Get your kicks on route sixty-six

If I were a car, I’d be a Futura. I saw one at the garage down the street from me. Gus, the mechanic, usually has two or three beauties getting a little work done. Nothing removed, puffed up, or otherwise altered, just a little tune-up underneath the hood.

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!

What Becomes a Legend Most

Not sure what this has to do with fashion exactly. Something about “style icons” perhaps?

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…

A Doppelgänger Aspiration

Eunice Johnson Dies at 93; Gave Ebony Its Name

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.

A Video Tour of Mad Men’s Costume Shop

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.