3. Naked Style

In the The Beautiful Fall by Alicia Drake, there’s a reference to this photograph of Yves Saint Laurent taken by the French photographer Jeanloup Sieff, Paris, 1971.  It  was the centerpiece of an advertising campaign for Yves’ first men’s fragrance, but Martin and I don’t recall ever seeing it. Being born in 1958 put us near the end of the baby boom generation bracket, like Sally Draper’s younger brother, or maybe the new baby. We were too young and too distracted by family problems to take in the hippie movement and other massive cultural shifts that occurred during the early 1970s. By the time we woke up and looked around it was disco time.

Back to the photo.

Drake writes:

“It was French fashion photographer Jeanloup Sieff who took the photograph, but crucially it was Yves, not Sieff, who devised the idea for the image; he wanted to be shown naked. Yves appeared in a black and white portrait, sitting on a pile of black leather cushions with his body shown at the height of its allure — slim, taut and mesmerizing in its grace.”

Here’s another photo by Sieff showing Yves clad only in black and looking even more alluring, to my eye.

What strikes me about these two photos is that style must have nothing to do with clothes, because naked or clad simply in black, Yves exudes style, in the power of his of sexuality and of his intelligent, self-assured gaze.

Does style boil down to self confidence?

In a later photo taken in 2002, at a retrospective fashion show held at the Centre Pompidou, Yves’ clothes look stylish but the power is gone.

It made me wonder when I last felt really comfortable in my skin, and this photo (I hope it’s sufficiently obscure — I don’t mean to offend) immediately came to mind. Here’s me, happy in my body.

And here I am a few years later, in 1983, happy, utterly unconcerned about clothes.

But then, after the birth of my daughter, my opinion changed. I used to look at this photograph and say Ugh. So ugly. And look what I am wearing when I think I am looking ugly? Ugly things.

In the years that followed, something happened to my self confidence. Part of it, as I alluded to in this post, had to do with trying to be a super Jew and fit in with my glamorous Jewish girlfriends. This photo shows me trying very hard to make this work. Inside, I felt really uncomfortable. In fact it’s part of the reason why I wanted to leave New York and move to California, which we did in 1990.

And part of my discomfort had to do with not really getting fashion. In the 1990 photo above and the 1991 one below, I’m trying to squeeze my shape into clothes that don’t really fit well or suit me.

For better or worse, I mostly gave up on fashion in the 1990s, in part because the dress style at my company, Adobe Systems, was very, very casual. Adobe regularly handed out free T-shirts to everyone in the engineering division. We all wore T-shirts and jeans. I didn’t have to think about fashion anymore and didn’t want to.

The next time I faced a fashion challenge is when I joined my Episcopal church in 1996, because I didn’t have appropriate things to wear to services. So I just didn’t attend. Then, in 2002 I joined the choir, and now I don’t have to dress up because of the black choir robe and white cotta. Sure, it’s a little strange that I’m the only one still in my choir outfit during coffee hour, but people are used to it. Or I just don’t attend.

Comfort is more important to me than anything else when it comes to clothes, shoes, hair and makeup. Sometimes I just want to wear my comfy L.L. Bean sweater.

But I’m getting used to wearing a little makeup.

Kristin of K-Line told me that  ready-to-wear (RTW) sizes are random and this is why it can be so difficult to get a good fit.

She wrote:

“An 8 at the gap could be 3 inches bigger at the waist than one at Club Monaco (or smaller or any other variation). That’s why, in some shops, you fit the garments and in others you don’t. The pattern drafters for any particular brand use a particular “sloper”. That means they cut to a certain body size and shape and then just draft the sizing up or down. If their sloper is narrow hipped or small-breasted or pear-shaped or tall etc., it’s more or less likely to work with you specifically.”

My experience has been that RTW clothes do not fit me well unless I am as skinny as a boy.

In summary, what the above photos tell me is that I once relished in my young body, that I felt confident. There was style in my smile and stance, whether clothed or naked. Beauty is fleeting, yes, but more importantly, I didn’t transition from being a young girl to a mother with a career with my self confidence intact, because of social insecurities and not having a sense of personal aesthetic or understanding how to dress my shape. I didn’t have a sense of Susan grown up; clothes were only part of the problem.

Martin remembers the mature women he worked with at Elizabeth Arden in San Francisco in the late 1970s. They were perfectly confident, unconcerned about weight and the effects of age. They exuded style.  I would like to as well, in my own way, when I figure out what that means. I think it’s going to involve some some little capes, for drama. And colors. It will mostly involve clothes that fit and are comfortable to move around in. There could be some new jewelry, and stylish shoes.

I hadn’t planned to sew, but Kristin’s thoughts on sizing, on having more control of sizing working with patterns, motivated me to start setting up my sewing room. I’ve been meaning to set up a sewing room since we bought our house six years ago.

Meanwhile, I ordered some things from Eileen Fisher. They’ve not yet arrived, but my cute new sandals did.

Next week I’ll tell you about the time I went to Paris and bought some jewelry. Until then, feast your eyes on these drop-dead gorgeous earrings at WendyB’s.