A Bag of Onions

Posted by Holly at March 20th, 2008

It’s pretty exciting to see the piece I posted on the New York Times’ Runway blog a couple of weeks ago generating comment.  I’ve been getting a real mind-kick ever since and I was pretty ticked at the beginning that Jim went up into the vineyard to prune and forgot to turn on his phone.  Then I thought I was starting to be a little like The Flying Nun the year she won an Oscar and wept aloud that everybody liked her.

So I got to thinking about the attitude that I might not matter because I live on a farm in Oregon; but, wait, am I not the same consumer Mizrahi, Martha Stewart and Moschino decided to launch lines for in places like Target (yes, yes, I know – Tarjay) and K-mart?  Isn’t fashion a business?  Aren’t the designers and retailers trying to turn a profit?  Doesn’t that mean they need the likes of me to buy whatever iteration of their work they put out?  Fashion/style/art may not apply to me because I live on a farm.  To be fair, farm Carharts got that little boost on Sunday in the lead article about in the NYT Style section about the young, hip partners who left New York City for the joys of the manure pile in Tivoli.  I’m sure the writer and editors were tickled to find such urban/exurban pairs on which to peg their story and get in on the earthiness without losing any of the NYT smartness.  Okay, so I didn’t know anything about living in the country, let alone a farm, when I first moved to the Northwest (the equivalent of going from NYC to Tivoli or to Mars, for that matter) and used to make mistakes like wearing sparkly ballet flats to go to my son’s Cub Scout events on the tops of little mountains) I did discover you can wear Carharts and pair them with boots like my ones with the polka dots or the little horses I wear now that it’s mud underneath my feet and not the city sidewalk. It is also true that the first time I did wear overalls (since I was a kid anyway) was the night before my wedding to Jim and then because he had been teasing me about getting me to do that.  I wanted to surprise him and wear them to a party in our honor thrown by neighbors in their barn (100 years old, historic, beautifully restored – the horses actually live outside so they don’t sully the beautifully hewn timber with poop).  When Jim saw me in my overalls (I also had on three-inch heels but they were in a thoughtfully chosen complementary black and pink country plaid) he decided to give me my wedding/birthday present right then, to wear with the overalls, diamond earrings.  Change demands new style.  Or is that style demands change?  I’m not sure but I am sure that the commerce of style, fashion and journalism is one reason the NYT is happy to send me my subscription to the doorstep of the farm in Cornelius.  (Thank heaven to the doorstep, by the way, so Jim can pick it up after giving the horses their nice alfalfa breakfast bale we personally grow in the pastures, moving 40’ pipes around to irrigate; which is often when I am happiest I have the boots with the polka dots.)

There has to be room for the likes of me to revel in the art of fashion and style even if I am unwilling to pay the outrageous price.  Going through my own head is the argument that great art means great prices but I’m not going to buy into that, either.  I was in the Portland Art Museum a few weeks ago where I saw, in the modern art wing, some fabulously interesting pieces and also some outrageous and cheeky works. The one that propelled me to unleash my own inner sculptor was a rectangular block of marble sitting on the floor in the middle of rice. It was called Rice House.  The rectangle  looked something like a building, maybe a rec-hall or dormitory like the horse wranglers used in old Westerns.  This was a solid block of marble, however, no inner lives depicted.  It happened, that at the time I saw that, Jim and I were having our bathroom vanities redone with granite tops and above the counter marble sinks, replacing the faux marble and the ornately carved gold-tone faucets with decades of dried toothpaste in the grooves (1970s taste and popular when the original owner built this house.  We love our bathrooms now, no more bending over when we brush; no more poorly aimed toothpaste on the faucets.)  I could hardly wait to get home from the museum so I could take a leftover corner we had of the granite and surround it with rice.  I used brown to complement the Moroccan colors in the granite, put it in the window in the stairwell and called it Rice Mountain.  It was a great piece of sculpture until the cats discovered how much fun it is to move the rice (sort of a Who Moved My Cheese comedy production) and spread it all over the place. I vacuumed up the rice, revising my artist’s statement as I went.

I’m poking mild fun, but it’s because we seem so seriously manipulated down the path of spending more to become fashionable and stylish. I want to think about fashion as art.   Some of it I love; some of it I hate; some is just too ridiculous to consider.  See the Style section on Sunday where underwear that reaches down the thigh has become part of someone’s fashion statement in Paris.  And, by the way, has anyone noticed that on the streets of New York, Florence, Paris or Cornelius most people are wearing drab-from-the-washing-machine clothing?  (Well, okay, maybe not on Cornelius’ streets although that underwear statement must have made a quick impression because there was somebody at our little Fern Hill Community Club annual spring event – potluck, a lot of corned beef from good old family recipes, a lot of casseroles, a lot of good old families present – because, in this crowd of mostly people who have had plenty of significant 0 birthdays and are comfortably retired, one youngish neighbor was wearing men’s boxers over green tights).  Even in the picture of the Beaux Arts café in Paris from where Bill Cunningham must have been observing the plumage, the people sitting there looked more like they were in an old silent and colorless film than in impossibly chic Paris.

The gap is in perception.  Yes, I live on a farm in Oregon – 40 acres, 4000 sq ft house

– where my husband breeds race horses and where we make Pinot Noir, Pinot Gris,

Chardonnay and Riesling in our little winery.    I may not fit the customer profile but

what I don’t want is for fashion and style to be held out to me as exclusive, not for

my ilk on the one hand and a temptation with the subtle message that I could be in

the inner circle, of course, if I chose to spend the money.  In ten thousand years you

can’t make me believe shoes, a sweater, a painting, an apartment is worth anywhere

near the prices attached to them.  I do completely agree with another blogger on the

site, however, about the quality and ethical difference in $15 and $150 pants.  My

Fred Meyer basic blacks are already pilling…

Posted by Holly at March 13th, 2008

I’m so glad I get the New York Times delivered every day because I am through and through still a New Yorker.  Or, maybe, I’m an Old Yorker because I barely recognize anything about my city that bears resemblance to, well, anywhere else.  When I first moved to the Pacific Northwest, in fact, over a dozen years ago, I wanted to write a book called Living In America For The First Time; New York Is A Foreign Country.  I still believe that and just a sail through today’s paper alone confirms it.

It’s pretty exciting that there’s a Sunday and Thursday Style section, now.  I love it and was dismayed, almost panicked, that Cathy Horyn has been banned from the Armani and other fashion shows, momentarily fearful that NYT coverage of fashion would end. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/13/fashion/shows/13banned.html?ex=1363147200.  It is, after all, the only place in the newspaper where they really run the comics (that stuff in the Sunday Magazine isn’t funny, although it is comical).  I mean, really.  That picture at the front of the article, two of those women look like they are sharing the same chair they are so thin.  And the people showing off the clothes of Opening Ceremony, are they not well?  Jim asked if his mother had bound the guy at birth.  Why does he look like a statue?  And the woman in the next photo, I thought she was, frankly, a cleaning lady who put on her worst housedress to clean the office floor.  And then, inside, the story about the Critical Shopper http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/13/fashion/13CRITIC.html?ex=1363147200 slobbering over men’s shoes that cost $2080?  He was funny about it, saying if he was going to spend over $2000 for shoes he wanted the cobbler to be Daniel Day-Lewis, hand-sewing them on his feet and looking longingly into his eyes.  DD-L, for my money was so disgustingly violent in There Will Be Blood that I will probably never go see another film he’s ever in.  But, then, I didn’t let Angela Lansbury into my living room for decades after The Manchurian Candidate so maybe I’m just too sensitive.  But, back to the shoes, when I first looked at the picture to that story, I thought it was about organizing a closet and that those shoes were old, already worn in.  I got a really good laugh out of that one, when I figured out they are new, because I have shoes that look like that now.

Let me tell you about my closet out here in the real America, in Cornelius, Oregon.  First let me tell you that there are a lot of people here who engage in productive activities and commerce, people who have lived all over the world including Mexico (migrant workers) and whose shoes also look exactly like those in the picture and who would gladly, willingly, sell theirs for half the $2080 tag because that would buy a lot of what they really need.  But I digress.  My closet.  On the top shelves I have all the shoes I rarely wear anymore – 45 pair of high heels including a couple of designer labels I got at DSW.  One of my favorite pair is a simple black, very pointy toe, very high heel.  I got them in Florence in a little, down-a-stone-stairway shop on some side street near the teeny apartment my son was living in for a while.  A friend of mine – and my son’s godmother – had instructed my son on exactly the Prada shoes I was supposed to look for when I got to Florence.  I did look at them.  And then I bought the really soft black leather ones at the down-a-stone-stairway shop for $35.  Anyway, now they sit on the top of my closet along with the tweed ones, ankle-strap ones, ones with bows and buttons and flowers that stick up.  I love my shoes but I have a rule that I won’t spend more than $50 on a pair.  And it has to be some pair, at that.  I did spend that on a pair of sling-backs with sequins that I wore to my own 60^th birthday party.  I wore them, again, when I got married.

Let’s talk sequins for a minute.  There was a cardigan in the Sunday Style section that had a price that must have been a misprint – $23,000.  Twenty-three thousand dollars.  Come on, is that a joke?  I think I annoyed Jim because I kept pulling out things I own with sequins or beads on them asking what he thought they were worth.  I do have this lovely hand-sewn, sequined jacket I bought at the Columbus Ave. flea market for $20 about twenty years ago.  Can I sell it as both hand-sequined and vintage and make anywhere near $23,000?  If so, it’s available for whoever wants it because that amount of money would actually pay for my mother’s caregiver for about 20 weeks and would be money I didn’t have to take out of my retirement account; and, really, out here in Cornelius I don’t have that much call for a black hand-sewn-on-sequin jacket anyway.

Not that I wouldn’t wear it; I would, because it gives Jim a laugh.  More than once he has actually said to me “You’re not going to wear that, are you?” at which point I have reminded him of a friend of a friend who, in her wedding vows, thanked her new groom for NEVER saying “You’re not going to wear that, are you?” Besides, literally every time he has said that someone we don’t know in a public place has come up to me to say I LOVE what you are wearing.  And I have designer clothes.  My late husband’s mother used to be a seamstress for the fashion designers and NY Times fashion writers.  I have one gorgeous, gorgeous jacket she made in the 50s out of original Rodier fabric.  If I ever finish wearing it I’m going to frame it and hang it as incredible art.  Lots of my clothes are fabulous and unusual.  None of them make me look like a piece of wrinkled spaghetti.

Now, to be fair, we buy a lot of our clothes at Bi-Mart, the lower-end, membership-shopping club.  This is not Costco.  You get a lifetime membership for $5 a couple and that gives us two cards in two different colors.  Mine is yellow; Jim’s is green.  I have recently lucked into three suede-ish shirts – two in a camel color and one in turquoise – that I love.  I thought of them this morning when the Critical Shopper described a shirt the color of plaster (I liked that) and striking “the perfect balance between tailored and unfinished” and costing $2200.  Twenty-two hundred dollars.  Have we lost our minds?  Mine cost $13.98 and were on sale at that, which is why I bought three.  Mine get to the unfinished point really fast living on a farm.

But, back to my closet.  The high heels are on the top because I don’t wear them very often.  I do have work-boots that look a little like the thousands of dollars ones.  Mine are pink and were an extravagance.  I knew I would be wearing these workbooks for years and really wanted a pair that lasted so I bought Timberland.  They are at the top end of my price boundary.  They have that lovely worn-in look like the ones in the picture.  I will sell them to anybody for $500, right now, as is, not worn all that much.  Size 9.  Original laces with the little Timberland tag still on.  I’ll pay the shipping.  I have Crocs.  Wait, that’s not true.  I had Crocs but one got stuck in the mud the day we were trying to float the dock back into place before my son’s wedding. (And don’t even get me started on the cost of weddings depicted in the Sunday Style section….).  Now my Crocs are knock-offs (sorry, Gloria Vanderbilt, knock-offs are all the real world can often afford.) that I get at Goodwill (although they are new) or Payless for $8.  Just as good and I can have them in as many colors as I want.  Right now I only have yellow and turquoise but I plan to change that as soon as the weather gets warmer and I start wearing them again.  I just bought some great suede moccasins – two pair of black (because I wear black most and figure I’ll wear them out), one dusty blue and one camel.  I think I will look great in my black slacks I got at Fred Meyer for $38 (less 40%), my Bi-mart camel shirt and the mocs.  The shoes cost $9 a pair but I did order them through the mail so I had to pay shipping.  I’ve got little patent leather flats, polka-dot flats and two fetching pair of brown flats I totally love.  One is casual with a chiffon bow and the other is dressier with a brown feather pouf.  I got them at Payless.  And now I wear knee socks so I am determinedly making a fashion statement with them.  Watch; they will become the next big thing.

That’s enough about my shoes.  My clothes tend to be more farmy, now, than anything else.  There are three or four pair of sweats, one pair of fleece lined black nylon pants that are too big on me but I like them because I can throw them on over the sweats when it is really damp out.  I got them to wear cleaning out the barn.  (Read my blog www.abagofonions.com  entry on horse poop. That’s another book I want to write – My Life Is Horse Poop.)  I have pants and sweaters to wear on a farm.  I also have some velour pants and some velvet ones and things with interesting decorations and in colors I like, because, well, we’re still newly-weds and it’s fun to look a little alluring.  Jim always comes in from the day – with hay all over his Bi-mart corduroy jacket – and goes in and changes to his evening jeans and a nice sweater.  Most of his sweaters come from California, where he lived and where a wonderful woman who worked with him gave him a new sweater every year for Christmas.  They all look a lot a like.  We had dinner at a roadside tavern (literally) last night with three booths, six tables, a bar and video lottery.  It was Wednesday night and that’s the German dinner, which Jim really wanted to try.  The owner, Hans, came to talk to us because it was our first time in, I think, and he told Jim he really wanted his sweater.  Anyway, I try to, at least, brush off some of the pet hairs and straighten up for dinner, too.

I went to a fashion show, once.  It was Tommy Hilfiger men’s wear and I got there because a man I was dating – who had moved back home to the Northwest somehow got selected on some early internet gamble as a winner of a trip for two to New York, a hotel stay and tickets to the show.  (We actually always felt he was selected the winner because other people they had chosen couldn’t meet their requirement of flying to New York two days hence and we could just pick up and go.  The young publicist who arranged it with him had desperation in her voice and huge relief when he accepted the prize.)  My date was, at the time, walking with a cane, was quite robust (to be polite) and definitely over the Tommy Hilfiger age limit.  The hotel they put us in was one of the new, Asian, boutique hotels in the West 40s.  My friend couldn’t get up off the low-to-the-floor futon bed without rolling onto his knees and having me help hoist him up.  Not a pretty sight.  We asked if Tommy Hilfiger would let us move to the Yale Club and pick up the tab.  They agreed probably because the savings in price for just one night was our airfare from Seattle.  The fashion show was a riot.  My friend actually dressed rather well, I always thought.  He usually wore gray slacks, a nice looking shirt with white cuffs and collar setting off the solid or color stripes of the shirt, a blue jacket and an ascot.  He had the ascots but he bought most of his clothes from Haband, a catalogue of which I don’t expect most of the New York Times writers have heard.  He once got a certificate from Haband announcing him as A Customer of the Year.  He framed it and put it on his mantle.  Tommy Hilfiger style he was not.  We attracted quite a few glances as we glided/limped into the tent at Bryant Park, I can tell you.  And I was enthusiastic during the show, attracting even more attention with my obvious reactions to the fashions.  No mystery as to what I thought, I can tell you.  The best part of the show was getting a goody bag – big opaque plastic that said STYLE in white lettering, a bunch of TH products, and a very cool memo book with the same opaque and STYLE lettering.  I still have the bag and occasionally use it to tote groceries.

I am not chiding or poking fun at the writers.  I like the new way journalists write from their own lives.  The point is, whose lives are they writing for?  Who in the heck are designers designing for?  Does it really matter what any designer designs or what shows up in the NYTimes, except as HIGH HUMOR for the rest of us out here in the world where the thought of spending thousands of dollars on a blouse, skirt, suit or men’s work boots that, by the way, lace up diagonally (I can just see Jim trying to deal with that when a horse or twelve have just gotten loose and are running amuck in the vineyard and he’s trying to get out of his (Bi-mart) cozy slippers with the sheepskin lining – yours for $300, right now, no questions asked)?

I think not.