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Nostalgia: Costumes for the Revolution, was originally published in the October 2008 issue of Vogue. It has been edited and reformatted.
The summer of 1968 began at dawn on June 5, in my grandmother’s living room. Andy Warhol had been shot two days before. I awoke to see my grandmother turning on the TV.
“Nana?”
“He’s been shot! He’s dead!”
“I know,” I said, warmed that she cared about someone I almost knew, “but that was the day before yesterday. And he’s alive, he’s going to be OK.”
“They shot another one! You know!”
The TV made that curious zipping sound as it came to life, and we were in the middle of a newscast. “Senator Robert Kennedy was shot last night in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel. . . .”
It was an unbearably strange year. Percussive, angry, out of control. Martin Luther King had been shot in April. In May, student riots brought France to a halt for weeks. My mother, caught in the upheaval on a little spring shopping trip in Paris, coped with customary brio. She tracked down her father’s old chauffeur and persuaded him to convey her up to Belgium on a tankful of bartered gasoline, with all her new clothes in the trunk.
I was nineteen and held on to glamour as a talisman against the dark. The Vietnam War was intractable, the violence terrifying. The only way through had to do with style, élan, panache. I wasn’t tall, and I didn’t look like a dolly bird, but I knew how to dress. I had a dab way with velvets from the Portobello Road. I had inside knowledge of Biba’s, knew my styles from long hours at the Victoria and Albert Museum, and when I went to Sarah Lawrence, Ossie Clark, Annacat, and Leslie Poole came with me. I rode up from New York with Penelope Tree in something called a Larchmont Limousine. Penelope swept her huge eyes around the bedroom I was to share with a girl from New Jersey, asked, “How can you stay here?,” took the limousine back to New York, and was barely seen on campus again. She had been discovered. Her boyfriend was David Bailey, the coolest photographer in the world.
I was lonely in America but found my friends in the pages of VOGUE. Not color spreads of models perched on Syrian domes, decked out in silk, and topped with Dynel tresses, but the small black-and-white photographs at the back, in a section called VOGUE’s Own Boutique. Girls my age, girls I sort of knew, girls wearing my clothes, lounging and lolling in exotic dress. “Penelope Tree is with the costume thing.” Lady Victoria Yorke in “the Byronesque-y sleeved shirt in violet silk satin paisley, $32, Deborah and Clare.” “Oh to Be a Gypsy” told me that “Ingmari finds the perfect backdrop to play out her charaderie roles of mystic, Gypsy, poetic peasant, what have you”—the word charaderie showed that VOGUE knew how to take liberties with language, just as one had to take liberties with clothes. Ingmari wore a “red-and-gold silk, floss-embroidered, mirror-dotted, Indian cloth”—from Serendipity, expensive at $125, but so familiar! I, too, had posed in Indian costume, for Berry Berenson, but these pictures of Ingmari were in VOGUE. There was Ariel de Ravenel, her basset-hound puppy on her desk, its front paws on a copy of VOGUE. Her debutante ball in Paris, a year before and a world away, had been a costume party at the Cercle Interallié—an evening I remembered with regret. I had not danced enou h or drunk enough.
There was Caterine Milinaire, whose mother, a producer, had been my parents’ first friend in Paris. I had known her since I was four and she was ten; Caterine was my glamorous role model. When her mother married the Duke of Bedford, Caterine and her siblings moved into Woburn Abbey, where I spent most weekends, assiduously selling full-color guidebooks to visitors. Caterine was now at VOGUE, and here she was, sulky and gorgeous in the Queen Victoria Bedroom at Woburn Abbey, photographed with her shoulders slouched in a slipper chair, her hips and legs braced across the void, her feet on a silk footstool. She wore Gypsy clothes: a golden vest from Apple, the Beatles’ store; a satin shirt and pants from Quorum. I had the same shirt. I was almost her.
Through someone at British VOGUE I was introduced to an editor at Glamour who liked me. The fact that my father had a production company with Peter O’Toole, the most famous movie star of the day, was not lost on her. Nor on me. By the end of June I had a job as her assistant, and another job replacing the book reviewer. Harold Hayes at Esquire had commissioned me to write an exposé of Sarah Lawrence, but there was no way to do it without causing pain. It seemed safer to forgo that explosive glory to play with clothes and live life as a charaderie.
When I went to Sarah Lawrence, I rode up from New York with Penelope Tree in something called a Larchmont Limousine
Condé Nast was then in the Graybar Building, at 420 Lexington Avenue, above Grand Central; I stayed two blocks away, at my uncle’s apartment. New York summer heat was a shock. On the first morning, I walked to work, done up for the King’s Road. By the time I arrived, my pale-blue silk shirt from Deborah and Clare was a wet mess; my wool miniskirt was concrete; and the snakeskin scales were curling away from my Quorum waistcoat. They gave me a desk anyway, and a rotary phone with big square Lucite extension buttons on it.
The floor outside the elevator was black inlaid with gold brass stars. The technical smell of copier fluid pervaded the hallways. Condé Nast was a bastion of propriety. Glamour’s editor in chief, Ruth Whitney, had the kind of hair later immortalized by Margaret Thatcher. We were enjoined to “think of Peoria.” At first I thought it was an acronym—Propriety, Education, Order, Rules, Integrity, Action, perhaps—until I learned that it was a place in the Midwest, where Glamour’s readers were said to live.
The only signs of revolution were clothes from faraway cultures: charaderies. A messenger named Calvin proudly displayed his heritage by wearing a shirt made out of a dashiki. My boss was a nervous, complicated woman with beautiful eyes and a threatening way of winding her hair around her fingers. She and her friend Julie were the Gypsy souls in bright skirts from Rajasthan and Kerala, and tight T-shirts from Paris. The VOGUE girls, one floor above, had less Peoria to worry about. They were immensely tall, with improbable, luscious names—Kezia Keeble, Bibi von Wink lhorn—and they swept through the elevator, a separate tribe in rustling multicolored skirts made by the Navajo or the Seminole. They carried baskets from Africa; their necks were hung with talismans from Morocco and Turkey. In a closed circle of perfection, they ended up in VOGUE’s Own Boutique.
One day Mrs. Vreeland spotted someone bare-legged in the elevator, and a memo went out to all of Condé Nast reminding us that a lady always wore hose. It was 98 degrees. The VOGUE girls wore bright Jack Rogers Navajo thong sandals without hose. Their costumes made them free.
At Glamour, I played with lengths of chiffon, kneeled at models’ feet pinning hems, ironed coats, and rode around in limousines to shoots with big boxes of clothes, feeling responsible.
I found old dresses on St. Mark’s Place and wore them to parties that had to do with French people. I reviewed Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test for Glamour and prayed he would read my heartfelt rave. I watched television—green scenes of carnage from Vietnam, and then I turned to Laugh-In.
The summer of 1968 ended between August 21 and August 28 in the living room of my uncle’s apartment. Russian tanks rolled into Prague as the Soviets crushed Alexander Dubček’s Prague Spring revolution. I was scared. If we stepped in, would that be World War III? Three days later the Democratic Convention began in Chicago: Eugene McCarthy versus Hubert Humphrey. If the Democrats won, the Vietnam War would end. But the convention quickly degraded into nights of riots, the rioters crushed by Mayor Daley’s cops.
And that fall, Richard Nixon was elected. In protest, I wore only red, every shade of red, all together.