Towels

These fancy towels are embroidered with my first name in twelve monogram typefaces and colors by Leontine Linens, a New Orleans–based company. Of course, I never use these towels. They’re too nice, so I keep them in a drawer. But I’d like to display my collection. They’re little works of art, so why not? Some kind of towel rack might work. I also collect Pop- and modern-art needlepoint—from Matisse, Vasarely, Picasso—and vintage textiles. I love midcentury upholstery fabrics by Jack Lenor Larsen. Also I collect Dansk housewares. My mother used Dansk for everything. I’ve got Dansk cutlery, the wooden ice buckets, and of course those amazing orange pitchers. As for my collection of monogrammed linens, I’d love to add pillowcase shams. Each one in a different shape with a different “Kim,” strewn all over my bed. By Kim Hastreiter, co-publisher of Paper Magazine

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Monogrammed towel collection courtesy of Kim Hastreiter, co-publisher of Paper Magazine.

Towels

2008-02-22T10:57:27-05:00

No other garment has been as celebrated, cursed, censured, fetishized, worried about, fussed over, and, let’s not forget, snapped, unhooked (single-handedly, with practice), adjusted, and readjusted as that band of fabric and metal we call the brassiere. This little apparatus has been the source of impassioned protests, academic treatises, and a multibillion-dollar lingerie catalogue business. It has had to support not only the breasts we put in it but also the symbolism we have stacked, as it were, upon it. During its century-long existence, the bra has become much more than the sum of its twenty-plus parts. The bra looms large in our culture precisely because of what it hoists. A pair of D-size breasts weighs fifteen to twenty-three pounds, but this is nothing compared to the hefty emotions—lust, envy, pride, shame— evoked by breasts of all shapes and sizes, in their owners and beholders alike. The bra has thus gained by its intimate association. It is the sacred pouch within which the golden currency is hidden. Our collective obsession with the bra, then, may be viewed as an oblique way of obsessing about the breast. Experts in these matters say approximately 85 percent of all women, or some 90 million of us, house their bosom in cups that are too small. Cup size has become the equivalent of a bodily letter grade, and, as though our breasts were a term paper, nothing but an A, B, or C will do. “I was in a C for years, pretending. … The idea of going to a D—I thought only strippers were Ds,” Oprah confessed during one of her much discussed “Bra Intervention” episodes, in which a group of women get their bra phobias off their chests and their breasts properly supported. Most women learn their bra size as a teenager and cling to this letter with foolish consistency. But a bust measurement is not a shoe size. A woman’s dimensions change with pregnancy, weight gain or loss, even with the monthly tumefaction of PMS. If the shoe no longer fits, we no longer wear it; if a bra no longer fits, we go on wearing it forever. Many of us do so not out of vanity but out of necessity, as anyone who has bought lingerie at a department store knows. For women of ample or diminutive proportions, the pickings are slim. Unless your size falls neatly into the first four letters of the alphabet—cup size does not stop at multiple Ds, but runs as high as JJ—you are unlikely to find the right bra. Susan Nethero, owner of the Intimacy chain of boutiques and the fitting guru who appeared on Oprah, explains that most American manufacturers still treat the average cup size as a 34B, a decadesold figure. “An average cup size today is at least a D-cup for most young women entering their twenties,” she writes by e-mail. “Women are maturing earlier and fuller than previous generations.” (Medical experts cite many reasons for this, from improved nutrition to hormones in food.) American companies manufacture for “the mainstream,” or rather for what they think is the mainstream, because “all they can do is read from sales reports what sizes sold,” notes Nethero. The cycle perpetuates itself: American women don’t buy their size, so their size rarely gets made, not to mention stocked at department stores. Yet how to buy the correct size if it isn’t there to buy? Like a jumble of bras caught on those little plastic department-store hangers, the problem is difficult to untangle. Like so many other American women, I have had bra issues for most of my life. When I was a teenager, my mother took my sister and me to a boutique where an elderly lady smelling of powder and perfume wrapped a tape measure around each of our adolescent chests—mine infinitesimal, my sister’s impressive—and shouted throughout the store, “I can’t believe these two are related!” Eventually, she found a strip of fabric for me, and a substantial supportive garment for my well-endowed younger sister. I wore my “bra” (stretch lace, no padding, racer back, front closure) for years, suffering the perennial taunts of the flat-chested adolescent girl: Put some Band-Aids on your mosquito bites! Is that you or the wall? Then, in 1994, the year I entered high school, salvation arrived in the protuberant form of the Wonderbra. I bought one in satiny black and wore it until it disintegrated. Now that I’m an adult, my approach to lingerie can best be described as out of sight, out of mind. I am so far from voluptuous that I don’t need a bra for support, and, when propriety is not an issue, I often don’t wear one. For the past decade or so, the two or three bras I’ve owned at any one time have been hideous—stretched out, the cups wrinkled, the shoulder straps slipping down at the slightest provocation. Once a year, usually mourning a bra’s death by ripped strap or broken clasp, I head to Macy’s determined for once to buy an array of new brassieres, some respectable, some sexy. But after an hour of swimming my way through the ocean of intimate apparel, overwhelmed by the dearth of choices and the glaring fluorescent lights, I purchase the single acceptable specimen I can find in my smallish size, and, thoroughly dispirited, head home for another year of alternating between two pathetic and ill-fitting bras. Finally, long past due for an undergarment overhaul, I schedule a fitting at Intimacy, Susan Nethero’s serene, elegant boutique on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Intimacy offers seventy-five sizes, ranging from AA to JJ, and anywhere from 15,000 to 20,000 styles, many of them higher-quality European brands. “We believe the European bras are better,” Nethero says unequivocally. “They are made with more pieces, as many as forty-five versus an American’s twenty or fewer.” Plus, Euro-brands encompass more sizes. “European women are generally fit professionally and hence the sizes manufactured more accurately reflect the sizes that women are.” At Intimacy, I am met by Dee, a dark-haired woman in her thirties with hipster sneakers and a maternal air. In the dressing room, I remove my shirt and sheepishly show her the eyesore I am wearing, a sad piece of white stretch cotton—a training bra, basically—gone gray from too many washings. “That’s OK,” she says, patting my arm. “I always tell my customers, It’s not your fault.” I expect her to whip out a tape measure and go to work. Instead, she encircles my rib cage with her perfectly manicured hands. “You’re a 32,” she announces. I had been buying 34A, but the chasm between my flesh and the cup made me suspect my guess wasn’t right. Dee pulls various styles, and I begin to acquire a new language, one of demis and plunges and convertibles and contours. I learn that there exists a highly developed philosophy of proper fit. “On the loosest hook, your band should be at its firmest point,” Dee tells me as I lean forward and she fastens me into a bra, a light-pink seamless “contour” number by Chantelle. “That way,” she says, “when the bra stretches”—as all bras eventually do—“you’ll have somewhere to go.” She tells me that most women wear their band too loose and too high. It should rest snugly across the narrow part of your back, just below your shoulder blades. “Ninety percent of your support should come from your base. Only 10 percent of your support should come from your straps.” The lowered placement feels odd to me, and I insist that the bra is too tight. Dee gently counters that I’m just not used to it. She enumerates the perils of a slack band: the dreaded back fat, created by the band riding up and pushing flesh along with it; grooves like tire tracks in one’s shoulders, the result of relying on spindly straps for heavy lifting. To these joys, Nethero adds several others, aesthetic and medical—poor posture, back pain, and numbness caused by pressure on the arteries in the neck and shoulders. I look in the mirror. The bra is lovely, the palest seashell pink with lace-trimmed straps. It is classy and feminine without being too girly, and its surface is smooth enough to wear under T-shirts or sweaters. “What size is this?” I ask. Dee tells me it’s a 32B. “See,” she says, “you’re not as small as you thought!” The only problem I have with the bra, and indeed with all the bras she brings me, is that its cups are “contouring,” to use lingerie-business parlance. In her informative and sassy primer, The Lingerie Handbook, Rebecca Apsan, owner of Manhattan’s La Petite Coquette, describes a contour bra as one “designed with a fiberfill foam lining to provide definition and shape.” Contour cups, she writes, “don’t increase size; instead, they create a rounder, more symmetrical bustline.” For this reason, and because the lining provides what Dee calls “nipple coverage” under tight-fitting or see-through clothing, contour bras are the ne plus ultra of bra chic. But I don’t mind my shape, small though it may be, and the bra does seem to increase my amplitude. I feel thick and insulated, like I’ve packed my breasts in Styrofoam. Ever since my Wonderbra days, I have avoided any sort of padding. I think it makes a woman’s breasts look stiff, unnatural, and as though they sit too high on the chest. I ask Dee for cups that aren’t padded. She replies in her kind way that contour styles don’t have the cushioning of true padded bras, and that they are suitable even for more sizable busts than my own. The “rigid” cups, she explains, give breasts “a nice shape and volume.” She suggests that I put my turtleneck on and take a look. I do this. “Soooo much better,” she coos. I appear fuller where I should be full, and yet I can’t shake the image of a 1950s pinup girl. The bra doesn’t give me torpedoes, but it does, in its twenty-first-century way, create what fashion historian Anne Hollander has called “the brashaped breast.” I decide to approach the issue indirectly. “Do you ever get small-breasted women who don’t want any shaping?” “We do. But they shouldn’t. They should be wearing something like this that’s going to give them more shape.” I decide that I might come around to Dee’s view and that with, say, bulky sweaters, I could use some bulk of my own. I purchase the Chantelle contour bra and a black push-up (“this gives you that little oomph”), also contour. Dee advises that all women should have eight to ten good-quality bras, including a strapless, a plunge (for low-cut or V-neck shirts), a push-up (to create cleavage for décolleté dresses), and one with convertible straps (for tank tops and halters). After years of famine, I suddenly want the lingerie equivalent of Gatsby’s cabinet full of beautiful, expensive shirts. But this is a start. The next day I take a cab downtown to La Petite Coquette. Owner Rebecca Apsan is the doyenne of Manhattan’s crowded lingerie world, and her store, with its boudoir feel, is something of a Manhattan institution. Apsan, who has piercing green eyes, a tangle of black ringlets, and a throaty, radio-ready voice, sizes up my chest with a single expert glance. Hers is the sure, practiced eye of someone who has been in the business of fitting women for more than thirty years. In her book, Apsan confirms what I learned at Intimacy, writing that “the band should be snug, but not so tight you can’t fit a finger under it,” and that “in no case should the main support for your bra fall on the straps alone.” In person, Apsan doesn’t talk bra stats or specifics; she works with the intuitive assurance of a seasoned athlete or a musician who plays by ear. She does, however, chat, joke, banter—asking about my life, my job, and tossing off clever witticisms like “The right bra is like the perfect man: good-looking, supportive, and sure to never let you down. It’s also just as hard to find.” The first of many bras she brings me fits perfectly, pushing my breasts slightly inward to surprise me with the faintest hint of cleavage. (“You need at least a B-cup to create natural cleavage,” Apsan tells me.) This newfound cleft is sort of exciting, but the effect, produced by another contour bra, makes me feel I’m dressing up as Jane Russell for Halloween. Does she have anything that’s not quite as volumizing? Perhaps something wireless? The bras Apsan returns with are so me that I begin to suspect she may be telepathic. Like most fitters, she is fond of contour bras, and yet she also takes a relaxed, ecumenical approach to lingerie. She brings a beige Wolford seamless underwire bra in silky stretch nylon that gently lifts my breasts while allowing them to remain their understated selves. She brings a sweet light-blue “bralette”—an unlined wireless bra that, as she delicately puts it, “is best for smaller bustlines.” (On large-breasted women, wireless bras let the breasts spread out and can make one look “thick in the midsection.”) But my favorite is a white cotton La Perla, a seamless—and yes, contour— bra that lends me some shape without insisting my bust conform to its rigid ideal. Amazingly, it does not make me feel like I have earmuffs on my breasts. It is practical and comfortable and sexy, all at the same time. It may well be the perfect bra. It is also eighty-three dollars, but I tell her I’ll take it. And I do, in both white and nude. As open-minded as Apsan is, she won’t deviate from her belief that women of limited curves also need reinforcement. “If the ligaments that attach the breasts to the chest aren’t supported, gravity and motion will eventually wear them down and breast support and positioning will deteriorate,” she writes. Or, as she puts it to me, “I’ve seen small, droopy boobs, and it ain’t pretty.” (The condition is called “Cooper’s droop,” after the doctor who named the ligaments.) And she won’t budge on her condemnation of my faded, comfortable cotton bra. “You should not be walking around in that,” she says bluntly. “Burn it!” If it were the ’60s, I might take her advice. Instead, I exercise my right to choose by continuing to wear the cruddy thing on occasion, not without a heightened sense of shame. There is no “fit and run” in the world of brassieres. Bra size, like the size of any article of clothing, differs with brand, style, fabric, even country of origin. “American and English fits are quite similar,” says Kim Rawlings, editor in chief of Contours magazine, “while European bras tend to run much smaller.” In a 1997 article published in the International Journal of Clothing Science and Technology, authors C. H. M. Hardaker and G. J. W. Fozzard canvassed ten UK bra companies, noting, “All manufacturers surveyed use the same size notation”— A, B, C, D, etc., originated by Warner in the 1930s—“yet there appears to be no industry-wide size chart.” Put simply, there exists no standard set of measurements that determines the alphabetical notations. This means that even when you know your size, it’s essential that you try on every bra you plan to purchase. Case in point: My B-cup status is questionable; in American brands, for example, I barely fill an A. But if there is no general consensus on bra sizing, there is widespread agreement on the ideal shape of the bust the bra contains. As anyone who has opened a glossy magazine in the past few years knows, the tyranny of round, grapefruit-size breasts—often fake— holds sway. “The fashion is for round breasts,” Poupie Cadolle, bra couturier and owner of Alice Cadolle, Paris’s famous custom lingerie shop, tells me by phone. “Round! All these women with their uniform breasts look like robots, like Barbie dolls. I don’t like it,” she sniffs. If your breasts slope, sag, or otherwise fall short of orbicular perfection, there are two options: implants, or, if you prefer a noninvasive approach, the aforementioned seamless contour bra. “I am against the shape that a seamless bra gives to the body,” Cadolle says. “It is not feminine. It is not the real shape of a bust. Seams give support and follow the lines of the breasts, which are not like tennis balls. I have been fighting the trend,” she sighs. “It is a long fight.” Alas, one has only to walk through the lingerie section at any department store to know that her revolution has not yet reached our shores. On a recent trip to Macy’s, the selection was overwhelmingly of the contour variety, bras erect even without breasts inside them, ready to mold all women into a single, acceptable shape. That is, unless you are a “full-figured” woman, in which case a wall of “minimizers,” designed to “reduce [your] bust up to a full size,” await you. These appliances work, as Nethero, who is not a fan, puts it, by “flatten[ing] a woman’s breasts against her torso, spreading breast tissue under her arm and down her chest wall cavity.” Have women been freed from the corset only to be contorted by an impossible cultural ideal? “A liar—like a bra,” Céline wrote. Of course, part of the magic of fashion is that it creates illusions, and if bras bring any pleasure, it is because they enhance as well as support. Still, shouldn’t natural-looking uplift also be an option? Why is it so difficult to find a bra that doesn’t radically alter a woman’s appearance? A bra that simply makes her a better version of herself? The more pertinent question, I learned as I surveyed the brascape, is this: Can the right bra, contouring or not, transform your life? Every book and fit specialist I encountered promises that it will. Women weep, self-image improves, careers are resuscitated, all once this mythical bra has been donned. If your brassiere is causing you serious discomfort, the assertion is not overblown. No one should suffer brainduced pain. My new bras have engendered small, pleasing changes. My clothes hang better. I feel more soigné. On those rare occasions when I want to look busty, I know I have that option. None of this is to be scoffed at. But shouldn’t my superlative, professionally fit bras also be ultracomfortable, light as air, undetectable by my naked flesh? Because the truth is, as much I like my improved undergarments, I can’t wait to tear them off at the end of the day. There is no bra as comfortable as no bra at all. “With all due respect,” Rawlings responds when I raise the question, “if it feels like you have nothing on, then the bra is doing nothing for you.” And Apsan is characteristically candid: “This is like asking if one should be aware of wearing shoes, a hat, contact lenses.” Her comment gets at what has been nagging me all along. A bra is just an article of clothing, however iconic its place in our culture. We don’t expect our jeans to alter our existence, why should our bras be any different? Perhaps, if our expectations weren’t so onerous, our bras wouldn’t be either. 149 Years of Support: 1858: Anne S. McLean patents the first “false bosom,”a dangerous looking set of steel-wire cones extending from breast pads inserted into a corset. 1863: Mr. Luman Chapman patents a “bust supporter,” a lessconstricting alternative to the traditional corset. 1889: Madame Herminie Cadolle displays an innovative corset— variously called a “corselet gorge,” a “bien-être,” or a “bra girdle” at the Exposition Universelle in Paris. 1902: The Golden Rule Store, later known as JCPenney, sells its first breast supporter. 1907: The word brassiere first appears in Vogue. 1911: Macy’s announces the opening of their first brassiere department. Madeleine Gabeau patents the first cup wires. 1913: Socialite Mary Phelps Jacobs, using two silk handkerchiefs and a pink ribbon, fashions a “backless brassiere” that many sources cite as the first modern bra. 1924: Ida Rosenthal and Enid Bisset found the Maiden Form Company. Their breast-supporting inserts, sewn into dresses and designed to uplift breasts rather than flatten them, prove so popular that women request them apart from the dresses. 1935: Warner introduces lettered cup sizing (A, B, C, D) in the United States. 1949: Maidenform launches its now famous “I Dreamed…” advertising campaign, in which women danced, shopped, and traveled, their top halves clad only in Maidenform bras. 1968: Feminists discard their bras while protesting the Miss America Pageant in Atlantic City, and the media later describes the incident as “bra-burning.” 1977: Roy Raymond founds Victoria’s Secret in San Francisco. 1994: The Wonderbra, first created in 1964, is reintroduced in the United States.

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Unhooked: The Bra Revealed

2008-02-22T10:57:27-05:00

Admit it, your kitchen’s got ’em—porcelain odds and ends, chintzy souvenirs, flea market trinkets, and tacky heirlooms—stashed in cupboards and buried in drawers. Maybe you’re practical and hold onto every chipped saucer because you never know. Or perhaps you’re sentimental and every tarnished teaspoon is a keepsake. Well, why not use all your junk to throw a great big tea party? One afternoon, we collected our favorite gewgaws. The result? A gorgeous riotous mix, as inviting as a table full of matching Wedgewood. Remember, the setting may be delightfully haphazard, but the food shouldn’t be. We served pastries from Fauchon (fauchon.com), tea sandwiches from William Poll (williampoll.com), and drugstore candy. Enjoy! How do you use your junk? E-mail odetojunk@isaacsstylebook.com

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A tea party fit for a … magpie!

Ode to Junk

2008-02-22T10:57:27-05:00

Thanks to online self-publishers, you can preserve, organize, and illustrate recipes in professionally printed cookbooks. Assemble all those batterstained note cards and fading newspaper clippings in one place. Or why not publish a series of books based on your favorite meals or special occasions? Three online publishers make it easy, fun, and inexpensive. If you want to publish a single copy of a cookbook, lulu.com is the ideal publisher. They’re all about options: Print text in blackand- white or color; illustrate with photographs or drawings; and choose from a staggering amount of book dimensions and bindings. You can also sell your cookbook on the site. Starts at $4.50 (approx.) plus $0.02 per page. Minimum print run: one copy Heritagecookbook.com is a subscription site that allows for collaborative projects: An unlimited number of cooks can sign into an account to upload their pictures and text—an ideal solution for fund-raising cookbooks that rely on many contributors. The free archive of vintage photos and artwork takes the mystery out of illustrating recipes or picking the perfect cover. $14.95 a month for membership; book printing is priced by the page, so check estimates online with the price calculator. Minimum print run: four copies.

2008-01-28T14:17:52-05:00

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2008-01-28T17:15:00-05:00

Preserve, organize and illustrate recipes in professionally printed cookbooks.

Publish Your Own Cookbooks

2008-02-22T10:57:27-05:00

All his life, Hollywood producer and director Barry Sonnenfeld has believed he’ll die in a plane crash. His premonition hasn’t kept him from flying, however. On February 16, 1999, on a chartered flight to Los Angeles, the corporate jet Sonnenfeld was traveling on plummeted from the sky. Save for the crew, Sonnenfeld was alone on the flight, prisoner to the terrifying vision outside the window of the ground rushing up to meet the plane. He told ISB about his fear of flying and what happens when you find yourself in the middle of your worst nightmare. ISB: When did your fear of flying begin? With my mother. The first time I got on an airplane, I was 12. We were flying back from Miami when she somehow persuaded the pilot to drop the oxygen masks. She said she was dying, that there was no oxygen on the plane. Everyone else was fine. The rest of the masks just dangled. ISB: But then you went on to have a career that makes you fly a lot, right? Well, that’s the secret to any good neurosis: You have to feed it. My philosophy is “Live in fear.” It works like this: When there is no crisis, that’s when you’ll find me living in fear and profound anxiety. But give me a real situation, and that’s when you’ll find me calming down. ISB: Have you ever had any fear-of-flying rituals? Xanax? A drink? A little prayer? For about ten years, I would get on the plane and put the seat belt on the outside of the blanket so they knew I was belted in, then put the blanket over my head and fly the entire time with my whole head and body not visible, my theory being that if no one could see me, then I didn’t exist. But as airlines got cheaper and cheaper, the blankets started to smell more and more horrific, and I just couldn’t take it. ISB: And then—as you predicted—you were in a plane crash. What happened? Columbia Tristar Television chartered a Gulf Stream II to fly me to Los Angeles for a meeting. The pilot, the copilot, and the flight attendant were all in the cockpit with the door closed. I was alone in the cabin. Fourteen thousand feet above Van Nuys Airport, the plane started to shudder and took a deep descent. From the cockpit I heard an incessant beeping: BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP. No one told me what was wrong. So I crossed my arms, put my feet up on the seat in front of me—just to be comfortable, I wasn’t taking the crash position—and said to myself, “And now I die.” ISB: You mean you were calm? Yes, completely calm—it’s happened before. Once, in 1975, I became so calm and banal that I accidentally talked two muggers out of mugging me. ISB: But how did you get out of a plane crash!? We were flying over the airport. The plane was shaking. At the end of the runway there was a wall and a fence. We made a sharp left turn, then hit, bounced over, and continued to hit and bounce over five other airplanes. Each time, I said to myself, “And now I die.” But I didn’t, and we hit another plane, and I waited to explode. Eventually we crashed through the fence into a parking lot, where we destroyed a Dodge Ram and came to a stop. Pilot, copilot, and flight attendant emerged from the cockpit, hysterical. Outside there was gasoline spewing. I stayed in my seat waiting for instructions until I realized they had all jumped out the back. So I got up and walked through broken china and luggage spewed all over, and into the luggage compartment, where the door was open. Standing around the door were about twenty Van Nuys firemen, yelling at me to jump off the plane. I said, profoundly calmly, “You say jump off the plane, but who is going to catch me?” They yelled, “It doesn’t matter, just jump, get off the plane!” And I said, “No, I need to know which one’s going to catch me.” So I looked around, found the fireman with the biggest mustache who was the most manly of them all, and I said, “You. You are catching me.” ISB: [laughing] And YET you still fly—you fly all the time! The plane crash made me a better flier. My fear had always been less about dying, and more about knowing, at 35,000 feet, that I was about to die—that for six minutes I would weep uncontrollably with snot pouring out of my nose, screaming about all the sadnesses in my life, all the people I had to leave behind, all the things I should have done, should have said, should have not said, and those six minutes would be just horrifying. As it turns out, dying in a plane crash is no better or worse than dying in a car accident or having a heart attack.

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All his life, Hollywood producer and director Barry Sonnenfeld has believed he’ll die in a plane crash. His premonition hasn’t kept him from flying, however.

Interview with Barry Sonnenfeld

2008-02-22T10:57:27-05:00

In 1938, the cosmetics firm Volupté introduced two lipsticks. The first was “Lady,” a light pink shade that Mademoiselle magazine described as for “girls who lean toward pale-lacquered nails, quiet smart clothes and tiny strands of pearls.” The second was “Hussy,” a deep red “for the girl who loves exciting clothes, pins a strass pin as big as a saucer onto her dress, and likes to be just a leetle bit shocking.” “Hussy” outsold “Lady” five to one. And since then, red lipstick has garnered more devotion and fluttered more hearts than any other cosmetic in our makeup cases. Because the decision to wear a bold lip color is so personal, Isaac’s Style Book asked a dozen women to share their thoughts on how they wear their red. Maria Elaina Antoniou, 54, actress I used to model—I had Brooke Shields eyebrows. I’m 54 now and recently had cancer. After my treatments, my eyebrows didn’t grow back, and the color faded from my lips. The outline of the lips—the vermilion line—practically disappeared. If I penciled in eyebrows, I’d sweat, and they’d come off. So I got naturalisticlooking permanent makeup by Melany Whitney: eyebrows, eyeliner, and orange-pink lip color. I feel so much better about the way I look. When I want to stand out, which is often nowadays, I put on red lipstick. Montserrat Llado, 48, personal shopper My mother was 44 years old when she had me. We lived in Barcelona. She would never leave the house without red lipstick, and she would never be inside the house without red lipstick. She’d put oil on top to make it shine. There could be a war going on outside—the Spanish Civil War!—and she’d have her lipstick on. I remember stealing my mother’s lipsticks at a very young age. I remember Father swearing that he never saw Mother without her lipstick on. She was very conservative and died at 87—with her red lipstick on. Naturally, I wear red lipstick. Poppy King, 35, Lipstick Queen Red! “Red Sinner”! It’s the only color I wear. I started making lipsticks when I was 18 in Australia because I couldn’t find what I was looking for and then just like that I became a Lipstick Queen. I don’t wear any other makeup. I am obsessed with lipstick: making lipstick, discovering new formulas, getting the pigment exactly right. Cass Bugge, 28, actress I started wearing red when Poppy King [above] approached me at work. I was working as a waitress, we got to know each other, and she handed me her “Red Sinner.” I had always found reds tricky. I’m half Norwegian, half Filipina— it never occurred to me to go for a brilliant bright red. Daniele Yandel, 20, college student Girls my age all wear pink gloss, so wearing a real lipstick is special. I wear Cover Girl “Really Red.” At night I put on a top layer of Hard Candy “Groovy” sheer red sparkles. It’s charming and a bit outlandish with my lip ring. People do a double take. How do I put lipstick on? I just move my lip ring out of the way, but many women need to use a brush. Linda Zadaria, N/A, educator I’ve been wearing red lipstick for 100 years. Well, since my early twenties. My lipstick and toenails are always red. I like a true red like Clinique “Red Red Red.” I’ve also worn Chanel “Runway Red,” but they’re always discontinuing their colors. I’ve tried abandoning red for a shocking pink, but it’s not me. Red is a signature. Like my haircut—a Louise Brooks bob without the bangs. And I always wear a hat. Every day. I have at least 120 hatboxes and each one contains at least two hats! Josie Torres Barth, 23, production designer Since high school, red is pretty much the only color I wear. When I was in a school play called Voices, set in the 1940s, I had to wear red lipstick, and I liked it. It stuck. I try different shades, and lately I’ve been wearing Burt’s Bees “Merlot.” It’s sheer, natural-looking. I like red because it can be old Hollywood and punk at the same time. Katherine Ramos, 23, magazine intern Red feels like a grown-up color. It’s something you have to grow into. Gwen Stefani has said this, and I think it’s true. Also, I’ve always been irrationally obsessed with my asymmetrical lips, and, to be honest, I often think Maybe it’s a bad idea to highlight asymmetries. But I keep trying red. I like Lorac “Explore,” but I don’t feel 100 percent ready—it still feels a little like playing dress-up. Darinka Chase, N/A, host and visual artist My job is smiling—I’ve been the hostess at Restaurant Florent since 1986. I started wearing bright red lipstick in my early twenties when I went out dancing. Everything in nature that wants to get noticed is red. I do berry reds during the day, though—Revlon’s Superlustrous “Rum Raisin” no. 535. When I’m stressed at work, I go to a mirror by the register and apply my lipstick very very slowly. Lipstick makes you confident. Like if you’re having an argument, you best have your lipstick on. It’s much easier to say no. Ellen Christine Colon-Lugo, 56, milliner Paloma Picasso made the best red ever: “Mon Rouge.” It’s discontinued, but I bet she has a refrigerator full of the stuff! Since Paloma, I’ve switched to Nars “Jungle Red.” Most reds bleed, and you have to wear concealer under the color so it doesn’t feather—especially as you get older. That’s the trick. Red is highmaintenance— at least real reds are. Not this sheer stuff that everybody’s wearing. Rhoda Chester, 69, retired school administrator Red lipstick is daring! I feel feminine and a little haughty and just wow. When I was 12, I started wearing a gloss, a sheer light pink. It was a very naughty thing to do in the ’40s. Then, in the early ’50s, when I was in high school, I’d wear red on the weekends only. Today I’m a big matcher. You know what that is? I match my lip color to my outfit. Pink with pink, browns with browns, reds with reds, and so on. My red? Lancôme “Rouge Réaliste” or Elizabeth Arden “Poppy.” Marna Chester, 33, museum educator I’ve got a procedure in place. I sleep with Rosebud Salve on my lips. Before I leave the apartment I put on a layer of medicated Blistex followed by my lipstick—usually Bobbi Brown “Wine”—and then on top of that I add a layer of gloss, either purple or cherry tinted. It feels sexy, and it’s an easy way to make a statement. No question it gives me self-confidence.

2008-01-28T14:09:37-05:00

242

1995

2008-01-28T17:06:00-05:00

Twelve women discuss our favorite cosmetic, red lipstick

Lipstick Traces: Red

2008-02-22T10:57:27-05:00

In this installment of Hairography, we chronicle the life and locks of Pat Cleveland, who began modeling at 15 years old, in 1967, and quickly rose to fashion superstardom. Once regarded as a tangleprone nuisance, Cleveland’s hair eventually became one of her most unique—and fiercely coveted—features. Her signature ’do, an untamed halo of fluffy, spiral curls emanating from her petite crown, inspired a generation of disco queens and free-spirited bohos, and enchanted designers Stephen Burrows, Karl Lagerfeld, and Halston. “I started to think then, Wow, I’m so lucky to have this hair—this hair is like my flying carpet!” she says, giggling. Cleveland’s extraordinary career is a paean to her joie de vivre—and to hard-totame heads of hair everywhere. “La Petite Belle,” 1958 (6 years old) When I was little, my mother would braid my hair into two little Indian braids—I had an enormous amount of hair! I’m half black and half Cherokee and Irish, so my hair never followed any rules. My mother was an artist, and my parents were friends with all these artists and musicians from the ’40s—Catherine Dunnan; Isadora Duncan; Henriette Metcalf, who was my godmother and the editor of French Vogue. My mom had costume balls and parties and salons, so I grew up with all these images and artists around. “The Ingénue,” 1967 (15 years old) My mom would take me to Carnegie Hall, and we’d be photographed by famous photographers—I had the first feeling of stepping on a runway there, and I thought it was a magical, immaculate place. When I was little we didn’t have cream rinse or hair dryers at home, so after washing my hair I would towel dry it and then stay by the fireplace, brushing it out very gently. Breck cream rinse came out when I was a teenager and there was no more ouch for me. Finally I could comb my hair! “The Hobo Muse” 1969 (17 years old) I was on my way to the performing arts school in New York when I was “discovered” by a Vogue editor, in 1967. Being artists, my parents were open-minded about modeling. I used to go to the Copacabana and Le Club and Cheetah and everyone would be doing the shing-a-ling. You’d see the Kennedys and the Supremes, and I always thought, Those girls have such perfect, shiny beehive hair. They were wigs! This was my first haircut, which Stephen Burrows gave me at Bendel’s. “Feather Winged” 1972 (20 years old) I took my first modeling trip around America on a Greyhound bus, and my mom was my chaperone. We slept in the same bed. She was my best buddy and my protector, and she really understood me. She made half my clothes at that point. She helped me sew up my jeans and make them fabulous. This hairdo was a longer version of that hairdo from 1969. I’d take my hair and wrap it with these things that looked like sausages and then I’d tie a veil over my head. “The Josephine” 1974 (22 years old) I moved to Paris when I was 21. I had had enough of the hair pulling, enough of the headaches and the chemicals and the burns, and so I cut off all my hair. This was my Josephine Baker cut. She was one of my characters—I also did Charlie Chaplin and Olive Oyl. I used to go to Leonard of Mayfair in London, and he cut my hair in a Chinese style, short to the chin with the bangs straight, dyed dark, indigo blue. They’d fly me from Paris to London once a week to get my hair done. “Bohemian Queen” 1976 (25 years old) I was going everywhere then— Asia, Africa. I wore these braids whenever I was traveling. But I was so lonely. I used to travel with a hand puppet, and I’d sit in restaurants wearing these enormous floppy hats with brims that came down over my shoulders and talk to him. I’m serious! It’s better than talking to yourself in the mirror—that’s a whole other set of problems. I met a lot of interesting people. But I wasn’t looking for a romantic relationship—I was married to my career. Nobody could match what my work could give me at that point in my life. “La Prima Donna” 1982 (31 years old) This was taken on holiday in Greece with my husband, Paul van Ravenstein. When I first met him, I fell in love with his hair. All I saw was this fantastic crown of beautiful white-blond curls. Here I’m wearing a dress that my friend made me, and we’re on the roof of his house in Mykonos. The ’80s were crazy—I used to go dancing at La Palace and I let my hair go freak wild like Angela Davis. Half of those people are dead now. I wanted to survive the party and reach my goal of having a family and being in love. “The Boho Disco ’Fro” 1984 (33 years old) Those were just my bangs— the rest was all pushed up in the back! This is how I wore my hair in the ’80s, loose and fluffy, and it became my signature. Big hair was in, and I had tons of hair. Then a lot of people tried to have that look. That year I did Fashion Week in New York when I was three months pregnant with my son Noel. I wanted to be able to crawl around on the floor with him and play and build things and not have to go back to work after he was born. “Letting It Fly” 1993 (41 years old) I’m a performer and an artist at heart. Modeling was part of my creative expression. I didn’t ever think of myself as a muse to the designers I worked with, because I was so transfixed by their talents and thrilled just to be in the same room with them, like Stephen Burrows and Karl and Valentino. I danced right into those clothes! When I wasn’t modeling full-time, I was being a mom, but I was always being creative, painting, and publishing my poetry. “Lovely and Liberated” 2005 (52 years old) My kids are in college now, and my daughter Anna is modeling. It’s nice, because I got to share this experience with my mom and now Anna gets to share it with me. I think everyone today is trying to be very conservative with their hair and look incognito. Fashion is about expressing yourself, not just blending into a crowd. But things will come back around. They always do!

2008-01-28T14:05:23-05:00

241

1970

2008-01-28T17:02:00-05:00

In this installment of Hairography, we chronicle the life and locks of Pat Cleveland.

The Hairography of Pat Cleveland

2009-01-13T10:43:09-05:00

Every August, barbecuers, stew makers, meat smokers, canners, confectioners, picklers, and bakers gather to eat and compete for blue ribbons at the Iowa State Fair in Des Moines. They are joined by cattle breeders, vegetable growers, rhinestoned Bill Riley talent-show contestants, and, famously, life-size cow sculptures made entirely of butter. One million spectators see it all in ten days. A meat-and-potatoes girl, I’ve always craved food that is unfussy and just plain big. And, come to think of it, it’s a little curious that I have never attended a state fair. Indeed, until recently, my only experience of these events had been virtual: I once downloaded the pages posted at iowastatefair.com. Potato Chip Cookies? I marveled. Who knew!? This mélange of flour, sugar, butter, vanilla, eggs, and Lays—how hard could that be? According to the 2006 results, Mary Jane Prall from Carlisle placed third in the Potato Chip Cookie category. A lady from Centerville, Olive Jean Tarbell, came in second, and Barbara Kiburz, placed first and won the blue ribbon. I continued to read and spotted Tarbell’s name dozens of times: for Gingersnaps; Peanut Butter Balls; Orange Marmalade Pumpkin Bars; Ranger Cookies; Luscious Chocolate Drops; Butterscotch Gold Nugget Bars; Triangle Pyramids—Triangle Pyramids? The list went on. On a lark, I called the one Tarbell listed in Centerville White Pages. Olive Jean answered. “How many ribbons have you won?” I asked. “Two thousand, most of them for cookies,” Tarbell said, all giggly and fey. “My daughter Robin’s won over 4,000.” “You go up against your daughter?” “We switch on and off. Robin’s taking cookies in 2007.” I hung up and called her back a few days later. Since the fair’s inception in 1854, I learned, no Iowan has won more blue ribbons than Robin Tarbell- Thomas. If you include the ribbons of the late Mildred Phillips, her grandmother, the extended Tarbell family has won nearly 10,000 ribbons. I decided I had to visit. It was a frigid February evening when I arrived in Centerville for my baking tutorial. Ninety miles south of Des Moines, twenty miles from the Missouri state line, Centerville is a friendly town with a pretty Victorian courthouse and a big green sign that says Home of the Larg - est Town Square in the World ! It’s also a thirty-five-minute drive from Eldon, a ramshackle blip with probably the most famous house in America: the “American Gothic” house, memorialized on canvas by painter Grant Wood. The back door of the Tarbell’s bungalow opens into the kitchen. There, three generations of Tarbell women greeted me like a long-lost daughter: matriarch Olive Jean “O.J.”; her daughter Robin, a coy legal secretary with long chestnut hair and a trim figure that belies her passion for home cooking; and granddaughter Molly Thomas. The KitchenAid mixer was ready to go. The round wooden table was heaped with food—a banquet, Iowa-style. A Crock-Pot with vegetable soup was plugged into the wall, homemade salsa, sliced sausage, cheese, and freshly baked buns were there for the taking. The adjacent living room had been upended and turned into a family archive. Boxes of loose ribbons, ribbon quilts, state fair entry guides, recipe cards, cookbooks, press clippings, and even Robin’s childhood toy oven, a Suzy Homemaker, were displayed. “We’ll start off with Grandma Phillips’s Peanut Butter Cookies,” said O.J., who presented a faded recipe card. “Recipes had to be included with every fair entry starting in 1980,” she said. “Grandma Phillips didn’t like filling out those cards—she was too busy on the farm!” O.J. explained how her mother used to cook on a woodstove using corn husks as fuel. She’d regulate the temperature by opening and closing the oven’s door. Her own grandmother, Eva Horstman, “had a covered rain barrel that held soft water for cooking.” The peanut butter cookies made it to the Nationals in 1970s. O.J. couldn’t recall the exact year. Meanwhile, Robin jumped into action, mixing the butter and brown sugar, blending it into a silken fluff. “The trick is beating a lot at the beginning, gradually mixing in the flour at the end, and then baking the cookies on a stone,” she explained as she scooped cookie dough and rolled it into meticulous little balls. She handed me the heavy mottled stone that she has purchased at pamperedchef.com, her equipment supplier of choice. “It slows the cooking time and the bottoms don’t get dark.” The peanut butter balls were placed on the stone. Fork tines were dipped in water. I was instructed to gently press the dough and emboss a cross-hatch pattern. “When these come out we might want to dip them in melted chocolate and chopped peanuts,” Robin said, “the judges always like a little something extra, and I like to drizzle chocolate, sprinkle nuts, or use chopped candy or crumbled candy bars on my entries.” We kept an eye on the oven, one of those General Electrics with a window, “good for the kids to look in,” O.J. noted. And indeed, there was Molly, looking in. With O.J. on dish duty, Robin and I began the Pink Petticoat Tails, a recipe she found in O.J.’s old cookbooks. “I got it at my wedding in 1949,” said O.J. Robin told me she followed the directions precisely except that she added rose water, infusing the flaky pink hearts, perfect for serving at a tea party, with a hint of floral perfume. “The judges also like that—when you use an unexpected ingredient.” The bright pink dough was rolled out on the counter. We pressed in the heart-shaped cookie cutters and sprinkled the tops with chopped walnuts. “Come fair time, we’ll use fancier black walnuts,” said O.J. Once again a baking stone was used. In 1997, Robin not only won Best in Show for these cookies but placed third at the Nationals. It was her best year ever, with 231 ribbons, 131 of them blue. So successful are the Tarbell women at winning that the Iowa State Fair changed its rules. It now prevents any blue ribbon winner in the cookie, pie, or cake divisions from competing the following year. Next, we moved on to Lime Meltaways, which turned out to be my favorite of the bunch. After the batter was passed through a cookie press with a ribbon attachment, the three-inch-long paper-thin cookies were baked on a regular cookie sheet. Tangy and buttery, they took Best in Show in 2000. When I got home to New York, they were the first ones I baked. Trays of cookies filled the Tarbell kitchen. “How do you transport all these cookies to Des Moines?” I asked. “Do you bake over at the fairgrounds?” There are nearly seventy classes of cookies, and Robin “takes,” or enters, at least half of those. Robin explained her system: Her husband, Jim Thomas, built her a contraption, a shelving system that fits into the back of his truck and prevents any cookie breakage on the two hour drive to Des Moines. “We go back and forth every day of the fair,” noted Robin, “and do a lot of the baking and freezing in July.” When you submit an entry, she said, you place them in ziplock bags filled with air. And never forget the recipe card. After a few more rounds, I headed out into the Iowa night, arms filled with plastic containers and ziplock bags filled with cookies and air, well-packed samples for my long trip home. “Please come to the fair this summer,” they all said as we hugged good-bye. I think I just might.

2008-01-28T14:01:43-05:00

240

1965

2008-01-28T16:59:00-05:00

Baking with the Tarbell family—cookie juggernauts of the Iowa State Fair.

Blue Ribbon Cookies

2008-02-22T10:57:27-05:00

“You’ve never floated before? Well, is there anything you’d like to know?” asked the young female voice on the phone. I was placing a call to La Casa Day Spa, and I felt a little queasy. Floating is the gentle, recreational term for sensory deprivation, and I was thinking of that scene in Altered States where William Hurt is showering with thumbs on his feet. “Um, I’m not sure. What do I need to know?” “One thing we like to tell people is that your hair will get wet. And you should bring any personal toiletries—deodorant, a hairbrush.” Is floating a naked thing? I wondered after hanging up. All the models on the website were wearing swimsuits. On the day of the appointment I brought my maillot to work, just in case. Flotation is done, yes, in the buff, and on your back in a metal or fiberglass container about four feet wide by eight feet long and four to eight feet high, in a solution ten to twenty inches deep. The tank is ideally silent MgSO4) and has a specific gravity of about 1.3—that’s heavier than normal water, which is 1.0. The specific gravity of you, meanwhile, though certainly more than 1.0, is less than that of the saltwater, and so you float. New York currently has just two tanks open to the public. I decided to visit both. I walked up the dim stairwell of La Casa Day Spa, on 20th Street, expecting to enter a clinical white room. But inside the spa the lights were low and the temperature was cozy. There were a biome’s worth of real and ersatz flora, cushy cabana furniture, and folksy carvings. Greg Lalley, the proprietor, beckoned me up a brief set of stairs and showed me the tiny locker room, where I stashed my stuff and put on a pair of disposable flip-flops and a waffle-weave robe. “This is a silly question,” I said, “but of course I have to ask. The water’s different for everyone, right?” “No,” Lalley said. “Aha … haha!” I replied. He explained that the water, because it’s saturated with 800 pounds of Epsom salts, is completely inhospitable to any living creature— mold, bacterium, virus, or crustacean. Deader than the Dead Sea. “Plus we run the water through an ozonating pool filter after each session to ensure complete sterility. We couldn’t change the water after every session— it takes about three days to dissolve the salt.” Lalley gave me a quick orientation, instructing me to be sure to exfoliate with the plastic scrubber, wash my hair and body, and insert the foam earplugs (provided) before entering the floatroom. He said he’d knock on the door when my hour was up. The tiled shower stall, normal-looking enough, was separated from the floatroom by a black glass sliding door. Showered clean, I pulled open the floatroom door and was met by a blast of warm wet air. Inside, the chamber was beige and looked much like another shower stall, with smooth fiberglass walls uplit by half-moon sconces and with a wide but shallow rectangular basin. The ceiling was high and the space felt roomy. I stepped into the clear water, pulled the door shut behind me, and almost simultaneously felt a strange sensation. It was pain. “Holy fucking Christ!” I exclaimed, as my heels, blistered from ill-fitting shoes worn the day before, hit the 35 percent salt solution. Like a novice fakir on her first bed of coals, I stepped a few paces farther into the tank, emitting cries of “ee ee.” I coaxed my weak flesh downward and onto my derriere. I felt a twinge of discomfort as magnesium sulfate met my unmentionables. Two buttons on the side of the tank to my left could be used to control the overhead lights and optional music. I decided to leave the lights on, since it was my first time (what if I freaked out?). I lay back very slowly into the 93 degree water, and all at once, I was afloat. My knees, toes, the balls of my feet, and my face stuck out of the water; if I’d had different breasts, they would have been liberated from my chest. “Oh, cool,” I said aloud, laughing. Then I got down to the business of total relaxation. I began to breathe the way I’d read about in a yoga book in high school: in through my nose and out through my mouth. I noted that my inhalations sounded like wind blowing through trees on a wintry moor, whereas my exhalations reminded me of crashing surf. This was good! I had an itch above my right eyebrow. So I scratched it. “GAH!” I hollered, and bolted to a kneeling position, scrambling for the water bottle Lalley said was on the basin’s edge. I poured the water into my right eye, and as I did so the deluge drew the saltwater already migrating from my hairline directly into my other eye. “Aaagghghgh!” I silently screamed. I used a salty arm to wipe the hair back from my forehead. Saltwater in my eyes, duh! A word of warning to the unwise from Lalley might have been nice. Wouldn’t you know it, this is hard, I thought, sourly, on my back and impossibly buoyant again. It’s like everything else in this city. I tried to force my neck to relax. The water was sloshing against my perimeter. “Stop moving, stupid water,” I admonished it. Eventually, I grew more placid; I forgot about my breathing and noticed the beating of my heart. But soon I was also noticing a clicking sound. Hm. Is it my bones? I thought. Is it the drain for the tank? And then a moment or so later, I heard someone coming upstairs. Then going downstairs. Then I heard the unmistakable slam of a coffee cup on a countertop. I hate New York, I thought, concentrating on the clicking, hoping it would drown out the other, even more irritating sounds. I was determined that my senses be fully deprived, so I didn’t turn on the music. I spent the next few minutes anticipating Lalley’s knock. When it was over I spilled out onto the street and into a haze of cigarette smoke from the bar next door. Sirens and neon assailed my foggy brain. Crossing into Union Square, I looked up to my left and saw the moon, huge, round, and white, with wispy clouds arrayed as in a work by Caspar David Friedrich. Mooning at the moon, I was almost run over by a bus. “Was it sexy?” a friend asked the next day. “I spent most of the time worrying about whether I was going to relax,” I said. “So in that sense, yes.” Blue Light Floatation, New York’s other flotation operation, is in the 23rd Street studio apartment of one Sam Zeiger. Established in 1985, Blue Light is NYC’s longest-running center, and its website graphics are by far the coolest—evoking a sort of Tron-Metropolis. I decided to take a restaurant critic’s approach and not mention to Zeiger that I had floated before. Zeiger didn’t overestimate my intelligence; the prefloat orientation was methodical and thorough. “It’s better if you don’t shave your body that day—it can get sting-y. Also, don’t drink coffee for at least a few hours beforehand—caffeine is the worst thing to do before a float. And don’t have a lot of liquid of any kind, so you won’t have a full bladder”—magnesium has a laxative and diuretic effect, he explained. “And don’t come with a very full stomach, because otherwise you’ll just be hearing that the whole time.” I arrived uncaffeinated and empty but with a mild Saturday afternoon hangover. Zeiger is a 60-something guy from East New York back when you could still buy live chickens at a market near an undeveloped area the kids called Sherwood Forest. His walls are covered with remarkable realistic portraits of friends, movie stars, and spiritual heroes—including one of John C. Lilly, the tank’s inventor—that he’s been making since starting to teach himself to draw and paint, in 1998. “I don’t want to sound all New Agey,” Zeiger said, “But sometimes you have to get out of the way and let your creativity flow.” He showed me the ozonating filtration system; he indicated where to put my things and how to get in and out of the tank; he gave me tips on arm positions that would help loosen my neck and trapezoid muscles— the hardest parts to relax. “If you find you’ve drifted into the side, just very lightly push off with one finger,” he said. “Otherwise you’ll be ping-ponging around in there.” Instead of knocking when it was over, he said he would play some soft music. He warned me not to touch my face and said I should rise from the basin with my head tilted back so the solution wouldn’t run into my eyes. Aha! The floatroom was located between Zeiger’s office and his kitchen. Sitting in the living area during the orientation, I heard the brainshaking blast of a motorcycle through the closed window, and the idea that it was going to be quiet, let alone dead silent, a mere twenty feet from his couch was laughable. And yet silent is what it was. I heard my eyes blink! I’d turned the lights off this time, and the perfect water temperature and stillness at one point made me wonder if I’d rotated 180 degrees—I actually couldn’t tell which way was up. Here in this haven within a haven, water within fiberglass within sheetrock within brick and stone, it occurred to me how horrifyingly loud it must be inside the human womb. But then I was drifting in and out of sleep. When the Enyaesque music started, it was as though the day had begun again. Except this time I was ready for it. “Hello, 23rd Street,” I said cordially to everything, as I exited Zeiger’s building into the afternoon sun. I felt like I’d been rebooted by the world’s sweetest tech-support agent. My attitude had been fully adjusted, and the hangover was gone. I considered wearing Wallabees and pjs for the rest of my life. Peru is divided into three topographical strips. A khaki-colored desert runs along the Pacific coast. The snowcapped Andes line the center. And tropical jungles blanket the borders with Colombia, Brazil, and Bolivia. Most tourists come to Peru to visit pre- Columbian ruins tucked away in the mountains and jungles in the southern central part of the country. In late March, I found myself as far from this Peru as you can get. I’d traveled from New York to the sleepy seaside village of Mancora, on the northwest coast, just south of Ecuador. The town is half a mile long, and it brackets both shoulders of the Pan-American Highway, which is clogged with trucks transporting oil and chickens. A row of palm-thatched cement shacks offer ceviche and Peruvian beers. I’d traveled there to attend the wedding of my friend Stefan, whose bride was Morgana Vargas Llosa, the daughter of the writer Mario Vargas Llosa. Morgana had been to Mancora half a dozen times. “It’s isolated, rustic, and unspoiled compared with the rest of the coastline,” she told me over a Pisco sour, the national cocktail. It’s true. Unlike many of the beaches on the 1,500 miles of shore stretching between Ecuador and Chile, Mancora is not polluted by sewage and mining runoff. From November to February, this quaint fishing village becomes Peru’s surfing hub, and world-class wave riders descend on the town. Other than that, the area doesn’t offer much more than a clean beach, a few palm trees, rustic beachfront bungalows, and constant sunshine. Getting there is no easy task, and my trip was no exception. After an eight-hour flight to Lima, the capital, my wife and I caught a two-hour flight north to Piura, not far from where Francisco Pizarro established the first European settlements, in the early 16th century. My travel agent had told me there would be cabs at the airport. My travel agent was wrong. The Piura airport was deserted, so we rented a Toyota Corolla and drove through the night along unmarked, unpaved, and boulder-strewn roads. At one point, we made a wrong turn near Talara, a poor industrial town at the westernmost tip of South America, built around oil exploration and refining. We got entangled in a maze of rusty pipelines at the edge of a cliff that was guarded by a small, unhinged man with a large, unholstered gun. This experience, while harrowing at the time, later proved rewarding when we swapped war stories with other wedding guests. A group of Dutchmen had been met at the airport baggage claim by poisonous snakes, which were then hacked apart by a quick-acting airport employee. Three Brazilians had lost their iPods to acquisitive Ecuadoran border agents. Those without such tales, which often define a trip to the developing world, seemed to have missed out on something. Like most Peruvians, Morgana goes to Mancora to escape the chaotic scramble and smog of Lima. And, she says, “if you’re traveling in northern Peru and you need to relax, it’s where you come.” But if you don’t surf or fish, there isn’t much to do. No snorkeling, no sailing, no five-star restaurants, no Wi-Fi. Even the beach is unremarkable. The sand is neither soft nor blinding white, and the ocean is not particularly blue or clear. Enter the water for a dip and your feet are greeted by a minefield of jagged rocks. To put it another way, Mancora is boring, and that’s exactly why it’s worth a visit. Such lazy remoteness invites a do-it-yourself approach to vacationing not easily found in this world of deluxe hotels and resorts. Mancora hasn’t been built to accommodate international tourism. It’s hardly built at all. The beachfront hotels—hotel is really too grand a term for these rustic compounds— are just south of town and vary in the amount of amenities and the ultimate luxury, privacy. We stayed at Los Corales, a convivial surfside place offering sparse bungalows crouched around a small pool. It has the best restaurant on the strip. There are slightly fancier options as well, Las Arenas most notably. Set back from the beach and engulfed in palm trees, it can be preternaturally quiet. As such, it attracts the type of guests who are less likely to partake in Pisco sour–induced revelry. Squeezed between some of the hotels are private homes—built by Peruvian businessmen and wealthy surfers—with terraces that open onto the public beachfront. Mancora is the Peruvian Malibu. When Pizarro first approached the coast of what would become Peru from his base in what would become Panama, the first people he encountered were floating offshore on balsa fishing rafts. When I woke up on my first morning in Mancora and pulled open the blinds of my room, the first people I encountered were floating offshore on balsa fishing rafts. That symmetry—and my eagerness for some activity—inspired me to meet one of these fishermen. Perhaps one would take me fishing? I came across Guillermo, who was sitting on the edge of his beached raft and pulling on a wetsuit. “What are you fishing for?” “Whatever I catch.” “Lobster? Crab? Fish?” “Yes.” “I hear Ernest Hemingway lived around here.” “Yes, in Cabo Blanco, just to the south.” “Will you take me fishing with you?” “No. Come back tomorrow.” While you won’t find the amenities of a luxury resort in Mancora, the service is, in many ways, more personal. Guillermo, for example, will fetch you a lobster, and your hotel cook (who may double as a porter or a waiter or a snake hacker) will have it prepared within the hour. Masseuses “all friendly locals” roam the beach offering ninety-minute sessions for forty dollars. And local transportation is only by mototaxi, a sort of modern-day centaur in which the torso of a motorcycle is jury-rigged to create a covered rickshaw. Cabo Blanco, where Guillermo told me Hemingway had lived, is twenty minutes south of Mancora. Antsy, I made a day trip in search of Papa. Travel guides and websites tell you that Cabo Blanco inspired him to write The Old Man and the Sea. This is not true. It was, however, the location for fishing scenes in the film that was based on the novel, security guard told me there were two locals who had known Hemingway: Ruiz and Rosa. I set out to find them. Ruiz proved elusive, but I found Rosa, steely-faced and stocky, frying lenguado, a local fish, in the kitchen of her restaurant, La Tia Rosa. “I hear you knew Ernest Hemingway, the American writer.” “I did. He was a nice man.” “What was he like?” “I don’t remember. I was only 8.” “You have no memories of him?” “I remember one thing. His Spanish was not good.” And that was it. Tourism officials fail to milk the Hemingway connection. There is no museum. No plaque. No statue. I found a few black-and-white photos of him with local fisherman on the wall of the Restaurante Cabo Blanco. Most biographers and documentary filmmakers skip Peruvian chapter of Hemingway’s life. Back in Mancora, I asked Morgana what attracted her to this region. “The farther you get from Lima, the fewer rules there are,” she explained. It’s true. Life in Mancora is governed more by negotiation than by contract; nothing is expected. “Plus, I wanted a wedding on a Peruvian beach, and this was my only option.

2008-01-28T13:51:23-05:00

239

1960

2008-01-28T16:43:00-05:00

Issac’s style book asked Emily Votruba to seek local adventure. She opted to float near, in New York’s isolation tanks. Meanwhile, Tyler Maroney journeyed far to Peru, settling down in the seaside village of Mancora.

Water Worlds

2008-02-22T10:57:27-05:00

As a writer, spending most of my time alone and at home, the occasions on which I have to look “nice” are rare. I have worn jeans virtually every day for the better part of two decades. The same kind: Levi’s 501s. So I was intrigued to discover recently that in 1873, when Levi Strauss & Co. was awarded U.S. Patent 139,121 for reinforced trousers, the finishing steps of the trousermaking were left up to the consumer. Seamstresses who worked out of their homes were hired to sew together the components of these denim trousers and reinforce them by adding rivets. And what of those California miners and prospectors out there in the wilderness, the first consumers of Strauss’s workwear, unable to avail themselves of the nimble fingers of a seamstress? They would have to manage somehow, sewing, and inevitably mending, their sturdy indigo pants stitch by stitch. I don’t mean to romanticize what must have been an arduous task piled on top of a host of inconveniences, among them living in a damp and leaky tent, but I am romanticizing it, I suppose. My nostalgia falters a little when I think about the grim necessity that required having to know how to pan for gold in some frigid river, build an unheated sod house, or pull a birthing calf from the steaming, slippery loins of its mother. And yet, I still find myself wishing I had some of those skills. People used to know how to do more things. I cannot help but feel a pang of regret that, along with the greater specialization of knowledge, there has been a general waning of basic competence. My mother—perhaps the most polymathically capable person I have ever known—made all her own clothes while she was in medical school. I, in turn, strive daily to be a desirable addition to any bomb shelter. I cut my own hair; I can make a fire with sticks. I’d gladly skip out on calf- birthing lessons, but I would like to know how to make my own clothes. Luckily for me that would mean learning how to reproduce just one basic garment. Being able to make my own 501s would not only add to my list of postapocalyptic assets, it would open up whole new horizons of thrift and variety (the thought of a pair of green trousers—in velvet or corduroy or Astroturf—has captured my heart, for example). Seeing as how I have no facility for machines (all my skills are low-tech; I can silver-leaf a table, but I can’t figure out the speed dial on my phone), I decided that I would make my pants employing nothing more than needle, scissors, pins, and thread. I am the most innocuous Ted Kaczynski alive, my anti-industrial posture resulting not in domestic terrorism, but rather in an inadvertent hewing to the strictest codes of couture. Oddly enough, setting up my atelier of one also meant I would be an unwitting and reluctant participant in the current mania for premium and customized denim, a craze in which I cannot feign interest. Trends by their nature evoke suspicion in me, but jeans that cost hundreds of dollars per pair and have ironically egalitarian names like Seven for All Mankind and Citizens for Humanity seem worse than merely faddish. They strike me as obnoxious bordering on hateful. I am not the market, I know, given my general indifference. I have heard stories about collectors, often Japanese, who pay tens of thousands of dollars for vintage pants. I have heard about connoisseurs’ dating their jeans by the tiny numbers stamped on the backs of the rivets, or examining the colored thread of the selvage as closely as if they were looking for polyps. And my heart goes out to the parents who have had to fork over ridiculous amounts of cash so that their daughters can parade about in jeans strategically creased with “whiskers” around the crotch, jeans that, as she approaches, draw the viewer’s eyes toward her virtue, and, as she retreats, bid farewell with deliberately faded twin circles on her ass, a shimmying umlaut of come-and-get-it sluttiness. Not that I am a stranger to looking ridiculous myself. Coming of age in the late ’70s and early ’80s, I pegged my jeans throughout high school and college. They were never very successful, and often as not I gave up and finished off the second leg with a stapler. I always made them too tapered, ending up with idiotic pants that were elfin and jodhpur-like. By the time I was finished the legs were so narrow that I had to wet them down, stuff them with paperbacks, and let them dry and stretch overnight just so I might get my feet through, and even then only if I was pointing like Pavlova. Eventually, it all just seemed like too much work, both the sewing and the wearing. I gave up and opted for my current uniform: 501s and a shirt. But I was undeterred by my history and lack of sewing skills for this new project. All I had to do was the following: 1. Buy a pair of 501s to serve as a prototype. 2. Take them apart into their constituent pieces. 3. Trace each of those pieces onto brown paper for patterns. 4. Cut out the patterns. 5. Buy—and launder—two yards of new denim. 6. Buy the following tools: <ul> <li>a seam ripper</li> <li>pinking shears to cut into the new fabric</li> <li>traditional saffron-colored thread</li> <li>fly buttons</li> <li>copper rivets</li> <li>pins</li> <li>proper needles for the denim (thicker and more durable than any of the ones in the many hotel sewing kits I have accumulated over the years)</li> </ul> 7. Lay the patterns onto the new denim, outline them with a Sharpie pen, and cut the pieces out. 8. And, finally, sew the pieces together until they looked like a pair of jeans. How hard could it be? With the possible exception perhaps of Y-front briefs or a plain white T-shirt, I had elected to make the most quotidian garment in the world. Quotidian, perhaps, but by no means simple. I can’t recall where I started unpicking them, but it was incredibly difficult to take the 501s apart, even using a seam ripper. The stitches were tight and unwavering in their uniformity. Every edge was finished with complex stitching in a pattern both intricate and unmistakably industrial, like the muscular steel filigree of a railroad trestle. They could only have been made by a machine. It took me the better part of two hours to liberate just the waistband and the belt loops. My clothes and the sofa upon which I was sitting were covered in crumbs of orange jean thread. A carnage of fabric, it looked like I’d been using my teeth. Four hours later, I had defeated the monster and I was surrounded by seventeen separate tatters of unrecognizable cloth. I was already at sea. It called to mind a previous do-it-yourself disaster. Many years ago, the publishing house I worked for put out a book for kids called How to Make Your Own Dinosaur out of Chicken Bones. In it, Asperger’s-y tots could learn how to boil down three birds and, using their combined carcasses, construct a tiny apatosaurus skeleton. We had only one finished example, and the call went out in the office to see if folks might undertake some additional prototypes for extra cash. I signed up, fancying myself crafty, bought my three chickens, and went home. The trouble started almost immediately. The structure of the birds disappeared once the meat started to fall away, and I was left with a large pot of cloudy stock with floating threads of ragged flesh, while the disparate, no longer remotely identifiable bones bobbed around in the murky water, a jumble of gray pins. I never did make that dinosaur. Working on the floor, I dutifully traced the pieces onto brown paper and cut my patterns. I suppose the pieces mirrored those of the original pants, but they looked sloppy and wavy edged. Plus, there were seventeen of them. Seventeen! The immensity of the task was starting to make itself felt, and the forty dollar outlay for the 501s seemed like a true bargain. Unless I took some shortcuts, I would be sewing until I died. That stapler was looking far too attractive. I made some executive decisions: none of those double-sewn French seams, for starters. Also, I had no time for ornamental niceties, so out went those back pockets adorned with the trademark double V. As for the very aspect of Strauss’s invention that made his pants unique, I could neither loosen the rivets on the pair I’d taken apart as my prototype, no matter how I pried, banged, and hacked away with pliers and hammer, nor could I find new ones to affix to my own creation, so thoroughly industrialized has the jeans business become. The fellow in the shop where I bought my thread offered to put them on for me, but orders started at a minimum of 100 pairs. So no rivets. And I would also repurpose the belt loops from the existing jeans—life is too short to make belt loops. Ditto the fly. Almost nothing evokes the essence of blue jeans better than the contrast of regular golden stitches against indigo cloth. My first hem, however, on the front of the right leg, was a drunken line of uneven dots and dashes—Morse code spelling out the message “Idiot!” I was the Bennet sister with the least enviable needlework, a sullen, umarriageable thing, sitting glumly by the spinet as Elizabeth flirted with Darcy. My sewing improved steadily, although I oscillated regularly between perplexing setbacks and great leaps forward. It pleased me to make the front pockets out of dinner napkins pilfered from the TriBeCa restaurant Odeon, circa 1989. But my good vibe went south almost immediately when I turned my work right side out only to find that the pockets looked improvised and lumpy: like swatches from the suit the killer in The Silence of the Lambs made out of his victims. Later, two inches of fabric disappeared from the area near the fly and then, a few hours later, reappeared just as mysteriously. The major problem was that I had embarked on my project with almost no clear plan of action. If something looked like I could accomplish it in the moment, then I tried sewing it. This resulted in lots of partial and separate bits all over the apartment: a yoke attached to the back of a leg, a front pocket lying twelve feet away. After a few days, I realized that if I did not impose some sort of order, I would find myself in the tailoring equivalent of having bricked myself up in my own basement. I started to work on one leg at a time. I would have to join them together when they were finished, but I put that thought out of my head, concentrating on attaching one piece to another. The jeans became all I thought about. I defaulted on other deadlines. I stopped reading the paper. I was waking up each morning at six, half-blind with headache, my neck and back destroyed from crouching over my sewing. The fingers of my right hand went numb. I didn’t shower for three days. When I did leave the apartment, I scanned backsides and inner thighs, mentally cataloging cut and stitching. As with any project that takes over one’s life, proprietary pride in my work started to win out. When I did manage to join the legs together (I cannot tell you how I did it; more than any other part, it was an anarchic crapshoot) I let out a whoop of triumph. I immediately unpicked and re-sewed the stitching on the yoke, putting in, yes, a double seam. I could not live with the thought of using someone else’s belt loops. The fly with its edged buttonholes was much easier to make that I anticipated, and it was a thing of beauty when it was finished. In fact, I sewed every single stitch of those niceties upon which I’d said I would not waste my time. For one thing, there is almost nothing superfluous on a pair of jeans. They started as the most indestructible and utilitarian of trousers. Pretty well every seam, every line of stitching, exists for a reason more structural than ornamental (except perhaps for those back pocket Vs, but the pants looked naked without them). I even made a leather patch for the back, my logo a melancholic self-portrait that seemed to broadcast an appropriate weariness, because in the end, my jeans would take me, conservatively speaking, thirty hours to make. The first time I wore the pants out in public was on a sultry, humid day. Luckily, I’d inadvertently bought thinner-thannormal denim (I experienced the anxiety of extreme hyperchoice at B & J Fabrics on Seventh Avenue and reached for the first bolt I could find), so they were exceedingly comfortable as I walked downtown to meet some friends. So comfortable, in fact, that I kept nervously checking to see that the fly was still buttoned. My friends were duly impressed and charmed by the self-portrait patch, for example, but as they looked at all the stitching and admired the fly buttons, their reactions seem tinged with a kind of why-would-onebother amusement, as if I had just proudly blown my own lightbulbs which, if you think about it, is kind of exactly what I’d done. Might there be another pair in my future? Possibly. The prospect of making more fills me with a sense of happy industry, but I would have to learn how to use a sewing machine, and, given my technophobia, that seems unlikely; and my life, like everyone’s, doesn’t really have a lot of spare thirty-hour windows (although I’m not sure the good people of 1873 had much free time, either). As a costsaving measure, I’d have to look at them as a long-term investment: The price of the pinking shears will be amortized over time, and the hope is that I might work more quickly on subsequent projects. Still, by making my own jeans, I confine any dubious labor practices to my apartment. The only person I am exploiting is me. I will never learn how to build that sod house, but on 16th Street, the ability to clothe my nakedness is far handier anyhow. And my jeans fucking rock, make no mistake—they look no different from actual jeans, save for a lack of rivets. Actually, that’s not true. They do look different. The evidence of the hand is everywhere— the lines of stitches that here and there meander ever so subtly from their course, like the most peaceful of rivers; the “red tab” fashioned from a piece of grosgrain ribbon salvaged from a long-forgotten gift— but is undetectable even from a distance of two feet away. They are like a photograph that, upon closer examination, turns out to be a cunning picture made out of butterfly wings or dried beans. I find them unutterably cool, almost precisely for how quiet they are. They are a secret I share with myself.

2008-01-28T13:35:01-05:00

238

1955

2008-01-28T16:31:00-05:00

David Rakoff tries his hand at sewing his favorite garment: Levi’s 501s

Levis 501

2008-02-22T10:57:27-05:00

Since the early 1980s, Linda Dresner has been attracting fans of cuttingedge American, European, and Japanese designer fashion to her boutiques in New York and Birmingham, Michigan. Praised for her eye and eclectic taste, she cleverly mixes old favorites like Rei Kawakubo and Dries van Noten with newcomers like Dsquared and Stella McCartney. Dresner’s dedication to reinvention—in fashion, in her personal life— made her the perfect candidate for our first installment of Hairography, in which we ask a woman of impeccable style to dig through a lifetime of snapshots and deconstruct the meaning behind her changing hairstyles. Dresner’s Hairography begins with an elementary school portrait taken in 1948. Since then she’s had C-curls, wild-woman hair, Gina Lollobrigida locks, and a ’do called a duck’s ass. No wonder her clients consider her the most stylish woman in New York! “The Page Girl,” 1948 This was taken at my sixth-grade graduation, in Detroit. I’d been battling curls my whole young life: I’d wet them down or tame them with bobby pins or barrettes, and I even set little pin curls over my forehead with Scotch tape! I loved to play dress up with my younger sister, who was adorable and had lovely straight hair. That was the beginning of my career, I think. Also, I had my mother as inspiration—a great beauty. I remember loving to be in her closet because she had an ocelot coat and beautiful hats, and there was always a wonderful aroma that came out of it. “The First Engagement,” 1955 This is my engagement picture. I was 17. In the ’50s, if you didn’t have a career in mind, you got married. The in hairdo was called the duck’s ass. It went with the bobby socks, full skirts, short hair, pointy bras, little waists, and saddle shoes. My husband was a very tall and handsome young man, beautifully muscled, and that’s what was important then. We looked good together. Getting married was a way for me to feel more grown-up—to escape from being a teenager at home. My father had passed away, suddenly, a day before my 16th birthday. Marriage was the way out. “The Glamour Puss,” 1959 My husband and I separated in 1957. I had the desire to escape, so I cut off my long hair and took up modeling. I don’t know where I got the courage to do it. But somehow—though I had two children I adored, and my life was full—I was driven to find myself. So I got in the car and found a modeling agency in Detroit. They used to shoot all the car ads there, and the clients rather liked me: I was one of the few girls who wasn’t blonde! This photo was taken as part of my composite, and it marks the beginning of my socalled modeling career. It’s my Gina Lollobrigida phase! She was an Italian film star with short-cropped hair and dark, exotic looks. “The All-American Girl,” 1960 There’s the big C-curl! We would straighten our hair by wrapping the top over orange juice cans, and the rest all the way around our heads like a comb-over, so when we let our hair down it was quite straight. I’d buy movie-star magazines and study them in bed at night for ideas. I was still admiring Gina Lollobrigida, and probably Natalie Wood. I had never traveled anywhere. I was 30 when I went to New York for the first time. “The Sophisticate,” 1962 Those little curls along the cheekbone? We’d make a circle on our cheek and hold it down with Scotch tape. I’m also probably wearing a hairpiece here. We used to call it a fall. There was no blowing hair dry in those days. They made home hair dryers, but it was like a pink shower cap you’d fit over your head, which was difficult for me because my rollers used to be quite big. The cap was attached to a hose and then to a contraption that you’d plug into a socket so you could sort of walk around with it a little bit—but not too far. It was quite a lot of work. But I didn’t want that kinky hair. “The Free Spirit,” 1969 Oh, one of my favorite movies was Imitation of Life, with Lana Turner and this actress I admired, Susan Kohner. She had straight hair, and I wanted that, too. Those were still the wraparounds years, when we wrapped the hair straight around our heads with a million clips and one big orange juice can on top. Très chic! “The Wedding Portrait,” 1970 I was still modeling when I met my second husband. I was feeling daring: a new marriage, another man—a man who was exciting. A bit dangerous even, and very handsome. He was sweet, but also gruff. And I was hopelessly in love. There was nothing I could do about it. At that time I was feeling quite confident about my looks and my style because he was older and he thought I was very pretty. But he was a naughty, naughty fellow, so that feeling of being adored didn’t last very long. That marriage went through many ups and downs—and many different hairdos. It ended up being a long marriage, though. It lasted thirtytwo years. “The Chic Mommy,” 1972 This was my son’s bar mitzvah day. I was in business with a friend, and we worked out of the same building as the local beauty shop where I’d have my hair done. We sold clothes, mostly styles that no longer exist, like “sports sophisticate.” And then I started to work with a New York girl who had moved to Michigan. We were a great success because we were the only store that brought in European clothes. And we were hanging them up in ways that the department stores hadn’t even thought of. We were very much pioneers in doing that kind of business. “Au Naturel,” 1980 I thought I could go swimming and not do anything to my hair. I just combed it back and thought I looked gorgeous! It must have been from watching Deborah Kerr come out of the water in From Here to Eternity. But then the hair would dry, of course. It was curly and short and looked kind of Italian. This was the year I opened my own boutique in Michigan. I was terribly nervous. I had a rail of Claude Montana oversize leather bombers in all these bright colors, from yellow to green to purple. I thought it was just fabulous. I sold them all eventually, I think. It took a few years and many sales to do it. I was also traveling to Paris a lot and feeling pretty confident. “The Power Hair,” 1984 Here I am, trying to be famous. This was taken for Michigan Magazine when I opened my first store in New York. That’s a Stephen Sprouse coat I’m wearing. He did these wonderfully bright-colored, very high-quality coats. I was sort of avant-garde. But my fashion taste was not appreciated by my second husband. He wanted me to be a cool, calm shiksa. Instead, my hair was curly. And big. Look at the hair! I don’t think I had a name for that hairdo. It was my wild look. The beginning of the wild woman. But even though I was excited about my store, it was a terribly difficult time in my marriage. I don’t know what gave me the nerve to push forward or to think that they needed me in New York. Naive ambition! I mean, nobody knew who I was, really. Even though it was not my happiest period, I still had that tremendous drive to escape. “The Icon,” 1986 How big is that hair? Looking back, I think it was pretty hideous. Even though the power suit was supposed to be about becoming more visible and more independent, we were actually very uptight about wearing all the right things then, with the jewelry and the hair and everything. I think it was necessary, but it wasn’t the most attractive moment. This was also a terribly painful time in my marriage, and I didn’t like myself very much or the way I looked. I didn’t feel that I had a signature look that I could count on: I was trying new beauty stylists in New York, going to people who were famous. It was a period of a lot of experimentation for me, of reaching out and becoming something else. I was amazed by the Belgian and Japanese designers and how they were able to get people to try something new. The idea of trying on change was very attractive to me. “The Grande Dame,” 1993 Here I am in my New York store. I had finished treatment for breast cancer the year before this picture was taken. Shortly after I was diagnosed and treated, my husband and I separated. I was heavier because of menopause. You go on hormones; you gain weight, and you have ups and downs and moods. My hair was just natural. I wasn’t doing much then except surviving. But the part that still surprises me is that even though I’m a girl who grew up in the ’50s, I always had this independent desire to go forward. And the way that I did it was by escaping to a new life or a career. As time goes on, you need to have the energy to think about re-creating and reinventing yourself. “The Free Beauty,” 2005 Today my hair is freer than it’s ever been, and I have no desire to do anything with it that’s tame or acceptable. I’m finally really independent. But I also have a new husband who celebrates who I am. I don’t go to the beauty shop anymore. I go for a tint, yes, because I’ve been gray since I was young. But now I leave it curly and just pin it up. I’m free from worrying. My wish for women is that they would learn to love themselves more. I find so many women beautiful—women from all walks of life, in my shop, on the street—more beautiful than they find themselves, and I wish that they could look in the mirror and love what they see. To be free. That’s the dream.

2008-01-28T13:28:25-05:00

237

1950

2008-01-28T16:24:00-05:00

In this installment of Hairography, we chronicle the life and locks of Linda Dresner.

The Hairography of Linda Dresner

2008-02-22T10:57:27-05:00

We were overdue for a dinner party. My husband Justin and I had hosted dozens upon dozens of candlelit evenings in our Brooklyn apartment around our once-pristine Danish dining table, where every wineglass ring that scars its surface today carries a reminder of the perfect moment when things got a little too fun to maintain elegant control. It had been ages, it seemed, since our last gathering— and we had reasons to celebrate. I had just handed in the draft of my first book, Righteous, and we had placed a bid on a house. The time felt right for a challenge—to see if we could push this table, this kitchen, and ourselves farther than we ever had before. We agreed to host a dinner party for six friends. The main course? Bouillabaisse. Isaac’s Style Book offered to give us a little bit of training in exchange for an eye on the proceedings: They wanted reality, and they got it. My adventure began with an earlymorning jaunt to the wholesale flower shops on 28th Street. Maybe it’s a New York cliché, but I hate paying retail. I had no preconceived idea of what I wanted, but as soon as I spotted the orange poppies and purple anemones, that was that. I paid for my floral delights and hailed a cab. Next stop was Clio, a home store in SoHo. It is one of our favorites (if Justin and I could register for our wedding again we’d do it here!). Clio’s a gem that offers silvered porcelain chargers from France (eight, please!) alongside Danish serving trays and rehabilitated vintage dinnerware—the perfect objects to mix with our plain white dishes. Confession: Husband and wife have different taste. I like a bit of flash, while Justin prefers minimalism. As a compromise we usually end up somewhere in Denmark, so it’s no surprise we took those serving trays, perfect for carrying hors d’oeuvres and French 75s into the living room. We also settled on stemless glasses for wine and water, which conjure a workaday European family table. Rustic looks aside, these glasses won’t topple over as tipsy guests pass bowlfuls of bouillabaisse or boards of cheese. We love cheese, but we knew very little about it. Thank goodness for Liz Thorpe, the cheese guru at Murray’s. Liz was no snooty fussbudget; in fact, we found out she’s a neighborhood girl with a tiny kitchen of her own just blocks from ours. Before she committed her life to the ephemeral glory of moldy rinds, Liz was an investment banker. Now she wears jeans and T-shirts to work at a job with walk-in refrigerators. Off the bat, Liz taught us the first lesson of the cheese course: Multiple cheeses should be consumed in strict order from mildest to strongest. She started us off with Selles-sur-Cher, an ash-covered goat cheese from the Loire Valley. Liz warned us not to let the cheese linger too long before the party—it will get “goaty,” she said. We sampled four more—Tarentai, Queso de la Serena, Alpage Prattigau, and Jasper Hill Farm Bayley Hazen Blue. The blue was heaven on earth. To Justin, it was the equivalent of frat-boy hazing of the eat-my-shortsvariety. Whatever—that just meant more for me. Liz taught us that cheese is a natural digestive and that it makes you feel less full, which is why it is consumed at the end of the meal. Furthermore, she said, cheese has every vitamin and mineral except vitamin C. “So you could just eat cheese and drink OJ and be healthy?” Justin asked. “That’s a plan,” she said. We discussed fruit pairings to cut the salt and fat of the cheese—something with a little acid works best, like apricots and figs. With the cheese figured out, it was time to hit the main course. I’d be lying if I were to hide our intimidation while we awaited the arrival of celebrity chef Laurent Tourondel, who would be taking time from running his empire of dining establishments to teach us how to make bouillabaisse in the kitchen of his fish restaurant, BLT Fish. First of all, he’s a chef. Second of all, he’s French. Enough said. But instead of the Napoleonic drill sergeant I was anticipating, a wide-smiling man strode into the dining room wearing a black blazer jauntily over his chef’s jacket. I was almost disappointed by his instant affability. Tourondel’s staff had already shopped for and assembled everything he would need to make fish stock, so he fired up the enormous stove and made quick work of it. Tourondel cooked fast and loose, tossing in a whole handful of parsley when I knew his recipe called for only a sprig, pouring wine over vegetables like he was putting out a fire. This I could get with: I’m practically allergic to following instructions, and I like to do my cooking with Sarah Bernhardt–like theatrics. Tourondel told us repeatedly that there are a million ways to make bouillabaisse and improvisation is welcome, but all the same, he stuck to a certain order, deeply browning fish bones before added them to the pot, taking care when he added a tiny pinch of saffron. (When I asked him why he used so little saffron, he grimaced and told me that during his childhood in France, dentists used it when they drilled fillings.) Tourondel’s recipe doesn’t include lobster, which to me is the best part. I asked him about when and how to add lobster to the dish, and he raised an eyebrow. “Ah, you want to make fancy bouillabaisse?” He picked up a phone next to his chopping block and barked “Bring me a pound-and-a-half lobster!” Within thirty seconds one was creeping across the counter—until he stabbed it decisively through the head, never letting up his charming chitchatting, and added the still-twitching tail to the pot. Tourondel’s cool nonchalance whilst working two pans at a time became more understandable to me when I realized that the glass roof over the room—the kitchen is on the top floor—retracted when the room got too hot. Still, I had the distinct feeling that watching Tourondel cook was like watching ice skating: It looks easy as can be until you yourself stumble onto the rink. “This took me, what, an hour and a half from stock to eating?” he said. “I promise you, it will take you at least four hours.” Little did he know the harsh reality that was to come in my kitchen, which is roughly the same size as his stovetop. The next morning we picked up the fish. Instead of sending us off to Chinatown, where I often pick up cheap fins for supper, Tourondel hooked us up with his wholesaler, Rosso and Sons. They hoisted a giant bag of fish bones, another bag of mussels, and a huge plastic container of fillets into the back of a car, and we were off to test our skills. Back in Brooklyn my hands were quickly covered in small cuts, scales clung to my damp arms, and the floor of the kitchen was covered in fish blood. Beside me, hunched over a cutting board set upon our stove, Justin was removing the milky eyes from a giant fish head with a paring knife. A minute ago I’d cracked its head from its spine with my bare hands. It took us little time to realize that we didn’t have the proper knives to butcher the fish carcasses we’d exiled to the fire escape. The apartment reeked of fish. I reeked of fish. I had done things with scissors I never thought were possible. I was Jeanne d’Arc de la Mer. And we’d only been at it a half hour. All this for some soup? We finally finished snapping the spines and de-eyeing the fish and began to brown piles of bones and heads in our two skillets, batch after batch. I took pity on the fishwives of Marseille; reluctantly I took my temporary place within their stinking sisterhood. We began to assemble the soup: I drowning fistfuls of uncut parsley and thyme, in ten times the number of star anise the recipe required, while Justin diligently measured, stirred, and with a loving smile, took over. He made the rouille from Tourondel’s recipe. It was a foul, curdling mess of mashed potatoes. He grabbed Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything off the shelf—reserved for moments such as this one—ran out to the bodega, and within a half hour had concocted a zesty orange sauce. My hero. The day of our party, we awoke in a bedroom that smelled like a fish market. It was Saturday morning, and I had squid to gut. We began to brown pan after pan of fish fillets. I thought back to Tourondel’s words, reverberating in my head like the voice-over of a bad movie: This will take you four hours. Right. Justin and I made very serious plans to take some very serious downtime in the middle of the day, so we could get some rest before the party. Fat chance. Fish browned, I set about squeezing lemons (imagine all those tiny cuts) and making simple syrup for the French 75s. Then, for the first time in my life, I actually ironed napkins. While the iron was still hot, I reached into the back of a drawer for something I took from my grandmother’s house after she died—a brand-new hostess apron, still in its plastic packaging. As I ironed out its creases, I wondered why she never wore it. After another few hours of exhausting, relentless preparation, I knew why she never wore it: She actually cooked dinner! Despite my fantasies of hostess chic, I realized that the apron would remain on its hanger while I continued to sport Justin’s rubberized apron he bought for fire-escape barbecuing. Today’s women are expected to be both flawlessly-made-up-ladies-of-thehouse and lords-of-the-scalding-hot-kitchen. With this observation in mind, I escaped the kitchen to put on mascara and quickly paint my toenails red—when else would I?—and tie the rubber apron over a gray silk dress. Time to set the table in a flash and then join my husband in the scullery, with a kiss before frying… At seven o’clock, we awaited the doorbell. Silence, save for Charles Trenet crooning on the stereo. I applauded myself for assembling a last-minute dish of olives with lemon peel and garlic in case my friend Kate, dispatched to arrive—fifteen minutes ago at the latest—with canapés, should flake out entirely. Doorbell rang. It was Kate and Josh—we had canapés. Doorbell rang again: Leslie and Juan Pablo. I handed Juan Pablo, the occasional introvert in the crowd, a heavy tumbler of scotch instead of a champagne glass; he looked at me gratefully. Now we were missing only two guests, already an hour late. An unforeseen advantage in bouillabaisse: You assemble and cook through the prebrowned fish just before eating. Had I been roasting a chicken, this evening would now officially be a disaster. Finally, the doorbell: Vanessa and Adam. Tipsy from gin and Champagne, I made my way to the kitchen once more. Justin and I were a perfectly engineered machine. We assembled the rest of the dish effortlessly and set the steaming skillets upon the table to cheers. Justin poured the wine and very sweetly made a toast to my book. I silently toasted him for every eye he’d surgically removed from what we were about enjoy. We clinked glasses and began to pass bowls of bread, cheese, rouille, and bouillabaisse. Next came the salad greens, which I had mixed myself and tossed in my own shallot vinaigrette; it was fresh and invigorating. We set the cheese on wooden boards alongside slabs of apricots and figs pressed with almonds. Each cheese bore a numbered flag to direct us what to eat when. After disciplined tasting, euphoric chaos ensued—“You gotta have more Three! I can’t get enough of One!—with just the sort of reaching and passing, albeit over silvery chargers and delicate glasses, that I’d envisioned. The Chenin Blanc was transcendent. So, in the end, was the evening.

2008-01-28T13:20:51-05:00

235

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2008-01-28T15:54:00-05:00

Dinner Party Boot Camp

2008-02-22T10:57:27-05:00

BOUILLABAISSE By Oliver Schwaner-Albright The spirit of bouillabaisse is simple enough. It’s a brothy fish soup made with impeccably fresh seafood and served with bread and rouille, a garlic mayonnaise with roasted red pepper mashed in. Fish, garlic, fennel, olive oil—everything can be culled from within a mile of the port of Marseille, where the dish originated. According to mythology, it was the Greeks who introduced bouillabaisse to Marseille. But the dish has a cult of authenticity that’s not so straightforward. It is defined by its ingredients, a roster of vegetables and eight or so fish, but no two people on the face of this earth will agree on what the shopping list should be. If you make a bouillabaisse for a dinner party and follow a famous recipe to the letter, invariably one of your guests will tell you that because you added shellfish (or didn’t add shellfish) it’s not a bouillabaisse at all, but a very good soupe de poisson. “So what was the real-McCoy recipe?” Julia Child asked in My Life in France, the delightful and impatient memoir she started writing when she was 89. “There was a lot of bushwash expounded over this question. Clearly, there were as many ‘real’ bouillabaisse recipes as there were bouillabaisse makers.” The discussion everybody wants to have, especially the experts, is about the fish: what’s in and what’s out. Child put together an assortment that included rascasse, galinette, mustèle, murène, merlan, baudroie, saint-pierre, gàlena, and lotte. “Although, when I looked up the latter two fish in my books, they had different names,” she wrote. Before you go to the market armed with your shopping list, you first need to ask yourself: Which bouillabaisse am I making? Because there are two kinds: à la marseillaise and à la parisienne. In his entertaining and erudite The Food of France, Waverly Root distinguishes between them, in part, by fixating on mussels (parisienne has them and marseillaise doesn’t). Georges Auguste Escoffier, the most celebrated chef in the history of France, lines the soup bowls of the former with slices of marette, a Marseille bread, and serves toasted slices of baguette with the latter. But the fundamental difference is that à la marseillaise is prepared with boiling water, while à la parisienne with a fumet, a fish stock made with rinsed bones and trimmings and white wine. Because of this, à la marseillaise needs just twenty minutes on a flame, whereas making à la parisienne might eat up half a day or more. When you’re intimidated by how much work goes into bouillabaisse, you’re thinking of à la parisienne. To make a bouillabaisse à la marseillaise, you sweat leeks, onions, saffron, garlic, and tomatoes in olive oil, cover with boiling water, carefully add pieces of firm-flesh fish and cook for seven or eight minutes, then add the delicate fish and cook for seven or eight minutes more. It’s the seafood equivalent of serving garden strawberries still warm from the sun with a little bit of heavy cream, ingredients that need no gilding. Of course, the first step is to move to Marseille, as Julia and Paul Child did in 1953. I prefer to make bouillabaisse with a fumet, because I live in New York, a port that’s indifferent to its seafood, and the fish here needs a little nudge. After you decide between boiling water and a fumet, next come the vegetables, and this is where the orthodoxy starts. Everybody agrees that a bouillabaisse has garlic, tomatoes, and fennel fronds softened in olive oil and seasoned with saffron. Some say there are also onions, some say only Gallic leeks, some say both; Escoffier starts his with potatoes; Child and Root both write that orange peel should be added, either dried or fresh. It brings distant floral taste to the broth. As for the fish, it’s instructive to start with what is never found in a bouillabaisse. There are no big-game fish, like swordfish or tuna. There should be no octopus or squid, no sea urchins, no ray. There are no scallops, though Child sometimes came across them. The fish that find their way in tend to be smaller and found in shallow waters, the sort of fish that a small nineteenth-century fishing boat—or an ancient Greek fisherman— could’ve easily caught, and also the sort that wouldn’t have been worth much at the market. “Junk fish,” Child called these unpopular creatures. Also known as rockfish, they are the ugly but delicious fish that swim along the craggy bottom of the Mediterranean. “What is rascasse?” Root writes about one such species. “It is of course a fish, armedwith spines, which lives in holes in the rocks, and would be allowed to stay there were it not for bouillabaisse. Alone it is not particularly good eating, but it is the soul of bouillabaisse.” Rascasse is the cornerstone of Escoffier’s bouillabaisse à la marseillaise, which also calls for chapon, saint-pierre, merlan, fiélas, baudroie, rouget, rouquiers, and, interestingly, crawfish or langoustines. His à la parisienne reflects the North Atlantic seafood of the capital, and exchanges the baudroie, rouquiers, and saint-pierre (though the last is commonly found in cold waters) for sole, weever, and mussels. But asking for rascasse won’t get you very far at an American seafood counter. Fish names are fiercely nationalistic, and they will look blankly at you if, in New York, you order a red mullet by the Italian triglie or the French rouget. To translate the rest of Escoffier’s list, rascasse is scorpion fish; chapon is a gurnard, or sea robin; saint-pierre is John Dory; merlan is whiting; fiélas is conger eel; baudroie, also known as lotte, is monkfish (or goosefish). But even this guide has its limits. These are Mediterranean fish—imported, pricey—and bouillabaisse was never about exotic ingredients. “The great truth is that bouillabaisse never demanded anything more than the local fishing would yield,” A. J. McClane writes in his Encyclopedia of Fish Cookery. The first thing to do when making a bouillabaisse, according to McClane, is to invite at least four friends, maybe eight, then go shopping. In the Northeast this means looking for striped bass, porgy, sea robin, conger eel, red mullet, John Dory, monkfish, and whiting. Mussels are nice, both in the fumet and a few for the final soup, though langoustines, while tasty, are unnecessary and expensive, and price should be a guide. At its heart it’s a humble dish. The striped bass you could catch from the pier at Brooklyn’s Sheepshead Bay or select from the seafood counter at Fairway is absolutely in the tradition of bouillabaisse, and the scrawniest one will taste better than a rascasse with frequent-flyer miles. And if one of your guests, after having thirds, makes the comment that there’s no merlan, you can explain why yours is la vraie bouillabaisse. A RECIPE FOR BOUILLABAISSE Adapted from Go Fish by Laurent Tourondel and Andrew Friedman (John Wiley & Sons, 2004) This recipe is for a thick, wintry bouillabaisse à la parisienne, but instead of a fumet, the broth is a soupe de poisson that’s been simmered, pureed, cooled, then reduced. It’s not a difficult dish if you’re a professional chef; that is, provided you have space, ingredients, equipment, a staff, and you can start Saturday’s dinner on Friday night. —Oliver Schwaner-Albright Begin by making soupe de poisson, a milled fish soup made with olive oil, tomatoes, and garlic—a Mediterranean classic. It is always served with croutons (toasted baguette slices rubbed with garlic), and rouille, a rust-colored condiment made from red chile, potato, and garlic. The intensity of this soup will depend on which fish you choose. If the flavor seems weak, continue to reduce. Serves 6 11/4 cups extra-virgin olive oil 51/2 pounds assorted fish such as rockfish, rosefish, blackfish, or wolffish, cut into large dice 1 onion, peeled and cut into fine dice 1 leek, white part only, well washed and cut into fine dice 1 carrot, peeled and cut into 1/3-inch dice 1 celery stalk, cut into small dice 1/2 medium fennel bulb, cut into small dice 1 sprig thyme 1 bay leaf 2 tablespoons tomato paste 1 pound canned peeled whole Italian tomatoes, drained and crushed by hand 2 heads garlic, halved crosswise 2 cups dry white wine 1 whole star anise 1 sprig curly parsley 1 teaspoon saffron threads 1 large Idaho potato Scant pinch saffron 1 dry red chile 3 cloves garlic, peeled and smashed 1/4 cup warm water 1 cup grated Gruyère 18 croutons (toasted baguette slices rubbed with garlic) BEGIN THE SOUP: Heat 1/4 cup olive oil in a sauté pan set over medium-high heat. Season the fish with salt and pepper. When the oil is hot, add the fish to the pan in batches and sauté until dark brown, 8 to 10 minutes per side. As the fish pieces are done, transfer them to a large pot. Set aside. SAUTÉ THE VEGETABLES: Add 2 tablespoons of the oil to the pan. When the oil is hot but not smoking, add the onion, leek, carrot, celery, fennel, thyme, and bay leaf to the pan and sauté until the onion is translucent, approximately 4 minutes. Add the tomato paste and the garlic and stir to coat the vegetables. Add the crushed tomatoes and cook, stirring, until they begin to break apart. Turn the contents of the pan out into the pot with the fish. CONTINUE MAKING THE SOUP: Set the pot over high heat. Add the white wine and cook, stirring, until it evaporates. Add 9 cups water, the star anise, parsley, and saffron. Lower the heat and let the soup simmer for 45 to 50 minutes. While the soup is simmering, make the rouille. MAKE THE ROUILLE: Put the potato in a large pot and cover with cold water. Set over high heat and bring the water to a boil. Let boil until potato is done, approximately 15 minutes. (A sharp thin-bladed knife should pierce easily to its center.) Drain the potato and set it aside to cool. When potato is cool enough to handle, peel and cut into medium dice. Pour 1/2 cup of the olive oil into the bowl of a blender. Add the saffron, chile, and garlic, and blend until smooth. With the motor still running, add the potato and warm water and continue to blend until well incorporated and smooth. Transfer to a bowl and set aside. FINISH THE SOUP: Pass the soup through a food mill set over a bowl, or puree it in a food processor fitted with a metal blade and transfer it to a bowl. Taste and adjust the seasoning with salt and pepper. The soup can be made to this point, cooled, covered, and refrigerated for up to 2 days in an airtight container in the refrigerator to allow flavors to develop. Store the rouille in a separate container. TO SERVE: Divide the soup among 6 bowls and serve, passing the croutons, rouille, and grated Gruyère alongside. TO MAKE BOUILLABAISSE: You can turn this soup into a bouillabaisse by letting it cool, then sit, covered, in the refrigerator overnight so the flavors have a chance to develop. Then, set the pot over high heat, reduce and thicken, then lower the heat. Add an assortment of shellfish such as squid and mussels, and 2-inch cubes of John Dory; grouper; hake; red snapper; rockfish or monkfish and let the fish poach just until cooked through in the reduced soup. Serve with croutons but omit the Gruyère.

2008-01-28T12:39:57-05:00

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2008-01-28T15:37:00-05:00

Bouillabaisse

2008-02-22T10:57:27-05:00

While dancing to Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto no. 2 in 2003, ballerina Jennie Somogyi, a principal with the New York City Ballet, tore and shredded tendons in her left ankle. The prognosis was devastating: She needed surgery and, in all likelihood, would never dance again. But a little more than two years later, Somogyi celebrated her return to the stage with a leading role in the world premiere of The Red Violin. Before the performance, Somogyi sat down with Isaac’s Style Book and opened up about her lifelong struggle with backstage jitters. ISB: After your injury, how did you handle the stress of performing in the fall 2005 season? JS: For a little while I was calm—but I wasn’t dancing in hard roles. Then in Denmark and New York I had breakdowns in the wings. I was a mess! Hyperventilating. I couldn’t stop crying. I was dancing roles that I had performed in the past, but I felt that people had forgotten that I had been out for nearly two years. I was upset that I wasn’t going to be the ballerina that I had been. Since those episodes, it’s gotten easier. I think I had to let the fear out of my system. It was very emotional being back. ISB: How do you feel before going onstage? JS: Many dancers have an adrenaline rush in the wings—I’m not one of them. Before I perform, my legs go numb and I get drowsy and I yawn. A lot of people are born performers and can’t wait to get out and be seen. When I dance it’s less about “being seen,” and more about getting lost in the music, getting something off my chest. I feel incredible post-performance—getting me out there is the problem! ISB: What do you think the anxiety is about? Pleasing others? JS: Yes, I’ve always been eager to please. I’ve been nervous backstage since I was 8 years old. I want to give the audience a good performance. ISB: When do you start feeling nervous? In the dressing room as you do your hair? On the bar backstage warming up? Waiting in the wings? JS: Well, I guess it starts in the dressing room. I have this thing with my earrings. Ballerinas have big, sparkly stage earrings. We always wear them except for when we do contemporary pieces that require leotards—modern costume that isn’t worn with earrings. Most ballerinas have a few pairs, in different colors, for different costumes. But not me. I have one antique rhinestone pair that I’ve worn for 13 years— since I started with the company. I must wear them! I’m not ready to go out until I put on my trusty earrings. I lost one in the middle of a show a few years ago—it flew off me. I panicked. Luckily, the crew found it. ISB: No thing with the toe shoes? JS: Actually, there is a thing with the pointe shoes. I coat them with tons of rosin. ISB: What’s rosin? JS: It’s the chalky stuff gymnasts use so they don’t slip. I like to leave my dressing room early and get to the wings. Backstage I dust my shoes with rosin—I’ve never slipped, not in 13 years, which is pretty impressive. It works for me. I feel like the one time I don’t do it I’ll go down! Right before the performance, before the curtain rises, I go out onstage and feel out the shoes, get comfortable, try out the harder steps. There’s a trail of rosin and the guys have to sweep up after me. ISB: You’re a jumper. How have you been compensating for the injury? You must dance differently now. JS: I inhabit the music differently: I feel more expressive, more in the moment, more relaxed. I enjoy it more because I know I’m lucky to be dancing. The injury has imposed limits—I can’t jump like I used to— but accepting the imperfection has liberated me. Now I go out and think: This is all I can offer, and I can’t be perfect. This is what I have, and hopefully someone will enjoy it.

2008-01-28T12:28:26-05:00

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2008-01-28T15:19:00-05:00

An Interview with Ballerina Jennie Somogyi

2008-02-22T10:57:27-05:00