At the beginning of the year, I wrote of my “musing on the idea of personal style versus experiencing it” due to my pregnancy and current inability to fit into my vintage wardrobe. What this has meant in practice is sad looks through eBay and other vintage sites without purchasing anything, looking through old editorials and making notes in my mind of things I should try to track down once my baby is here, and, for fun, reading archaic guides to dressing. You know the type: interminable lists of dos and don’ts for putting together an outfit, strict rules that change dramatically based on the publication date, endless ideas about how a woman should look. I’ve accumulated quite a collection of this kind of book, covering a hundred years of sartorial advice. Previously, I’ve written briefly about my collection of celebrity beauty books—these wardrobe advice guides fall under the same larger umbrella that could be called “manuals for looking better.”
The basic gist of all is that you can always improve your face, diet, body, hair, clothes—only the specifics evolve from decade to decade. One I just re-read is Clotheswise: Successful Dressing for Your Lifestyle, published in 1982 and written by Clara Pierre and Alice Meyer. Pierre was a freelance fashion journalist and the author of Looking Good: The Revolution in Fashion (another book I will cover in more detail in the future), while Meyer was executive director of Fashion Directions, a service that helped prominent women coordinate their wardrobes. She also originated Bloomingdale’s “Fashion Shopping Service,” the personal shopping department, in 1972; she appears to have left Bloomingdale’s around 1975 to start her new venture, Fashion Directions. One Bloomingdale’s ad proclaimed, “Alice Meyer knows the Bloomingdale woman. Who she is. What she does. What she wants to wear. Alice Meyer knows fashion. What’s new. When it’ll be here. How to pull it all together. For a new season. For a new lifestyle”—leading the way to her future as a book advice guru.
“Yves St. Laurent talks about limiting the components of a modern wardrobe. ‘A woman should build her wardrobe as a man does—with clothes that are timeless, give her confidence, and never make her feel démodé… A woman's wardrobe should not change every six months. She should be able to wear the pieces she already owns and add to them. They should be like timeless classics.’”
Together they pooled their knowledge of fashion and dressing successful NYC women into a novel approach to building what they termed a “Lifestyle Wardrobe.” A system of wardrobe management, it requires a rather involved hour-by-hour analysis of your week to break down your time (and therefore your clothes) into five activities: work, dress-up, exercise/sports, casual/home, and casual/out. Once color-coded, the reader can see clearly where they spend the greatest proportion of their time and, by the authors’ beliefs, where they should place the emphasis of their wardrobe. One’s clothes are then divided into “Expandables” and “Addables.”
Expandables are “adaptable clothes that aren’t locked into being worn in only one way. They work alone and with each other. They mix with a new item or with the clothes you already own and they never look the same way twice. Expandables are blouses, shirts, skirts, jackets, sweaters, pants, dresses, coats… They can be anything as long as they are versatile.” Addables are accessories that provide impact: “When it comes to Addables the trick is to pare down…” Together, Expandables and Addables create a kind of capsule wardrobe specifically tailored to your actual daily schedule—the point is less to have a uniform, but more so to have a group of pieces that can be endlessly interchanged to create new outfits and using a clarified color palette and signature Addable to develop a trademark look.
“Whatever it is you love, maximise it. But once your choice is made, stick to it. There’s a real advantage to using Addables this way. You can pare them down to a few signature pieces to sink your money into, instead of spreading it thin, putting it into lots of little items you only wear once.
Trademark Dressing takes a little thought and a lot of boldness. You must be willing to reveal yourself in the way you dress. Your look should seem to transcend what you wear, though you use clothes to achieve it. Give your audience something to identify you by, and repeat it until it’s ‘yours.’
‘Trademarking’ your Lifestyle Wardrobe requires making choices, but the reward is a personal style that singles you out from the crowd. Addables practically do it for you—they can be among the most individual items you’ll ever own. It goes back to the whole point about Addables in general: They’re Expandables with an infinite vocabulary. Learn to use them so they speak your language. A bronze strap evening sandal can look smashing on a summer day with something as tailored as a white pinstripe linen suit. A Lurex glitter scarf gives a jolt of surprise when tucked into a tailored outfit. It’s the juxtaposition of flash against something conservative that gives the look its wit. Many evening Addables can lead two lives—day and night.”
A little simplistic and boring for me (also way too much effort—there is a part where you write down each item in your closet as an Expandable or Addable and color code by activity), but the Lifestyle Wardrobe possibly might be helpful for someone less genuinely excited by fashion and clothes—I’ll stick to purchasing random vintage pieces that go with nothing I own yet bring me joy, thanks. For a book that calls rules “Fashion Myths” and says to replace them with options, it is in fact filled with many overly prescriptive rules.
That said, this book is littered with thoughts about style from many of the best-dressed ladies of the time. I went through and collected them below; my personal dressing manifesto most closely aligns with Louise Nevelson’s, listed last here. These quotes are where the true advice lies, in my opinion—no elaborate systems to follow, simply innate curiosity and style.
The gorgeous fashion illustrations are by Charles Booth, who worked extensively at WWD in the 1970s and 1980s.
Socks
Most people don’t focus on them. Vogue fashion editor Polly Mellon does: They’re her favorite clothes variable. “I love socks. I use them as a surprise a lot. Warm brown, pale blue ribbed, pale yellow, terra-cotta, anything with a little glitter for night, Argyles. I love the look of a pattern coming out of your pants.”
Jewelry
Socialite Betsy Kaiser says, "The jewelry I love most are the pieces I can travel with. My kids gave me an Elsa Peretti 22-karat gold belt buckle that has ten interchangeable straps. The belt can be worn in suede, leather, or satin, depending on how dressed up I am, and I wear it everywhere…”
Designer Mary McFadden: "My favorite jewel is my Verdura watch that I bought when I was seventeen years old."
Carolina Herrera wears a diamond bow with all her evening clothes, either in her hair or pinned to a black velvet ribbon around her wrist.
Sylvia de Waldner's trademark piece is, quite simply, her engagement ring mounted with two small pansy flowers.
The Paris editor of a famous American fashion magazine recently bought a pair of large, kite-shaped gold earrings and "hasn't taken them off since." They look marvelous with her dressy clothes but work just as well with her man-tailored daytime pantsuits. "It's probably their 'shock' value," she says, but it's impossible to think of her now without thinking of those earrings.
Color
PALOMA PICASSO: “My three favorite colors are black, white, and red. But, of course, I deviate from that… I dress very often in bright colors, but it’s always with black and one other bright.”
DONNA KARAN, designer: “Three years ago a woman could get away with a pair of good black pants, a good black skirt, black turtleneck, a pair of boots in a neutral color, straight-leg jeans, and a fabulous belt.” Note: she still can. Some things never change—especially the elegance of black.
DIANA VREELAND’s classic winter uniform: “Three black cashmere sweaters rotated with three black Givenchy skirts.”1
INGEBORG DAY, writer: “In the winter I wear black. Two pairs of black pants, a black skirt, a black wool turtleneck, a fisherman's sweater, and a short-sleeve black sweater. I have a pair of black evening sandals and Italian boots.”
LYNN CAINE, author: "I think a woman goes through color stages the way she goes through life stages. In my twenties I wore lots of black to set off my black hair. Then I went through a blue-green period I felt it played up my green eyes. Finally, a friend who knows about clothes said to me, 'You should be wearing purples.' And she was right. Now I have the whole plum-mauve-violet spectrum to choose from. Sometimes it takes an expert's eye. It's hard to know yourself colorwise.”
REAL-LIFE DRESSING STRATEGIES: HOW THEY DO IT
SHERRY LANSING, president of 20th-Century Fox, has something of a uniform: pants with a silk shirt and often a blazer. "At the beginning of each season, I might buy one outfit in five or six colors."
ELLIN SALTZMAN, vice president and corporate fashion director at Saks Fifth Avenue, also advocates a uniform: a silk shirt and trousers. "In the summer I just roll up my shirt sleeves." Black is usually her main color, "Black with brights, or an occasional pale, just for shock."
NANCY REAGAN, "My wardrobe is dictated by the life I'm leading."
PHYLLIS GEORGE BROWN, wife of the governor of Kentucky, says that her style of dressing has changed with her careers. "When I was a sportscaster, I was sporty," she says. "Now I'm much more classic."
PALOMA PICASSO, jewelry designer, says her wardrobe is built around a small group of black basics. "I always have one or two pairs of black pants, several black shirts and one black dress. I wear these with bright colors. When you wear black, you can use a lot of accessories. I like big jewelry even though I'm small: little jewelry doesn't work for me. When I put a hat or a jewel on, it's the bigger the better. I can't go halfway. It has to be all or nothing."
DONNA KARAN, fashion designer, says, "Start with your neutrals on the bottom and bring in your accents on top; always have a pair of wine shoes and a wine handbag. They go with everything. Every woman must own a pair of black pants and a black skirt." Her wardrobe begins with "fabulous pants in neutral colors, like black or navy, I can dress those up or down with a sweater for day, a silk charmeuse shirt for night: I prefer to have one thing, like a sweater, in multiple colors. That's how you make statement.”
AUDREY HEPBURN, actress, says, "The rules of dressing are practically the same no matter what you spend. I want as little as possible in my closet. I want just one thing, but I want it to be right."
MARINA SCHIANO, PR consultant to Yves St. Laurent, says, "I adore exaggerated things because they go with my look. It's research, I suppose, choosing what suits you best. I'm not a normal person. I don't have a normal, standard face or size . . . so it's either exaggerate or it's a catastrophe."
LOUISE NEVELSON, sculptor, says, "Being well dressed is not a question of having expensive clothes or the 'right' clothes—but they must suit you. I like wearing lovely things… in the daytime, old lace dresses, Japanese robes. When I buy something new in a store I may not wear it for a year until I get used to it. My day is filled with my work and my interests…”
Diana Vreeland’s manifesto for dressing – found in Marisa Berenson’s 1984 advice book, Dressing Up: How to Look and Feel Absolutely Perfect for Any Social Occasion – can be found in this newsletter.
SO GOOD. This pushes every one of my buttons, thank you. I must warn you though when I had my baby and I had my job and I had generational family obligations and all that crazy LIFE… I found turning to a uniform made at least one thing simpler. Sherry Lansing and I hit on the pants-shirt-jacket solution and it was in place for decades. I think we looked pretty snappy (Sherry and I).