in the closets of my mother-the-model

From Dior to The Gap, my mother was defined by her clothes until the end.

Photo by Ari Seth Cohen for Advanced Style

We all have things that make us us.

I grew up a fanatical guitarist, playing since the age of four. I studied with Eddie Simon (Paul’s brother) for a while, and briefly played in clubs around Boston while I was in college, opening once for Nanci Griffith at Club Passim in the early 1980s. I have owned twenty-four guitars in my lifetime (I wrote about this recently for The Bitter Southerner). To this day, my state of mind can be measured by whether I play or not, or the amount of time that passes before I open one of my five guitar cases and take it out, even for an hour or two.

A guitarist was how I was known by external definition for ages, until I graduated from college; I was rarely seen without an instrument, but then, after I moved back to New York City and into my mother’s apartment, I stopped playing for months at a time. My mother was the star, the singer, the glittering object of attention; we know you know how to play, she said to me one night when I was sitting on the living room couch with my Martin. I put it away until I left, a year later. When I moved into my own apartment and friends from work came over, they were surprised to see a case sitting in my living room.

I had no idea, they would say. Sometimes they asked me to play, and sometimes they didn’t, and I didn’t offer.

By then, I thought of myself as a guitarist in the past tense; it was something that no longer defined me. I had moved on to food — I was devoted to cooking, and briefly went to cooking school in Manhattan — and by the time I left a stint working at Dean and Deluca at the height of the late eighties, I was constantly obsessing over cookbooks, and things like the difference between carbon steel and stainless knives. I was offered a job as a sous chef at a Chelsea restaurant called Eze, and I turned it down: the hours were insane, and so I threw myself into publishing and writing about food instead. Also, my mother said, over dinner at Raoul’s, I didn’t send you to college so that you could wear an apron; you’re not a chef — and so I decided I wasn’t.

Whoever we are, we all try on different personas through the years, to see how they fit; usually, we do this unconsciously. When the shifts occur, they do so without plan or design, although I used to know someone who regularly and publicly changed her persona, in a way that felt whiplashy and schizophrenic: she was The Refined Londoner one minute and the teal-haired yoga guru the next, married to a fabulous and loving guy one minute and fleeing their home the next, an incredibly talented interior designer one minute and publicly hating on her design editor colleagues the next, in a way that seemed unnecessary and professionally suicidal. She was an anomaly; I’ve never met anyone else like her before or since.

Monterey, 1970

The only person I’ve ever known whose persona never changed as long as I knew her was my mother: she was a model first, last, and always, and as preoccupied by clothes and style as you-know-who is about Greenland. She needed it to live, to breathe, to thrive. It gave her life meaning and foundation, and she defined that life — and benchmarked it — by what she was wearing at any given time. If I asked What did you wear at that Sherry-Netherland press party in 1957 when you were on television, she’d say A robin’s-egg blue Dior New Look dress and a silver clamshell clutch. If I asked What did you wear to lunch that time you and my father took me to Chasen’s in 1970, she’d say A brown suede fringed maxi skirt and a flowered blouse tied at my waist and those Jean Shrimpton aviators with the amber lenses. And flat gold sandals.

If I asked her what she’d had for breakfast, she’d have no idea. But a dress from sixty-five years earlier? No problem.

At Michael’s

My mother was a believer in recycling clothes and outfits in ways that are mystifying to those of us who are not born with that natural gift; it was the language she spoke. Until she became ill in the last few years of her life, her size remained a constant: she was 5’6” and 115 pounds, built very long and lean with broad shoulders, long arms, and a flat chest, making her perfect for modeling anything, which she did, from bathing suits and dashikis (invited by Princess Elizabeth of Toro for a fashion show held at the United Nations) to fur coats for her husband Buddy Hammer’s company, De’cor, and briefly after he died, his partner, Pologeorgis. (I don’t love fur, and the only fur anything I’ve kept of hers is a mink-and-cashmere Pologeorgis sweater, worn here by Plum Sykes. And I can tell you this: I do not look like Plum Sykes in it.)

Fashion was my mother’s cultural barometer: she could instantly tell anything about anyone by what they were wearing. I love to make women look great, she’d say, and she did, no matter who they were: she restored 1920s Fendi furs for Yoko Ono and made sables for Nicole Brown Simpson, modeled Alek Singer couture for the girlfriends of Russian diplomats, sold lynx coats to young ultra-Orthodox brides marrying into the Reichmann real estate empire, and gorgeous members of the Jordanian royal family. She could talk to everyone; they all loved her and trusted her, and if God forbid you were in her showroom and took a shine to something that she felt wouldn’t look good on you, she’d be the first to tell you. (So I applaud her self-restraint when I went through a short cowgirl faze in 1979 when I was sixteen and favoring pearloid snap-front, embroidered yoke shirts and Wranglers while the rest of my friends were wearing Huk-a-Poo and Jordache.) I maintain that she didn’t know what to make of me.

Her love of fashion, of course, extended to her own wardrobe, which ran the gamut from high to low and everything in between: five-dollar pushcart scarves worn with Armani, voluminous Morgan Le Fay gowns worn over cotton leggings from The Gap, chocolate brown suede Italian pumps worn with Banana Republic chinos shortened just a little bit too much for her tailor’s liking.

Boris and Natasha

If I sound like I’m in awe, I am. I was Boris to her Natasha, Fran Lebowitz to her Twiggy; our shapes and sensibilities were wildly different, as though I sprang from the loins of another woman entirely. Both of my grandmothers were short, wide, and big-breasted, and I inherited those genes. So did my mother until, determined to be on television as a singer, she changed her body shape forever when she was in her teens, which I didn’t even know was possible.

It has taken Susan and me most of a month of visits to her apartment to go through all of her drawers and closets. After her second husband died, her clothes migrated into his side of their wall unit and his closet, and eventually into the drawers and closet in the den where I slept for the two years I lived there. Just when we think there are no more sweaters to pack up, we find more; since she died in October, we have brought fifteen giant bags of clothes to consignment shops, and we are still not done. I have taken only very few of the pieces of hers that I’ve loved; her size two Celine jackets and Prada trousers won’t fit around my shoulders or my chest or my waist, not even after a nearly twenty-pound weight loss.

It’s been hard to go through everything and make decisions about where things should be taken. If I close my eyes, I can see her coming towards me on East 57th Street in the black leather pants and the cream and white cashmere shawl; I can see her walking down Fifth wearing the sable jacket and carrying the brown satchel I dragged back from Italy for her in 2000. But things changed for her, as they inevitably do when fabulous older people get even older: her sable began to split at the seams and develop holes where it dried out, until it was unwearable. Beloved sweaters were stained when she developed the tremor she insisted she did not have, and her vision became a problem. Jackets lost buttons; the straps and zippers on her ancient Vuittons broke where she tore at them with shaking hands. Her clothes actually became too heavy for her to carry on her shrinking frame, and she took to wearing the soft sweatshirts I brought back for her from wherever I visited or taught: Wellfleet, Aspen, Nantucket, Dublin.

I can’t part with it.

These things were all part of her persona; her fashion sensibility and love for it were her touchstones. They were her signifiers of place and experience, in the way that I cannot part with the little leather Agnes B. jacket she bought for me one day when I was twenty-five, and working across the street from the boutique at Dean & Deluca in 1988. An impossibility; unthinkable. It doesn’t even matter if I can’t fit into it anymore, in the same way that she kept the damned sable jacket with the holes in it.

Clothes made my mother who she was, and I can't remember her any other way. We’re going back to her apartment again this weekend.