Sweater: Boat-neck, navy and white striped, puff sleeved cotton blend sweater. I bought this on considerable sale from Anthropologie while I was recuperating from Covid about six weeks ago. I get why it was on sale. It has a weird fitted bottom, which it not a thing people love in a sweater. The material (some cotton/acrylic situation) has a texture that reminds me a bit of woven placemats from the early 1980s, and thus makes me crave a salad with Green Goddess dressing. And the sleeves. Y’all. The picture does not do these sleeves justice. These are full on Gilded Age lawn party puff sleeves. These are sleeves that could make covetous Canadian orphans commit crimes of passion. I want to hate them. I don’t hate them, maybe because they are so incongruous on a sweater that, otherwise looks like it should be dropping by the 19th hole after ladies’ tennis to see if IV needs to have his tux jacket pressed before the Garden Club benefit, for lord’s sake. Maybe I don’t hate the sleeves because they are responsible for keeping this from being the hands-down preppiest thing I own.
Jeans: Cheap, straight, high-waisted, black. I’m old enough that I’ve been through more than a few jean trend rodeos, so I know better than to pay too much or get too attached. People get emotional about skinny jeans. I don’t. The first pair of jeans I ever really loved were pleated and pink and white candy striped. They matched my leg pink and gray legwarmers and pink converse and the pink rhinestone NYC pin I wore on my jean jacket in 1986. I thought that was a good look (to date I still think about that outfit) and was pretty much devastated by the brutal invasion of skinny jeans the following year. Skinny jeans in the 1980s were punishing, pre-stretch-era denim with ankle zippers (so you could pull them over your feet). Sometimes those ankle zippers were topped with denim bows. A touch of whimsy to distract you from the fact that just to zip them up you had to fling yourself violently across the bed, or against the wall, or on the shitty dressing room floor at TJ MAXX, where your mother took your for the knock-off versions of the Guess? jeans the popular girls wore, because she was absolutely not paying that much for a trend and you were not thin enough to fit in them anyway. People referred to those jeans as hysterectomy pants. It was a joke, of course, but honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a widespread decrease in fertility among girls who hit puberty during the tight jeans/Bon Jovi1 era. That also might have also been due to the spontaneous biological response at living getting pitched a mall-bangs-having sex symbol who referred to a motorcycle as a “steel horse” at a critical developmental phase.
All this is to say I was, at best, ambivalent when skinny jeans started coming back around in the early 20th century. I mean, wore them. I wore them with high boots and big sweaters and dangly scarves, and so sometimes my wintertime shadow looked like it was a sword and plumed hat away from swashbuckling. I wore them with heels. I wore them with sneakers. I wore them, even when they made my thighs look huge and my feet look unnaturally small, like that fat pony from the Bugs Bunny Wagner cartoon. I wore them, too, because most of them, unlike their mean girl hair metal forbears, contained so much spandex that you could consume an entire turkey dinner and enough gin to sink the Hyannisport Regatta2 and still have( at least theoretically) viable ovaries if you had to bend over. But fashion propels us forward or backward or mallward or wherever people shop now (internetward?). Survey says the kids are bringing back JNCOs and ultra-low rise. That’s fine. Straight leg feels like a hedge, and one I feel like I might be comfortable making for (more or less) the indefinite future.
Shoes: A few years ago, after I turned 40, I went through a few years where I spent too much money on fancy sneakers (cheaper than sportscars, cleaner than affairs). It had come, rapidly, to my attention that high heels were not something I could do so much of anymore and there were occasions and seasons for which neither boots nor sandals were appropriate. Due to age and general irrelevancy, I didn’t really get that Vejas were a thing. I saw them on the feet of a girl standing beside me at a Giant Dog show at Cat’s Cradle and thought, “huh, those are cute.” Then I came home, googled “Leather Sneakers Giant V” and read about how a Vogue writer thought they were uncomfortable, but more comfortable than Chuck Taylors, and I bought the ones with the shiny avocado green V as an advance Xmas present for myself in December of 2019.
I read somewhere that I wasn’t supposed to show my bare ankles anymore. But if that’s the case, I’m going to need them to start making normal length jeans again, because we don’t do novelty socks in this household.
Earrings: Bright red, acrylic hoops. These came from my friend’s gallery, Peel, here in Carrboro. I have two pairs of these (in red and green). The red ones are, at this point, as close to signature earrings as you can get.
Outfit: I didn’t start the day wearing this. I started in—get this—an actual button down blue Oxford, which, upon reflection, the actual preppiest thing in my wardrobe, and cashmere cardigan. I wore it to brunch in Hillsborough, where I did managed a real life spit take at a not-that-funny thought about the British Army (long story), and drenched myself in cappuccino. My friend, generously agreed to pit stop at my house so I could change before we could move on to our next small town in the greater Research Triangle (Saxapahaw), where I managed to miss the Holiday Market for the second year running.
I like this outfit all right. I also wore it on Election Night 2023. That was good night for local politics here. The first genuinely happy Election Night I’d had since 2008. That’s something, guys. I don’t when I’ll have one of those again. You got to find your jolly when you can. And you might as well do it with a puffy sleeved sweater.
Sweater: Anthropologie, Maeve
Jeans: Target, Ava & Viv,
Shoes: Veja sneakers
Earrings: Peel Carrboro, Night Moves Atelier
In researching this piece, I was confronting with the curious, but not unpleasant detail that Jon Bon Jovi and Nana, my favorite grandmother, dressed exactly the same in 1987. Like it is astonishing.
The Daytrippers. Dir. Greg Mottola, Columbia Pictures, 1997. Film. And ps, you should 100% watch this movie. It’s one of my all-time favorites. Currently streaming on The Critierion Channel.
Tiny Commotions 
