Here is something that may surprise you: I’m a tough sell. Two decades working in fashion, from writing and editing to retail and back again, has cultivated a subtle yet unyielding suspicion toward “newness” and, even worse—oh, God—any hyperbolic declaration of need. Between my personal aversion to waste, the professional privilege of access and gifts (not an insignificant part of the equation, admittedly), and other pressing financial demands, I am, somewhat perversely, disincentivized to buy new clothes. Especially at full price.
So why then, one recent Thursday night, did I find myself parting with more money than I care to publish here on a luminous ivory satin “studio blazer”? Cocktail in one hand, credit card poised like a cigarette in the other, a conspiratorial grin stretching evermore laterally across my face as it met the approving looks of the other women circulating the candlelit room.
