Out of Chaos an organizing newsletter
Creation Myths
While I was visiting my sister over the summer, I came across one of my mother’s old photo albums. A favorite from my youth, it is a wonderful, timeworn album of the trip she and her best friend took to Europe in 1957. There are a lot of stories from that journey, but what really impressed me about her trip as documented in the album are mother’s clothes. There she was, an American in Paris, Venice, Spain and Switzerland. Her clothes are impeccable and fit like they were tailor-made. Even her sunglasses had style. The year was 1957 and my mother bore more than a passing resemblance to the iconic Grace Kelly. During high school, I used to squint at the Kodachrome photographs and ask, “You don’t have that skirt anymore, do you?”
Mother knew a teaching moment when she saw one. What she tried to impress upon me (after she had assured me that she had given away that skirt and all the rest of it years ago), was how lightly she had packed for a six-week trip. In those days luggage was weighed and travelers paid per pound. Mother had very little money (a common maternal refrain!).
So, the navy blue, zip-up suitcase that my teenage self thought was too small to take me to Cape May for the Fourth of July weekend was the very same one she had somehow fit all those wonderful clothes into (big skirts, coats, bathing suits, capris) for a stylish Continental tour.
“You must have had a garment bag, too,” I would protest.
“Not at all. We had powdered soap and washed things in the sink every night.”
It is difficult to imagine, looking at those glamorous pictures, to believe that she was wearing clothes washed in a hotel sink, but she swore it was so. Her message was clear: You don’t have to have a lot to look good. And she looked great.
Mother grew up in Little Rock, Arkansas. She was not poor, but hardly rich. She had aspirations, so instead of going to college in Fayetteville like most of her college-bound friends, she decided she wanted to go to Stephens College in Missouri. Although her family didn’t have money for a big wardrobe, her younger sister, my Aunt Jon, was a superb seamstress. Mother had the idea of using only two colors so that everything would coordinate. Thus, Aunt Jon made her sister an entire wardrobe in hunter green and brown.
Like the tiny suitcase that yielded great outfits, this handmade wardrobe made an indelible impression on my ninth grade mind. I decided that I would only wear black, white and gray forever more. This drove mother so crazy that she wished she had never told me the story. I naturally wished she had saved some hunter green and brown hand-me-downs.
I wasn’t the only one who coveted Aunt Jon’s clothes. After college, mother moved to Manhattan where she worked as a salesgirl at Saks Fifth Avenue. She was routinely asked where she had gotten her chic clothes. Ladies were always very disappointed to learn that her sister in Arkansas had made them. Again, one didn’t need much, if it was good.
Looking at mother’s photo album this past summer reminded me of those stories, and what my mother taught me about clothes. As a young person, clothes are what we have, they represent us. How we cared and managed them served as the foundation for how we would later tend to our lives and homes. And wasn’t mother amazing, with her little suitcase and timeless, Arkansas clothes making a splash on Fifth Avenue? These were the Perfect Daughter’s childhood myths. Although of course they aren’t myths. Mother swore she only took that little suitcase…