She’s not a regular mom, she’s a cool mom
all moms are chic (but mine is the chicest)
HNY my friends,
The holidays are now over. You are made of 3/4s sugar and ¼ facts about the contestants from the latest season of Traitors UK. Somehow, after planning to plough through an entire stack of shiny hardcovers, you managed to read less over ten days than you do on the busiest day of your life. On actual Christmas you set your alarm for 7am and got out of bed at 7pm. Despite the failure to crack a single book, you’ve read so many gift guides that now the entire concept of a “gift” seems kind of twisted, actually- like is it really a gift if someone feels obligated to give it? Apparently, your break made you much more tired than your year (this was the year that all of your friends your age began answering the question “how are you?” with “sleepy.” The word peri-menopause is being thrown around a lot, which started for you at 31 so now it’s like “welcome, I knew you all would find me here eventually. Sit down- can I offer you a very large coffee and a bunch of easy to remove layers?”) You miss vaping, even though you know that this is how it has to be, and you fight your ingratitude by making Notesapps with titles like “things that bring joy, edition 55!” but that doesn’t stop you from thinking about the few things you did wrong this year instead of the many you actually did kind of right. In bed, you enter increasingly obscure Google wormholes until you finally fall into a dense, dreamless sleep and wake up clutching your phone, as panicked as if you’d been blindfolded and dropped in a random train station where the signs are in Dingbats font.
Or am I projecting?
So this letter won’t be about books- not today, although we are back to school and our usual programming.
It definitely isn’t a gift guide (for the record, I’m not so good at holiday gifts- a gift from me will come on a random Wednesday in March because it reminded me of you, and I’ll be so excited that I’ll send a photo of it before it can even arrive.)
Today’s “issue” is about fashion, but only sort of. Really, it’s about being almost forty and still seeing the world as a series of my mothers do’s and don’ts. Perhaps some of her style secrets will inspire you, although what she would really want is for you to be yourself.
So, Lu and I were in the UK for the holidays this year.
I got back on Christmas Eve morning to find he had gone full indie sleaze Santa- trimmed the tree, roasted and roasted things and then surprised me with the most romantic gift imaginable:
He replaced our cracked ceramic toilet seat with the oak throne of my dreams, because apparently my Anglophilia knows no bounds. (BTW, these are often referred to as a Thomas Crapper after a Victorian sanitary engineer who may or may not have made important contributions to modern plumbing- but that’s genuinely too much to get into right now.)
Despite these insanely cozy developments— London, like my husband, really does “understand the assignment” re: Christmas— I missed my family badly. I really never get used to being far from them and I have to remind myself how lucky I am that I happened to be born into my “if you could invite anyone, living or dead, to a dinner party who would it be” answer. If the cost of having a lot of love is also a lot of missing, then it’s a bargain.
I had particular pangs for my mother, who always comes out on Christmas morning and presents me with something she has always owned and I have always admired (although last year, she gave me a monogrammed robe that I wore as a baby, which is technically just gifting my own possession back to me.) As a child, watching her get dressed, I’d admire something on her person (a brutalist earring, a pony hair leopard flat) and ask brightly “can I have that when you die?”
“You can have it before I die,” she would say.
She’s also the one who taught me that ya can’t blame a gal for trying, and I was gonna try, because… my mother is the chicest person I know.
To be fair, I find basically everyone’s mother chic, if we are defining CHIC by this acronym:
Creatively
Herself
Impossibly
Committed
You can’t look at a non-digital photo of someone’s mother in her youth and not gasp a little at her tender strength, her unique beauty, her profound presence (the nerdiest grad students in 1975 looked like they were modeling in recent Miu Miu ads.).
Moms have IT. They always have and they always will.
And by the time a woman enters her 60s or 70s, she has truly developed her taste- you don’t have to like her taste, but you can’t say she doesn’t know what she wants! I could literally spend a whole party just listening to the host’s mother discuss the linen wear brand she favors– and I have. One friend’s mom has worn exclusively Issey Miyake Pleats Please since decades before its surge, while another has been riding her John Deere in a massive prairie nightgown and Gardana clogs since the mid-90s. I can still see her, coming through a field like a superhero.
Recently, an iconic woman in her 60s explained the secret to her style to me thusly: “wear what’s comfortable, then always add a short black jacket. It tricks everyone into thinking you have it together.” I imagined her closet, an endless sea of short black jackets- like when Doug Funnie gets dressed in the morning:
But back to my mother (who, from here on out, I’ll be referring to as Laurie Simmons.) She’s always been possessed of an enviable clarity of aesthetic. One of my earliest memories is sitting on the floor of her closet, running my hand along her row of Chelsea boots- all of which would have seemed identical to someone else, but which she understood the varied personalities of. She kept her jewelry in a small grey enamel filing cabinet, where I spent hours arranging and re-arranging it like a pirate’s treasure, unaware that its only real material value was that it was hers and she is mine.
She’s certainly been dressing like some version of herself since she moved to New York in 1971.
I often imagine her moving into her loft with bags and bags of thrifted knits and a roll of cherry print wallpaper (see below) and realizing it had no closets.
Things Laurie Simmons loves, and has always loved, in no particular order:
White jeans, year round (see above and below)
An angora sweater:
Fucking with menswear shapes and letting her heels do the talking.
A scrunchy sock. A loose shirt with tight pants…
…or a tight shirt with loose pants
She loves anything in a shade that resembles fruit that is ever so slightly rotting– she still talks about the “banana yellow” Papagiallos she coveted as a teen but was told in no uncertain terms were not in the family budget. As with everything in her life, when a door closed she cracked a window, until she finally located a bargain store where they were selling defective pairs and remainders. And they had her color! But in a size too small. Still, she jammed her feet in.
She loves tone on tone…
She loves a red lip, an earring that once belonged to someone’s grandmother.
She thinks that women cutting off all their hair once they reach middle-age is a conspiracy, and in actuality a Bob is for before you’re 35:
(Her rules could be a whole different post, but let’s just say “formal shorts” is the combination of words she likes least in the English language.)
She loves animal prints only if the cut is classic…
Laurie Simmons loves a slim maxi skirt, an exaggerated collar. In recent years she’s developed an appetite for jewel tones, flats with a defiantly odd shape or color, silver nail polish, wearing one massive ring and no other accessories (or, as I called them as a child “SUCCESSORIES.”)
She loves a pegged silk taffeta pant and always has.
When I was a tween, Laurie and I would play a game in any seemingly hopeless store- the Dress Barn upstate, the gift shop at the New London Hospital, a picked over Strawberry…
One of us would name an event— a first date, a barbecue on the beach, the presidential inauguration, a Hollywood awards show— and a budget (under 10 dollars) and then we’d each have to pick out the best look we could out of the available components and assign the other a score. Once she really blew my mind by suggesting a plain red sweatshirt could be belted with a pearl necklace- that was it! That was the look!
Sadly, when I took Laurie to the Emmys she did not wear Strawberry. I wish she fucking had, because she looked so good I could have applied for the seminal UK reality show My Mum’s Hotter Than Me!
Last year, as one of her holiday regifts, Laurie had new buttons sewn on the chartreuse cardigan she wore when pregnant with me and beyond:
But instead of giving it to me, she handed it to Lu. At first, he was confused. After all “I wore this through both of my pregnancies and now I think you should have it” isn’t the most ringing endorsement for a straight dude, even one who wears nail polish.
But she’s got the vision and we both know it. And of course, it looked fabulous. And every time I open our closet and see it on his side, I feel a profound sense of coziness.
I don’t dress like Laurie. I don’t have her eye or her taste or her body or her hair. I have never taken one accessory off before leaving the house. I have never worn a “pop of color.” Even in the depths of sadness, I am dressed as if I work at a Claire’s Accessories in the Scranton Mall circa 1992. But sometimes I’ll see a woman in the street- she could be eighteen or eighty- who reminds me of her. Something about her low ponytail, or the boxy shape of her turtleneck, or her long sculptural necklace or her jeans skimming the top of her canvas tennis shoes. And I stare at her and she probably thinks “what’s this lady’s damage?” until- 9 times out of ten- I go ahead and fuck it, I say it: “I just want you to know, you look fabulous. My mother would love your outfit.”
In white after Labor Day,
Lena
My favorite line: "She kept her jewelry in a small grey enamel filing cabinet, where I spent hours arranging and re-arranging it like a pirate’s treasure, unaware that its only real material value was that it was hers and she is mine." 🤍
I like the idea of having a bob only before 35.