Wikipedia tells me (do you actually have to cite wikipedia?): “The Classic Car Club of America maintains that a car must be between 20 and 45 years old to be a classic, while cars over 45 years fall into the Antique Class.”

Um. I think I’m an antique. But if you’d be so kind, I’d prefer to be referred to as “vintage.”

Speaking of which, Vivienne Westwood is a rare vintage, always worth a listen!

Ben Brantley wrote an article recently {Among Celebrities, Mystery’s Not Fashionable} about how our newfound capacity to stay in the spotlight—tabloids and twitter, wordpress and wikipedia—has undermined the whole reason we want to know anything about each other. There’s no mystery if we keep flaunting ourselves, and mystery is desire I suppose. Okay, that’s a bit of a leap. But compare Jackie Kennedy to Lindsay Lohan, and yeah, that does make his point…

Then in college, circa 1980, my compadres and I went through some sort of pop-nostalgia thing. Grownup-hood impending, trying on the coolest version of our parents we could imagine. We weren’t alone. Would there have been Ramones without Beatles? Or even more significantly, what about the Ruttles?

Now here it is, 40 years after the grande demise, and my 9- and 6-year old boys demand (whine, cajole) Beatles whenever we’re in the car. They can tell you which song is on which album, they discuss who’s their favorite (Ellis: Paul, Lowell: John).

Good is always great, oh and, “Ringo’s Wearing Red Patent Leather!”

Is this just a reflection of a personal scar? I wore cuffed pants—plaid no less—on my first day of a new school when I was in seventh grade, in 1974.

It was a careful plan: a maroon knit top, color coordinated with a vertical stripe in my plaid bell-bottoms, all culminating in great big, extra wide, CUFF. I regretted it the minute I arrived at home room. I’m sure I looked perfectly groovy, in a Brady Bunch sort of way, but suddenly my thirteen-year-old self realized groovy doesn’t equal cool. Ragged-bottomed blue jeans ensued for the rest of the year.

Speaking of which, on the subway yesterday I checked out peoples’ bottoms (pants bottoms that is). Very few cuffs. There are a number of reasons for this, but I’m guessing one is because altering clothes is a rarer asset than it was in days of yore, such as 1974. Cuffs are more complicated than just turning up a hem. A tailor can do it but it’s not as simple, or cheap, as just not having cuffs in the first place.

But if I see shorts without cuffs, or at least some deliberate termination, I think the wearer is indifferent, suffering from that same lack of imagination as a pant-wearer WITH cuffs. To me, shorts are the Anti-Pants, and they necessitate a confident ending. Pants typically terminate, tried and true, somewhere below the ankle. Shorts come to an abrupt ending, and benefit from communicating some sort of gracious segue into the knee. Above, below, mid thigh, mid calf: what are you doing there, and why?

This model’s legs are twice as long as mine, but you get the idea...

Of course this doesn’t answer the age old question: what about skorts?

1954-65

Delta’s is “We love to fly. And it shows.” And what better way to show it than a history of their Airline Attendant uniforms? Yup, nothing I love more than a good uniform….

Propeller Era Uniforms (1940-1959).
Jet Age Uniforms (1959-present).

Those from 2001–2006 strike me as despicably insufficient; un-uniform-ish. They’re touted as some sort of homage to “business casual,” but why would you want to do that? It reads wrong. The four in this 2003 picture look like rumpled and weary passengers at the end of a long work week. It makes me want to jump out of my own seat and serve them a good strong martini. BTW, they are Attendants from “Song,” Delta’s now-defunct low-fare brand experiment. I guess you can’t fake grass roots.

“Business Casual 2003”

1957-59

1969-70

I confess I troll the obituaries. I love reading about interesting people’s lives, in brief. So I came across Eunice Johnson’s death notice in the NY Times (one of my favorite haunting grounds) in January, and I was moved. If I could be half the woman she was, well, I’d be short, now wouldn’t I? Okay, that’s not what I meant to say. No, I was going to say, I’d be quite accomplished—I’d have climbed some very tall metaphorical mountains. I so admire her ability to identify problems that mattered to her, and most significantly, to solve them.

Click for a Mad Men tour

Why do I love that show so much? Is it simply the clothes? This seems like a good place to clarify: Anne’s + my clothing line, Doppelgänger Wear, is about the history of women’s ambition, expressed as clothing. Whaddya think, can you see it? Our clothes are not based on high-fashion of bygone decades (the 1940s, ’50s, ’60s, etc.), rather they are based on home-sewing patterns of those eras. This means style marketed to women who wanted to make something of themselves, by themselves. The latter wasn’t such an uncommon pursuit in those days. In school, girls took “home economics” while boys took shop. But the former, to make something of themselves, is still a work in progress, isn’t it. Funny how that progress has diminished our ability to sit down and sew.