flexibility and creativity of New York and London and Paris. It took a change, a change that I loved wholeheartedly, for me to admit that not only I had also appreciated what was being done in the before but that the before contained more layers than I had imagined.


Runway images via

Sunny Side

My memory holds on to pieces of days and events and images with an iron grip that I sometimes wish were a little weaker. Although I don’t know why it holds onto so much, I am often aware of why at times it chooses to push some of its collected fragments to the forefront. A song plays. A pleasant and familiar smell fills the air. The sun filters through the trees in just the right way. And then something inside me stirs. But it’s only often that I know the source of the push. Often but not always.

The site that I use to sift through the various collections out of the various fashion capitals is changing directions come fall, so I spent a large part of a somewhat recent weekend sitting cross-legged on my bed and swapping out pictures on posts labeled “Fashion Month.” There were over 250 to fix. I was, for a time, rather prolific when it came to such matters. The reasons were two-fold. I was learning, still am, and the collections were part of my education. And I needed to keep my underemployment-induced boredom at bay. Or to at least dampen its effects.

Though exhausting, the image replacement exercise felt anything but dull. I was able to experience how much, and how little, my opinions have changed. My growing love of florals and suits. My initial distaste for brights. My brief flirtation with them. My recent rededication to all things navy and gray and cream. It was when going through a collection featured in a long ago Favorite of the Day post from the Spring/Summer 2012 season that I rediscovered a much-loved dress.

While examining it again, I came to realize how much it resembled one that I’d recently added to my closet.

Most of my clothing purchases happen accidentally. Shopping trips with specific goals in mind, especially when undertaken with others in tow, often end in frustration and terse words. But then it’s easy to shop accidentally when one’s curiosity leads to frequent store wanderings. I like examining clothing stores, their layouts and their merchandise, and thinking about what they’re doing right and what they’re doing wrong. It’s a habit with roots that stretch back before my four and a half years in apparel retail, a habit that existed even before my internship at a small buying office in Manhattan in late 2008 and early 2009. I step into stores noting where they keep their menswear section and lightly touching garments that catch my eye. I return home full of questions and conclusions and, sometimes, with a gift for myself.

It was on one of those accidental shopping trips a few days before my most recent birthday that I wandered into a Madewell. Yet again I was in the middle of, though not yet aware that I was in the middle of, a dress buying moment. After years of skinny jeans, it seems that I’ve come back round to the dress. I never abandoned them really. I’d simply come to buy them at a slower rate. But unlike the dresses that I’d collected during my years of living at home, dresses meant for a certain type of work life or peppered with girly confections, the dresses I’ve found myself drawn to for the past few months are much simpler. No bells. Barely any whistles. A few sequins. Navy and black and white and little more. I’ve been gifted dresses that fall outside of these parameters but gifts are another matter altogether.

That day I picked up a shirtdress from the sale section with a boxy silhouette and a block of navy at its bottom that cooled off its bright white top half. Navy and white in combination is a staple of my wardrobe but boxiness is a characteristic that I generally avoid in my clothing. It rarely does my body any favors. But my curiosity often leads me to try on those things that normally make me wary. The size was off at first. I held out little hope that the one I needed would be found in the back but asked for it anyway. When the sales girl returned waving it above her head, I did a little dance in front of the fitting room. While contemplating whether or not I should make it mine, I took a picture and posted it on Twitter.

The connections appear to me often but not always.

I woke up the following Saturday, the day after my birthday, possibly still drunk and definitely suffering from a shameover of immense proportions but with somewhere that I needed to be. Having a friend with a birthday close to yours can be fun when you're younger but my just turned 32-year-old body responded with anger that I was making it do anything but stay in bed watching romcoms and eating pizza. I calculated how long it would take my Uber to deliver me to the scheduled brunch and a Bloody Mary and thanked my overachieving self for choosing an outfit the previous day.

I had worn something more complicated for my own birthday. A jumpsuit. My first jumpsuit. But for a day about someone else, I'd decided to wear that week's purchase and take the more laidback California Samantha out for a spin. Because that was what I had been doing unconsciously doing with all of that dress buying. Getting to the heart of whom I wanted California Samantha to be. And all those years ago, long before I knew that I would pack up and leave my family, my friends, and my books for a life here, an image was already being created. And it started with that dress and that Jenni Kayne collection (and many Jenni Kayne collections that followed).

Who is California Samantha? Well she is evolving. She likes simple dresses in easy shapes. She likes skirts of a similar fashion. She has been stripped of the layers that previously dominated her life. When she decided to cull her closet last month, all of the items she consigned or gave to friends were colorful and printed and, in more ways than one, restrictive. Her skinny jeans have lost their place as default. 

She appears relaxed even when she is not.


Photos via