TEXAS HATTERS IN LOCKHART, Texas, is located just off Highway 183 to Austin, and staffed by a fourth-generation of hat makers; starting with Marvin Sr., the Gammages have made hats for all from Willie Nelson to Hank Williams, Ronald Reagan and Prince Charles. Joella Gammage, her son Joel and husband David today ensure that Texas Hatters is full to the brim with cowboy hats in every colour and style, and that each customer is welcomed with banter, smiles and expertise in abundance.

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Joel Aaron Gammage: My friend has a hat that is in between a top hat and a bowler. He wears that hat so much, people call him Country Slash. He’ll even wear it to the swimming pool! He’s an I.T. guy during the day, and a base player at night. I think the right hat has the tendency to bring out the inner character of a person. Your attitude changes. Cock your hat to the right a little, and all of a sudden you’re ready for a fist fight or a poker game. You know, guys don’t have as many facets of articles of clothing as women. You have your cowboy boots, belt buckle, and hat – whatever style.

There’s a historical side to the cowboy, the vaquero, which dates back to Mexican history. In its origin, hats were sombreros. We adapted them to a Western-European style. If we go back to traditional cowboys, your work was signalled by your hat. Depending on what your place was on the ranch, your brim was shorter or longer. It’s very similar to English culture. A tall hat was a symbol of stature.

In my grandfather’s day, hats were black or brown and that was it. There was only one way to wear a hat. My grandfather changed that. Today, hats are becoming more statement pieces. The functionality changed quite a lot. In the actual ranching community, it’s to protect yourself from the sun. But we wear it a lot still because it’s so ingrained. When you walk into a grocery store in a hat, you’ll grab people’s attention. You kind of just want to call that person ‘Sir,’ and treat them differently.

Joella Gammage Torres: I’m third generation. My dad and my grandfather worked together. My father proposed to my mother with a hat and a poem. It was a ladies high roller, with a telescoped crown, and the poem was something to the effect of: ‘Texas crown for the queen of my heart.’ How could she turn him down, right?

We’re in Lockhart, Texas. Prior to that we were in Buda, and before that we were in Austin. When we moved here, people who thought we went out of business thirty years ago in Austin found us because Highway 183 was their favourite road to take to Houston. There is a cattle auction down the road. When cattle prices are good… ‘Sold my cattle, I’ll buy a hat!’ But we get everyone: from what people call hipsters, to politicians and businessmen, fashionable ladies, everything.

The anatomy of a hat? First of all, the important lesson, would have to be that the crown is the part that sits on your head, and the brim is the part that sticks out. A lot of people get that reversed, which I don’t understand. Hats are made from straw or felt, or both. Leather hats exist, but we never made them. For the creases in the hat, there are some styles that can be done with a preformed block. We have quite a few of those, that are seventy-five to one-hundred-and-fifty years old. But primarily we soften the material and then we use our hands to do the creasing.

To make a hat, we have about a two-week waiting period, but if we had to walk one through, it takes a full day. Everything is by hand. We don’t start with something round on the top and flat on the brim and then put a crease in it. We make the hat from scratch, we do all the finishing and sewing here, we don’t use glue, all the ribbon trim is by hand. My dad said, quality is like buying oats. If you want good clean oats, you need to pay a fair price. If you want oats already run through the horse, that’s a little cheaper. We make every hat as though we make it for the most important person in our lives.

Our most popular hats hail all the way back to my dad’s time in the business. He made hats for Stevie Ray Vaughan, Ronnie Van Zant and Donnie Van Sant. There’s fans all around the world that want their hats just like them. The Ronnie Van Zant is similar to what I have on right now, only it’s a solid felt, with a rattlesnake belt on it. There’s a Stevie Ray Vaughan on that stand right there, with the ‘Do Not Touch’ sign. Both styles actually have an oval telescope crown. It’s creased inward and then comes back up, which is why we call it a telescope. And then the Stevie has a flat, bolero-type brim, and the Ronnie has the opposite: a pencil-rolled edge on the brim and then kinda rolled up cowboy-style.

The Gus hat is also very popular, it’s another one my dad created. If you’re familiar with Lonesome Dove, my dad created the styles for that mini-series. The Gus has a centre crease that runs from the front to the back, so it’s lower in the front, and two creases on either side of that so it looks like three fingers ran down the centre of the crown. It has curls on the side of the brim, as though you grabbed it with both hands. We call that a cowboy curl. The most iconic hat that came out before the Gus was probably the one James Dean wears in Giant.

Cowboy hat styles do evolve. Wider brims were really popular in the Forties, then in the Fifties they went a little bit shorter. I think part of it was people got cars. In the Seventies, all the crowns were really tall, like six inches, and really short brims. Today it is completely the opposite. Right now short crowns are really popular with a small dent, as if it fell off, and a really wide brim, barely curled on the side. Most of the colours are basic: black, silver buckle, straw coloured. But a lot of the guys and gals are going for brighter coloured brims now. They say, ‘I want you to notice that I have a style of my own.’ So they’ll put red, purple, or turquoise ribbons on the edges. As well as rhinestones now and then.

Each style also evolves according to who’s creasing it. There’s a design behind you called the horse shoe, it looks like a horse stepped on it. My grandfather would say that looks more like a mule shoe, because that’s how he did it. Everybody has their own hand. It’s like trying to copy some of the master painters, you can’t get the stroke exactly the same. [My husband] David has his style, I have mine. Often, when someone orders a hat from David or [my son] Joel, they have to be the ones that finish it up for them. And vice versa, the customer will recognise – that’s not how Joella did my last hat.

Joel is actually the most experimental. He went through this long phase of… particularly ladies that were interested in getting hats from him. And he’ll tell you, it drove me crazy! I like to think symmetrical, and everything he did was asymmetrical, kind of the Picasso of hat making. Technically they were still cowboy hats, but they were definitely a blend of Western fashion and high fashion.

Joel: In Austin you can pull anything off. You can walk down the street with butterfly wings, pink sunglasses and a miniskirt, and it would be fine. But if you would go to West Texas, and more traditional communities, you might get looked at a little funny. There’s still some traditional farmers and ranchers out there, but they are getting rarer, because you get a cultural shift where people want the modern standard that they see on TV, they want to live past the means they grew up with. For my family’s business, there was a need for somebody – after my grandfather died – to adapt to a variety of different cultures that come from the Austin community. You don’t notice it right now, but my accent will definitely change when I speak to other people. Before I got married, I went out dancing all the time, and I would wear a lot of hats, and sell a lot of hats. Now I do car shows and festivals and events and stuff. I was in the music scene already, so I wanted to bring that scene to Lockhart.

My personal favourite hat is a modified high-roller. If you’re familiar with the Ronnie Van Zant 38, it’s a telescoped crown, with a cylindrical shape and a curled brim. That’s one of the signature hats that I used to wear a lot. I called it my lucky hat. Whenever I wore it, people talked to me.

David A. Torres: I’ve seen wills being written up about hats. People come in here with their dad’s hat, which [my wife] Joella’s grandfather made, and they want it fitted to their size. Sometimes we’ll write down – made for so-and-so, passed on to so-and-so. In the twenty-nine years that I’ve been here, I’ve seen a hat pass on to the third generation once. Once I saved a family from not talking to each other, because two grandsons were fighting and both thought they had right to the hat. They didn’t want the money or the land, because the hat was a status symbol of an elder. They asked me to make another one just like it. I made an exact copy. I put them side by side, I knew which one was the original one, but then they got shuffled and I couldn’t tell which one was the real one. They both came and both offered money to me to let them know what the real hat was, but I honestly couldn’t tell them. They both have his hat over the mantelpiece.

Joella: There used to be drugstore cowboys, or urban cowboys. Someone who doesn’t actually work with cows, or on a farmer ranch, but dresses the part to attract women or men. Real cowboys looked down on them, but not so much now. We have a new generation of teenagers and twenty-somethings that do the rodeos. They raise their animals as children, and take them to shows. They’re real cowboys, but I’m always surprised when they come in here because they wear jeans other than Levi’s or Wranglers. They’re not wearing the traditional Western-style shirts. They’re wearing belts with fur and rhinestones, and headbands with rhinestones. But they’re not pretend, they’re the real thing, but their new style really surprises me. And they’re straight.

As a woman – not as a hatter – when I see a man in a cowboy hat, provided that he looks like a cowboy, not in shorts and flip-flops, I think: ‘That is a real man.’ I don’t know if it’s cultural, bred into us, but my mind goes to – he probably rides a horse, and deals with cattle, all those little-girl fantasies.

Joel: When I think about what a cowboy is, defining it in the traditional sense is almost impossible. There’s fewer and fewer ranches and farms. I’m one of the few people in my generation that actually decided to stay involved in my family’s business. And if you do manage to find a traditional cowboy, in certain communities, they might close their doors to you just because they’re afraid someone might want to come develop on their land. It’s gotten that serious; development has changed so much, there’s cotton fields and oil fields all over Lockhart, polluting all these areas. Places that have been cotton fields for a hundred years are now bought and sold for mass-housing production, so they’ll just become sub-divisions. And for whatever reasons, maybe that family needed the money, but it’s all changing everywhere.

To me, the definition of a cowboy is carrying on the heritage of, ‘When you say something you mean it. When something’s broke you fix it. When something ain’t broke you don’t mess with it. You preserve it.’ What a cowboy is to me, it’s maintaining integrity, and being able to stand behind what you say.

Anja Aronowsky Cronberg is Vestoj’s editor-in-chief and founder. 

We talk for hours, over many months and across two continents. He is in the throes of a turbulent summer, first due to a social media commotion in the aftermath of the Black Lives Matter uprisings of 2020, and then another, more parochial, turmoil focusing on the originality of his designs. I find myself moved somehow by his attempts to come to grips with the confrontations: a man otherwise so affable and cool he sometimes seems made of Teflon, now torn between wanting to defend himself, the worry about making things worse, and the desire to understand and accept that the narratives which form in the public domain have little to do with intent, or with the perception you might have of yourself.

I often feel like ‘the only one.’ The odd one out – the stranger in the village. When I’m in high society in Paris I feel it. When I’m on the South Side of Chicago I feel it. But I think of doubt as my engine actually. There’s nothing that motivates me in quite the same way. So yes of course I doubt. Can I do this? Am I confident enough? Can I break that wall down? Does the Trojan horse fit? But also, if you doubt me just wait I’ll one-up you. You know, as a kid at school I can’t tell you how many times I heard ‘Hey Virgil, you talk like you’re white.’ Or ‘Virgil the Virgin.’ But I had a witty comeback for every time I heard that joke, and that’s how the roles were reversed and I was laughing at them – and so was everyone else. I’m still like that. If they assume I’m all about ‘streetwear,’ I’ll show them tailoring. If they judge me by the colour of my skin, they assume I’ll talk this way and act that way. They think they know what my work is about. So I’ll one-up them.

Before the summer of 2020, before the racial uprising, it was basically taboo to talk about race in an all-white setting of power. I never made my race the forefront issue when it came to my work because it was obvious that if you were screaming about race issues from the mountaintops, no one would listen. That’s why my Trojan horse was built. But now everyone is like, ‘Hey, I’m ready now, let’s talk about race.’ ‘I’m white and I’m here to listen to you.’ So I can hop out of my Trojan horse for a minute and do some work above ground and it’s not seen as threatening anymore. Nobody thinks I’m complaining now; they know what I’m talking about. Where are the black creatives in fashion? Why are there not more black people in the boardrooms? What is the black experience? What is the black canon? Every corporate partner I have is tackling the racial issue inside their businesses right now. And as a face and collaborator, I can dialogue back to them and be like, ‘What are we doing here?’ There’s a new system in the making, and it’s better for the brands I work with to let me lead the way. Two years ago if I’d said, ‘I’m hiring only black people for this project,’ they would all have been like, ‘Woah.’ Now there’s a PR angle and everyone is on board.

But for me there’s still doubt located in being a black artist, creative, designer, whatever. Being in opposition to the European canon. My race follows me everywhere: because of how visible I am, because of my name, because of this moment in time. It’s what I represent and what I am; there’s no way my work or person can exist outside of that. In the hierarchical, white spaces I move through I’m attempting to add my name to the canon. In fashion, in art, in design, the white European canon is taken for granted to the extent that we don’t even see it anymore. We just think of it as ‘the canon.’ I want to upend that. Or at least ask questions about how to create and exist in that space as a black person. I’m in dialogue with my white peers, but I’m in opposition to them also. That’s where doubt comes in: it’s two-fold. There’s doubt in terms of the validity of my work – ‘he’s not a real designer’ – but there’s also my own doubt. Can I do it? Can I be the only black person in the room, and still make them listen to me? Can I make them give me the resources I need?

So I’ve been inching towards the black canon, defining it, embodying it, in my mind and in my work. I’ve been rearranging the furniture in my mind to use our favourite metaphor. When I first met you, when I was first becoming known in fashion, I didn’t want to talk about it, you know that. I didn’t want to deal with race. And now I think of it as the one legacy I want to leave as a black designer. I lead with race now, and I try to put doubt to the side. I know speaking plainly like this is risky. Maybe it’ll stoke some new social media tornado. Maybe my bosses and peers will worry about the bottom line. Maybe Black Twitter will poke holes in my theory. Sometimes it seems impossible to speak about race for even three minutes without saying the wrong thing. You end up offending white people, you end up offending black people. I don’t have the answer obviously; I’m figuring it out like everybody else. But what I do know is that I want to help define the black canon. Draw lines around it and say, this is it. Because I think that until we better understand the ways it converges and diverges from the white canon we all know and measure ourselves against, black creatives and intellectuals will never be able to drop the prefix. And as far as we might get in our chosen fields, when what’s written and said about us leads with ‘black,’ we’re never going to transcend race. Brilliant black minds will continue to exist parallel to. And as long as that’s the case we’re always being ‘allowed in,’ if you know what I mean. Power doesn’t reside with us: it relies on the magnanimousness of the white canon. I think we need to outline and celebrate black culture, focus on black people, distinguish the black canon first. That’s step one.

There’s something you’ve got to understand. When you’re black in the arts, in order to be seen you must perform. It’s like, ‘Hey! You! Do something! Don’t just sit there – entertain us!’ Dark skin is acceptable if it belongs to someone in front of the camera. A basketball player, a singer, a model, an entertainer. I know that, and I’ve worked with that. I’ve been the basketball player, the singer and the entertainer. The face. But the entertainment aspect of my work is wearing thin. I want to step back and let the work speak for itself, less blatantly, with more nuance. I want to take the space to think, to be a thinker. I want my logic to be more apparent. I want nuance to be welcomed. That’s what clipped me the summer of 2020 with all the social media scandals that swirled around me: my own community saying, ‘Skip the nuance. You need to be direct. You need to fight.’ But I don’t want to give my nuance up. My nuance is my strength.

To the black community I’m not black enough, that argument goes all the way back that to high school. Actually, the first time I felt the effects of prejudice wasn’t from white people – it was from other black people telling me, ‘You speak too well. Why do you talk like that? You talk like you’re white.’ I remember sitting at that lunch table being like, wait, what did I do? I’ve told you before that my parents are African, they’re immigrants in America. My dad came with two degrees from Ghana in the Seventies. So when I was being attacked on all sides by Black Twitter last summer, my dad took me aside and told me, ‘What happened to you is what happened to me when I came to this country.’ Black Americans asked him, ‘Why do you use those words? Why do you drive that car? Why are you not more like us?’ Sometimes it feels as if black culture wants something from me, but will throw me in the trash without a second thought if I don’t fit the narrative. I’m disposable. It’s ironic times ten. At the beginning of my career, I had detractors but I had lots of support too. People were rooting for me. But now… There’s a certain glee in seeing the mighty fall, that’s quite human. Schadenfreude. It’s given rise to a different kind of doubt for me. At the beginning there was less at stake. In a way I doubted less, because I mean, what’s the worst that could happen? Now I have to play the politician. There were forty-eight hours of internet tornado this past summer that got pretty ugly. My wedding photos were uploaded online; it was a true celebrity crazy person zoo. I got swept up in cancel culture. A lot of people in my social circle have been asking why not more well-known people are prepared to say even slightly controversial things, about race or whatever. But when cancel culture is as virulent as it is now I can understand. It’s so easy to say the wrong thing. And then it’s public square humiliation time. That’s why it’s safer to cruise by unremarked upon in the sea of other celebrities also not saying anything. I know this isn’t the doubt we’re focusing on here, but it did make me doubt human nature, and my place in the world. Then you texted me the best quote: ’misunderstandings are ubiquitous and neither intelligence nor the intention to be accurate is any guarantee against them.’

That was something David Deutsch, the physicist, wrote.

Well it really resonated with me. I’m still figuring out how to be a ‘good’ black person of power, in fashion and in culture. What’s my responsibility? What do people want from me? What do I want for myself? As you know, to many people in the industry I’m still not even a designer. I’m some outsider, the perennial new guy, the one doing streetwear certainly not ‘fashion.’ My race is part of that, yes, but so are a lot of other things that set me apart. That I’m American maybe, that I didn’t go to fashion school or climb the conventional hierarchy to success. That I’m multi-disciplinary. That my work is adjacent to entertainment culture. That I don’t subscribe to fashion as an elitist pursuit. What I want is to show that it’s possible to circumvent conventional European codes of fashion, or invert them perhaps and say, this is what a black designer, black artist, can do. I’m trying to push that Trojan horse into the industry: get behind enemy lines and deliver my message in a more efficient way to standing with a megaphone outside the castle walls.

My strategy has never been to call out singular examples of racism, even as I’ve encountered them myself. I don’t want to confront individual people and tell them off. That’s not my style. It’s better for me to think of an action that has ten times more impact than an individual instance of prejudice or bias. That way I’m allowed to keep creating and hopefully in the wake of my initiative I can progress with my work, myself, the cause. The theory of indirect communication: that’s my tactic. That’s how I’ve built my career. I’m going to carry on operating in spaces that aren’t diverse, where I’ll be the only black person in the room. I’m going to carry on having to prove myself, show sceptics that I belong. I wish it wasn’t like that but I know what I’m in for. In the spaces that I move through, you never hear, ‘We don’t like black people.’ Few people in the demographic I exist in – globetrotting, educated, sophisticated liberals – would admit to having racist tendencies. The racist is always someone else, a caricature. So bias is expressed in subtle, underhanded ways: in expressions and body language where you can hide their actual meaning to yourself if not to others. These are the unknown knowns we carry. It comes out in ‘You’re not a real designer.’ ‘That’s not your idea.’ ‘That’s not original.’

You told me once about Joseph Campbell, about his work on myths and folklore and his understanding of the hero’s journey. I’ve been thinking about that. My career has a kind of story arc, a narrative that fits the mould. I’ve gone from obscurity to success, from outsider to insider. Paraphrasing a bit here but if my ‘hero’s adventure’ is that ascent, then I get that now is the time to be tested. The people who once saw me as a symbol, as the underdog righteously crashing the salons, are raising an eyebrow now. There’s some doubt. ‘What will he do?’ I mean, it feels good to root for the underdog, I get it. So no, I’m not the underdog anymore. I’m seen as part of the establishment, as just another gatekeeper. But I’m not an archetype, I’m no hero; I’m just a human being flawed and contradictory like everybody else. And I want to write my own story. I’m always aware of double consciousness: how I see myself, and how I’m seen by others. That’s why doubt is constantly on my mind – I’m never allowed to forget how I come across in the world. As a black creative, every time I put something out, it has to go through this sort of… I have to overexplain myself. I have to have the receipts ready in my back pocket just in case. I’ve got to be able to back everything up, show that my inspiration is correct and credible, prove myself. I always laugh if I go to say a white artist’s talk; they can literally be like ‘I found this piece of paper on the ground and it made me laugh – art premise found.’ I’m being facetious, but you know what I mean. If you belong to the canon, you’re never challenged on a grand scale because a great story is all you need. Me, not so much. It’s like, ‘Okay we know you’ve arrived, but show us your passport one more time.’ So when I get challenged I oscillate between a knee-jerk reaction of defending myself and proving that my work is bona fide. But what I really want is to stay quiet, let it be understood that I don’t need to justify myself, allow the work, the ideas, to speak for themselves.

But I’ve come to realise that my voice is my weapon. I’ve put it off for as long as possible but now I can’t any more. More than a fashion designer, I’m a thinker. I produce to provoke thought. I want to put ideas out in the world, not only objects. My output isn’t about this jacket, or that show – it’s about the underlying logic. I want my work to touch as many people as possible so the surface area needs to be substantial. It’s ironic actually: at the start of my career ‘he’s not a designer’ was the most common objection to my work. And I took offense to that. But now I think to myself, where are the black public intellectuals in design and culture? Where are the thought leaders, the game changers? What I leave behind shouldn’t be objects or even an aesthetic – it’s about redefining what a creative could or should be today. Get this: for me the object is a way to point to the idea. There are millions who’ve come before me. I’m not saying I’m brand new to the black canon: I’m just carving out some more space here. My investigation, my work, my trajectory speaks, I hope, to a generation of young black people who need to know that there’s an open space for them to occupy too. But it’s a work in progress. I’m an autodidact, an explorer, and often I’m an amateur too. My career in that sense is an investigative exploration. It’s about how to be a black thinker in white spaces; it’s about inserting the black canon in art history books. It’s about being a black voice that matters beyond the fringes. I want to be able to look back at my life and career and know that I left some inanimate objects behind, yes, but also a logic that changed the mainstream.

Virgil Abloh (1980-2021) was the founder and CEO of Off-White, and the Artistic Director of Menswear at Louis Vuitton.

Anja Aronowsky Cronberg is Vestoj’s Editor-in-Chief and Founder.

This article was originally published in Vestoj ‘On Doubt,’ available for purchase here.

DOWN AN UNASSUMING BLOCK in Chelsea, beside a Staples office supply chain store, sits Kleinfeld: a glamorous, multi-floor mecca for brides-to-be in the heart of Manhattan. The sixty-two-year-old salon, once a fixture in Brooklyn for more than fifty years, moved into its current sprawling space in 2005; that same year it became the feature of TLC’s hit reality show, ‘Say Yes to the Dress,’ bringing international exposure to the salon.

What sets Kleinfeld apart from its high-end competitors – beside their claim to housing the largest selection of wedding gowns in the world – is the fact that every step of the process occurs in house: from the initial fitting to the final steam before the gown is fluffed and zipped into a garment bag to walk down the aisle. The bridal consultants, dedicated to realising each bride’s sartorial vision, guide their first encounter with Kleinfeld. Senior bridal consultant at Kleinfeld, and cast member on ‘Say Yes to the Dress,’ Debbie Asprea’s role in the wedding planning process is akin to a savvy matchmaker, introducing the women to the dresses. After twenty-three years in the business, and countless brides, not much surprises Debbie anymore – except the dress her daughter chose for her own wedding day.

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My father had a dress factory, and since I was a little girl I was always involved in clothing and sewing. My first job was in my father’s factory, pulling patterns apart and assisting on the little jobs around the place. After that I went into retail, ready-to-wear. But then I heard about the opportunity at Kleinfeld and went for it. There is something very special about working in the bridal industry; it’s the most important garment anybody could ever purchase in their lifetime.

At Kleinfeld, we meet people from all over the world every day, but after so many years, nothing surprises me anymore. I’ve seen it all: I’ve even had brides come back to me for a second marriage. It’s happened to me a few times in the past couple of years. That’s a little bit of a surprise to me. Or when you get a bride that’s pregnant. And with same-sex marriage… we also see that type of a situation where you’re dealing with a family’s acceptance.

For a bride-to-be coming into Kleinfeld, I’ll typically begin by looking over her pictures and discussing her likes and dislikes. We usually start with three dresses. If she’s shopped at another store before our appointment, sometimes she’ll have pictures of herself in other dresses – that’s a really helpful tool for me. In that case, I’ll try to get a sense of her style by asking her questions like ‘Why didn’t you buy the dress in the other store?’

We generally have five appointments a day that happen every ninety minutes. Before each appointment we begin with a brief discussion with the bride: her style, her venue, number of guests at the wedding and her budget. We breeze through this in a few minutes because, most of the time, once the bride comes in everything turns upside down anyway.

When a bride walks in, they’re very nervous. I try to connect with them and make them feel comfortable. We’re in a very small room: she’s getting undressed and I’m putting a dress on her and within minutes I have to become her friend. Every bride is treated like she’s the only bride for the day, like she’s my first bride.

When a woman comes to Kleinfeld her expectations are extremely high. We are the largest bridal house in the world and with the television show they have a particular idea of what goes on [behind-the-scenes]. They expect us to have everything that they ask for, and within their price points. Sometimes that can be a little bit challenging.

You have to remember there’s a lot of emotions involved in a purchase of this nature. You not only have to please the bride, but you have to look at her mom and all the other people important to her that she brought with her to the appointment. Their opinions matter; a bride is not going to buy a dress unless her mother approves. In my experience, no bride has ever purchased a dress that her mom didn’t like.

With this job, you have to really have a passion for it. If your heart isn’t open to it, you could never help a bride. It’s so personal; you really have to connect with that bride, it’s not just about the sale. It’s about matching up the bride with the garment that’s going to make her feel the most beautiful on her wedding day. The most gratifying aspect of the work that I do is when I zip that dress up and see the bride’s face in the mirror. It’s the most amazing thing to watch her reflection when you close that dress. You see the tears, or the smile, and you just know that’s it.

One time I had a bride come in after her groom-to-be had made an appointment for her. She didn’t have an engagement ring because they didn’t have much money, but her dream was to come to Kleinfeld for the dress. She had no idea that all along her fiancé had been saving for an engagement ring in secret. When the bride put on the right dress, he dropped on his knees and proposed to her – this time with the ring. Seeing her shock and happiness was incredible.

When the right dress goes on, it’s beyond amazing. It’s the most rewarding part of my job. That’s what keeps me there. I have two daughters and one of my daughters is actually getting married in March. She came to Kleinfeld and I was her consultant; I wouldn’t let anyone else do it. She chose what I consider one of the most beautiful dresses in the store. I felt that way about the dress before my daughter came shopping, but never thought that she would choose it. I was surprised she went with something so traditional. In all my years of experience, I felt like it was my first day at work.

My role is to help a bride make her dreams come true – to find her dress. Of course, you have to please everyone, and this involves a little bit of everything. Each bride and each family has its different needs and expectations.

Olivia Aylmer is a New York-based stylist, writer and graduate of Barnard College at Columbia University.

Anna Skeels is an illustrator based in London.

IRENE IS ONE OF the fashion industry’s many éminence grises. She started her work in fashion in the late 1960s and worked her way from Mademoiselle to Elle to Vogue. In the late 1980s she became the fashion editor of Vogue Paris where she pioneered the work of photographers like Peter Lindbergh, Steven Meisel, Bruce Weber and Paolo Roversi, at the time all young and looking for a break. In 1991 she resigned, after a lunch meeting where an important advertiser tried to put the screws in, and her publisher’s silence spoke volumes. On the day she left she famously received the gift of a photograph from every photographer she had worked with at Vogue, delivered to her office every hour, on the hour. Shortly afterwards a chance encounter with Yohji Yamamoto led to the next phase in Irene’s life, as the designer’s creative director. Next to Yamamoto, who Irene affectionately calls her spiritual ‘brother’, she helped the designer fine-tune his vision and shape his legacy, in the process leaving an indelible mark on the history of fashion.

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We talk on a bench by the Jacob Javits Convention Center. It’s a glorious summer day, and he’s here to work. He speaks of his long career providing security for gallery openings, fashion designers, ladies who lunch and, later, for New York Fashion Week with a candidness that is totally disarming. I drink my coffee and listen while he looks through the big stack of files he’s brought with him, and reminisces about what fashion once was.  

Forty years ago I was a detective in New York City, but you never make enough money being a policeman you know. You have to supplement your income as a civil servant, so many of us did security work on the side. It’s called moonlighting. My first job was at a cocktail party in an art gallery; I made a crisp fifty-dollar bill in an afternoon. That was a lot of money for me back then. What did I make? Say $20 000 a year? And all I had to do was stand at the door with a guest list and make sure that no one got in who didn’t belong. It was all very innocuous, there were never any issues really. Every once in a while a homeless person would come by, look through the window and see somebody serving trays of hors d’oeuvres and try to come in but that was about it.

I started my company a year later, in 1981. My reputation spread through word of mouth mostly. Alongside gallery openings I did these high end cocktail parties on Park Avenue in people’s residences. I remember noting that most of those women, the dowagers, had very big feet, and telling my wife about it. Getting to know my fair share of ladies who do lunch, as they were called back then, helped when I started working on fashion events. Many of those ladies with big feet would come to the shows too. I knew them by face which was helpful since nobody would bring their invitations to the shows back then. Their face was their invitation. Typically, they would just walk through the door, with a ‘how could you not know who I am’ expression, and I did know who they were. I still do.

Anyway, I get ahead of myself a little. I did a lot of AIDS related fundraisers in the Eighties. I worked with Norma Kamali for her shows and her boutique, and eventually that led to a job for Valentino in the early Nineties. That was a very big job for me. He literally built a piazza on Park Avenue, and called it Piazza Italia. The right people saw me working there, approached me and said that they were going to erect tents in Bryant Park to host fashion shows. I was asked to put a bid in on the job, and I did. I got the job, and the first official New York Fashion Week shows at Bryant Park opened in the fall of 1993. I learnt a lot about fashion from the get go. When the shows are on, you’re immersed in it for eighteen hours a day. It’s very very demanding, and you need to be focused on it.

NYFW has grown so much. In 1993 we only had twenty-seven shows, but last time I was involved we had ninety – that’s almost four times the amount. The venues in 1993 held four hundred people, now they hold 1500. Overall, now we shuffle over 100 000 people into various fashion shows for the duration of fashion week, and this needs to be done in a civil manner. These people are very sensitive, and they cry very easily. I’ve dealt with tears and with tantrums. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard ‘I’m with her, she’s with me,’ or ‘don’t you know who I am.’ They’re all legends in their own minds.

We practice what we call ‘security with a velvet touch.’ We stay in the shadows. The PRs check people in, and most of them don’t know what they’re doing but that’s another story. Anyway, we stand behind the PR people. If we see them lingering with an individual, we might catch the individual trying read the guest list. People do that you know – they can read upside down. If we see that one of these PR persons is taking more than a minute or two with someone, then there’s usually a problem. PRs are often afraid that if they bar someone they’re going to lose their job. Meanwhile, they could also be letting in the wrong people; someone might use your name to get in, and then when you show up five minutes later I won’t let you in since you’re already here. Imagine – that’s a whole scene. Basically, we play the bad cop. But we always try to give people a gracious way out, like, ‘Sorry you’re not on the list, obviously there was an issue with your invitation, maybe you didn’t RSVP in time?’ You never say, ‘Oh get outta here,’ even though you want to. But you can’t, because like I said they cry very easily and you never know who they know.

Only certain people on my staff can do fashion. I’ve learnt to be a good judge of that. To work at a fashion event, number one: you need to look good. And you need to speak well, you need to follow instructions, you need to stay focused, and you need to know who’s coming in the door. You need to know the Anna Wintours. You need to know the first, second and maybe even some of the third row people. Anybody above the third row is in Siberia – they’re somebody’s Aunt Tilly. We need to take care of the first, second and third row. Those are very important people. I keep track; I have photos of everybody. They are posted on our door, and when my staff leave the office they see them.

I’ve been fortunate enough to count about three quarters of my staff as regulars – they’re policemen, they’re firemen, they’re postal workers, they’re ex-army. They come back twice a year and they become more familiar with who’s who. It works out. I don’t hire people who just have a big neck, you know. If you give me your resume and tell me you’re a judo guy, that’s the last guy I’m going to hire. I can’t have that. I don’t want you to be using those skills, or to show me that you can knock somebody across the room. I don’t have that kind of clientele, and I don’t want that kind of clientele. Dealing with the public is so important. It’s like a ballet – you take this part and put it over here. ‘Now what’s the problem? You’re not getting in, is that it? I’m sorry, that’s the score.’ These fashion people are not stupid, they look and they see and they listen. I mean if too many guests tell the designer they had a problem coming to their show, the designer won’t be coming back to us.

We are typically the ones who have to tell people when the show is overbooked and they’re not getting in. They don’t love us then. ‘That’s stupid, how could you do this?’ Well, we didn’t. The designer did. But someone has to be the bad cop, and that someone is us. Stanchions are our best friends in those situations; they allow us to channel people properly, ‘Standing room is to the left, seating room please go right in.’ You have to always let the public know what’s happening, don’t ever keep people in the dark even when the news is bad. Tell them, they want to know. Nobody wants to stand around like a lamp post. I’ve been doing this twenty-five years now, I know the drill. I’ve made a lot of friends over the years, and probably a lot of enemies too. There are some people who just won’t give up.

I’ll show you my archive. I’ve saved everything from every season since 1993. Look, this is me with no grey hair – can you believe it? I had to institute a rule early on, that all my staff had to be in black suits. I can’t tell you how outrageous the suits people turned up in were. And the ties – oh lord. People thought that because it was fashion, they could turn up in a tie with pineapples on it. That was not ever going to fly. Now everybody has a black suit and I give everyone a tie.

I remember the first show during that first Bryant Park fashion week. October 31, 1993, Donna Karan. Donna invited Barbara Streisand, but Barbara Streisand was late. The show was supposed to start at one o’clock. At one thirty Barbara Streisand still wasn’t there so Donna started the show. Who shows up five minutes later? That’s right, Barbara Streisand. And I had to go ‘Barbara’s here! Barbara’s here!’ So what they did is they stopped the show, and then they started it again.

There was a time when people were literally slicing open the tents to sneak in. We had one young lady covered in mud one night – this was a season when it rained all week. I caught her sliding under the tent. I said, ‘This is a fashion show, what are you doing?’ ‘I have to see it, I have to see it!’ ‘Well you’re not gonna see it now anyway let me tell ya that.’ We’ve had people replicating invitations, we’ve had people impersonating others. If they knew a journalist was out of town they would come in and use the journalist’s name – this is another reason we need to have facial recognition. There are so many different ways you could try to sneak into a show. Now we have people selling tickets on the net. I remember a mommy and daughter who flew in from Texas. They were in town for fashion week for three days, and they had four tickets in their hands for the most popular shows that season. None of the tickets were valid. The first show they tried to get in, ‘Bingo!’ ‘Where did you get this ticket?’ ‘Well I bought it on Craig’s List, and I have three more.’ We accommodated them in some way because they already spent airfare, hotel and $3000 to buy four fake tickets. These people don’t know.

Did you hear about the lady that died on the runway? This was about five-six years ago – her name was Zelda Kaplan, and she was ninety-five I believe. She was sitting on the first row, second seat at the Lincoln Center. Zelda was a fashion icon for years, always dressed to the nines. She was with her escort who was sitting behind her, a younger gentleman. All of a sudden Zelda does this – puts her head down like this, so her friend grabs her shoulders, he realises something is wrong. This is when we take notice, and can you believe it – she’s dead. But the show is still going on. So we cross over as discreetly as possible and pick her up. We cross the runway, carrying her, and we bring her outside and of course the medics are there, trying to revive her. The show never stopped, and most of the people never knew what happened because they were looking the other way. Afterwards of course this makes the newspaper. Death and fashion, they love it. New York Post is having a field day. All everybody wanted to know was, ‘Is she dead?’ Well I’m certainly not going to give away your medical information, so all I said was, ‘There was a woman at the show that needed medical attention, and she was taken to the hospital.’ If there’s an upside, it’s that Zelda Kaplan had been coming to fashion shows all her life. If she would have scripted it, it couldn’t have been done better. She made her exit the way she lived. Anyway, that’s the Zelda Kaplan story.

There were always a lot of people at Bryant Park in the early days: we would refer to them as lobby fleas. They would come in in the morning because they had an invitation to a show, and they’d never leave. They’d spend the day, people watching, just to see who’s there, just to be seen. You couldn’t get rid of them. The lobby would be filled with all these people, if it was cold or rainy, forget it they never left. Fashion people can be fanatical, but then again so are people at football or baseball or basketball games. It’s not every show though; out of eighty shows, seventy are fine. Only ten are ‘I gotta get in’ type shows. Nobody’s breaking into a show at nine o’clock on a Sunday morning. And then if it rains, you’re embarrassed for the designer. You don’t want that to happen. Sometimes we have to sit in as seat doubles; we sit in the front row and pretend to take notes.

Every day, I read the fashion weeklies. I subscribe to People magazine. I don’t read it, I just look at the pictures because I have to know who the next hot starlet is, you know, who the next guy is going to be, because they come to these shows and they sit in the front row. Sometimes a PR person will come up and say ‘I have a talent person with me and we need some special treatment.’ It means they need to go in a certain door, or they want to go backstage so we accommodate them, we do. Sometimes the designer doesn’t want to take a picture with a certain person, and then we have to make sure that never happens. I can’t mention any names but there was one designer who said absolutely not, and she knew that this individual wanted their picture taken together. And of course there are some people that want to sit next to Anna and have their picture taken. We make sure that the appropriate people are sitting next to Anna, not just anybody.

After working with NYFW for twenty years, Anna Wintour said hello to me. It was about ten years ago now. I thought I must have been mistaken, she must have thought I was somebody else. I asked around and was told that she knew exactly who I was. So now it’s ‘hello’ always. She often comes an hour before the show, and sees it alone – before the public. Then she comes through the back door and we bring her in. When that happens, I walk next to her but otherwise I very rarely am backstage. We only allow female security backstage. They make sure that the photographers aren’t taking inappropriate photographs at certain times, right, which we find they try. They make sure that there’s nobody back there that doesn’t belong, you know stagehands, the lighting guy – they don’t belong back there, the models are getting dressed! We also keep the public at the end of the show from charging backstage. Wait two minutes will you, let the models at least get some clothes on. Often the PR people will have some celebrity that they want to let in before the others, someone the designer wants to take a shot with. The word is always, ‘The clothes were fabulous.’ It’s the only word they ever use – ‘fabulous.’ Already in 1993 that was the word. ‘Fabulous, fabulous, fabulous.’

Anja Aronowsky Cronberg is Vestoj‘s editor-in-chief and publisher.

He receives me in his beautiful office, at a time when face masks are still ubiquitous and most people are working from home. His loyal assistant sits next to us for the many hours we spend together, soundlessly reminding us both not to get too confidential. This is for the brand after all. He seems thoughtful and kind, and generous with his experiences and feelings – quite different from the foppish man I had expected. Much later, I find myself in the familiar position of wrangling with his people – ‘we like this,’ ‘please change that’ – and I’m reminded of the complex formations present in big business. Where does a person end, and the corporation begin?

When I started in this job I was a cultural appropriator. It’s true. I was perhaps the best one. The way I thought about creativity then was as something totally free and open. Inspiration to me was something that could be infected by anything. I’ve always been an omnivore like that, finding inspiration everywhere and picking whatever I liked. I’ve changed a lot in that respect, and the times have changed too. There’s no room today for ‘Oh, I’m sorry I didn’t know.’ The feeling now is that you must know everything, and you must care about everything. It’s like being at school. But my work is an ongoing investigation so the challenge suits me. But sometimes the limits we put on creativity can make things complicated, and being at a big company means I’m under intense scrutiny. Every day, every moment, everybody is looking at me.

When I got this job and became a public figure I was almost forty-two. I was already a man with a life. I don’t need visibility. What I want is a good life: good conversations and exchanges. Of course I want my voice to matter, because I’d like to think I have something relevant to say. But when the press started paying attention to me six years ago it was really bad. Well, good and bad. Good because people were recognising my work. And bad because I felt that people were somehow stealing my sense of self. I saw my picture everywhere and it was unsettling; I never thought my work was about me. The line between my professional and private self was quite distinct before. But being a creative director of a fashion house today is all about being a public person – sometimes I imagine it’s a bit like being a rock star in the Eighties. So I had a hard time at first with people stopping me in the street to take a picture. I never in a million years thought that would be my life.

I try not to think too much about the ‘Alessandro Michele’ I see in the magazines. I made a conscious decision not to think about my position or status in order for my work and life to continue as before. I love my life. I’m secure in myself. When I come across a bad picture of myself in a magazine, I can laugh about it. I don’t fret. But being a public figure can be really dangerous; it can be like a drug. It can completely destabilise you. I’ve met famous people who don’t see themselves as human anymore. They have become personaggios, and that scares me. You risk losing contact with the things and people that you love. I’ve had to be very transparent with myself in this respect, very straight and very honest, because when I started to encounter people who say they adore me, or think I’m some kind of god, when I started to see my own image everywhere, I had the feeling someone out there was building a parallel version of me. And I never wanted that image, the persona, to overpower the person that I am.

I’m an open person, but when I doubt I speak to my partner. His opinion means a lot. In a way doubt for me is private, but then again it’s also not. Nothing in my job is really private, not anymore. It’s more like one long therapy session. Every aspect of my inner world is on display, so doubt is always just around the corner. Always. My life and work are completely intertwined today. I think of my work like a garden: I plant something, you plant something too and it all grows together. It’s up to me to take care of the garden, to know what to prune and what to fertilise.

Once designers were like royalty; without the right name you were seen as an impostor. Today labels are more like ongoing narratives. If you’re twelve and you go on Instagram, you don’t need to get a dress, or a belt. You don’t need to buy the products to be a part of the vision or the imagination. Fashion now is a point of view, or a stage. It’s not about the clothes. When young people want to take a selfie with me, I don’t think they care about the bag; they care about the world. And the world I want to project says: be strange, be a loser, be a freak. It’s okay. Because when I was young the definition of ‘fashionable’ was very narrow: thin, white, rich, old. And when I was a little boy I was a total outsider. I needed a very special place to express myself, and for a while fashion was just that. It’s funny, I often think fashion is one of the ways we as humans have invented to forget our imminent death. It’s about ideals: perfection, dreams and fantasy. Coming up in fashion I never heard people talk about death or disease, only about what was gorgeous and fabulous. Now maybe things are a little bit different. You can show an image of a disabled person or someone diseased. But think back to fashion magazines in an earlier era: those people didn’t exist. Fashion was about beautiful hair, and a perfect body. Well that’s not the case anymore.

Before I got this job I was bored with fashion. I didn’t feel it spoke to me anymore; it was about predictable sexiness, for rich people. I was really ready to do something else. I still remember how people would react when I told them I worked in fashion – it was as if I was working on another planet. We were completely disconnected from the world. Well it worked for a while, but I was quite sure that there were others out there as bored as I was. You know, there was a point when I felt that being in fashion was like being in a bad relationship, the kind where you know you should leave but you don’t have the will power. I felt stuck making products, without considering the whole fresco. I was losing the creative attitude. Everything became about numbers, about having the right bag or shoe. There was no soul – I might as well have been working in a supermarket. So when I met Marco for the first time I really had nothing more to lose. I allowed myself complete openness and sincerity. In my head I was already moving on, leaving the relationship, so I could speak very honestly. Actually, Marco is the biggest gambler I met in my life. He was really risking something – money and position – with the decisions he made at the beginning. Me, I’m a creative person; I can be reborn a million times.

When I became creative director I really divided the audience. I remember reading some really crazy things about myself. Like what? Well that I looked like Jesus for example. Crazy! It was a coded way of saying I wasn’t fashionable, because to be fashionable is to be sophisticated. So now when I hear people say, ‘he looks Gucci,’ about someone who doesn’t look rich or glamorous but instead a bit strange, it really makes me happy. If I managed to make the freak fashionable, then I’ve really accomplished something. It means that the world is changing a little bit, and that I played a small part in that. I want to think of myself as an interloper, always. I don’t want to become a slave to the history of the company. I think being a creative director today is a bit like being a shaman: you bring to life something dead. Yesterday’s Gucci is finished, and at the same time it’s not. The brand grows in strange, unpredictable ways. It’s a form of magic really.

When I showed the Dapper Dan look on the catwalk in 2017, I didn’t understand how the cultural context would affect what, to me, was a celebration. The Black community invented the most contemporary vision of Gucci in the 1980s. What was happening in Harlem at that time was super interesting; it was a Renaissance for the company and a vision for how a brand like Gucci can be powerful in the street. I saw a picture of a look Dapper Dan made for Diane Dixon, the athlete: she was wearing this poufy jacket with huge sleeves and LV logos everywhere. And I thought, ‘This woman with a “fake” look is like the new Venus de Botticelli for the company.’ So I wanted to reference Dapper’s work and the glorification of ‘the ghetto’ in the show, and I didn’t think I needed to spell it out because it was so obvious. The next day: disaster. What can I say? I learnt. I’m learning. You must be careful with what belongs to other cultures. It doesn’t mean you can’t use it. But you have to be delicate. Not like a… how you say… colonizatore of image. There were other incidents too, and yes they made me doubt. How could my intentions have come across so wrong? Well these situations made me realise how ignorant I’ve been.

Can I tell you a little story? I live with a guy whose professional life is as far from mine as you can imagine. He’s a researcher and a scholar, he works with Native people. He lives among them, eats and sleeps together with them. Before we met, he knew nothing about fashion. So one day I came home with a beautiful fabric, oh it was just beautiful. I’m obsessed with old fabrics, I’m a collector. This piece was from the end of the 19th Century, from England. It was amazing, a masterpiece: a red toile de jouy. I was trying to decide whether to place it on our bed or on the couch, and I asked his opinion – it’s our house so I want his input too. And he told me, ‘Well for me this fabric is unacceptable.’ ‘But why?’ I asked him; ‘It’s so beautiful!’ And he made me look again. He showed me how colonialism was represented in the pattern: the stereotypes, the exoticism. I didn’t understand at first. ‘It’s not our past.’ ‘It was so long ago.’ Those were the things I was thinking. We fought about it for months. But he helped me understand that what I was seeing as a beautiful Indian man riding an elephant was in fact the image of a slave, of oppression. And afterwards, I kept asking myself: am I a racist for not seeing what he saw? I questioned myself. I felt criticised: ‘You’re just a person in fashion, all you can see is the colour, the elephant. You don’t have the skills to understand what’s really happening here.’ It was a hard lesson. It took me a long time to accept my own failure, my own ignorance.

Navigating creative freedom and political correctness isn’t always easy. It’s a delicate process, and sometimes it’s frustrating. Cultural appropriation is such an ambiguous word. I love art history, and it’s full of what we would today call cultural appropriation. It used to be that as a creative person, you had access to everything in order to create work that was powerful, to get a conversation going. I worry sometimes that we today are too much in the political attitude that it’s one against the other. The mind set has changed and we all have to adapt. When I realised I needed help, I was also worried that I’d be inhibited, or too self-conscious to be free in my creativity. So we devised a way. In the studio I work in a very free way, no one controls what I do there. But once my work is done, we now talk about whether what we made in the studio might be perceived differently to what we intended. Everything we do gets discussed in this way. Screening things is normal now; not doing it is just too dangerous. On the catwalk or in a campaign, things can get reduced or simplified. The whole story isn’t always apparent. And anyway working with limits can be quite a good challenge; you have to push yourself more. It’s funny really – just five years ago a designer could use whatever references he wanted. Five years ago I couldn’t have imagined changing my work for social or political reasons. Never. My creativity was sacred. But I see it differently now. You have to think carefully about the impact of what you’re saying.

There’s a lot of talk now about whether a brand is authentic when they try to move away from the elitism or exclusivity aspect of fashion. ‘You talk about diversity, but do you really mean it?’ or ‘You’re only doing it because you have to.’ I think those arguments are a bit beside the point. Even if you ‘have to,’ it’s a good thing no? We learn from repeating what we have to. Think of a child told again and again by his mother, ‘you must learn to be careful.’ Well some things we have to be forced to learn. I don’t like to be political when I work, but I’ve understood that fashion really is political. It used to be confined to boutiques and rich people in ivory towers but now it touches everyone. I’ve been approached by eleven-year-olds who know everything about Gucci. Can you imagine?

I still question a lot of the practices we have in the fashion industry. Our system hasn’t been renewed in a long time, not really – in many ways it’s as if we’re still doing the job that Monsieur Dior did years and years ago. Like why are we still doing shows using the same structure and rules? Where’s the innovation? Where’s the risk? The rules have become so homogenous: you have to use the ‘right’ models, the ‘right’ light, the ‘right’ stylist. Fashion can be so… come si dice… autoreferenziale. Self-referential? It’s crazy to me that a creative director should use a stylist for example. That’s my job! It’s time to challenge those old rules. Imagine, in twenty-five years of working in fashion I only once interviewed a black design applicant, and she was American. Can you imagine? I think I’ve seen hundreds of white, Western designers over the years, but diversity is still really rare. Why? On what level are we failing? Is it about access to education, or about class or is it about bias on behalf of head hunters? Or the brands themselves? Traditionally fashion has been an exceptionally racist industry; being black meant exoticism, bananas and Josephine Baker. We know better now, but systems take a long time to change.

There was a time when the company didn’t want to sell the GG logo cap to the ‘wrong’ customer. In the New York shop, the cap wasn’t available. So when I became creative director I immediately wanted to open up a dialogue with the people who worked with Gucci ‘fakes.’ To me that was powerful. Fakes are not bad. I mean, what is a ‘fake’ anyway? ‘GG’ is a pop symbol, and today, like Warhol said, pop symbols have power. Labels give value to an object. Is my jacket Gucci without the label? If I put a Gucci label into a vintage piece, does it make it Gucci? Is it more Gucci because I’m the creative director? I was thinking about those things when I worked on the Dapper jacket: am I fake and Dapper Dan real, or is it the other way around? Or are we both fake? These terms are so loaded, and how you value them depends on the time, context and also just your individual point of view. I’m just a guy from a faraway quarter of Rome, I wasn’t born in a rich family, my surname isn’t Gucci. Maybe I’m here just by chance. So what makes you think I’m the real one? [Laughs] I remember the first time I was invited to a really high class dinner; I didn’t know how to manage the wine glasses and I felt so uncomfortable. Now I think I’m lucky not to know, because it means that I’m not oppressed by rules. I am what I am.

The idea of ‘good taste’ is dying. Sophistication or Western ideals of elegance are being challenged. That’s what I want my work to do. I love bad taste. In the awkward or strange you can find the most beautiful things. As designers one of the most important things we can do is to challenge what style or good taste is or can be. That’s why I try to be as unfashionable as possible. I hate when designers talk about being ‘inspired’ by this or that. To me that sounds like someone stuck in their ivory tower and using binoculars to look at the world down below. I imagine a European or American in an elegant Moroccan boutique hotel sipping a spritz by the pool, and telling journalists later that he was ‘inspired’ by Morocco. That way of working is completely irrelevant now. I prefer walking down the street, or just having a nice conversation with someone.

Anja Aronowsky Cronberg is Vestoj’s Editor-in-Chief and Founder

This article was originally published in Vestoj ‘On Doubt,’ available for purchase here.

Clothes tell stories; this much we know. They also provide compelling material for the stories we like to tell ourselves: such as, ‘Men don’t like shopping for clothes’, or ‘When it comes to style, a woman knows best.’ The New Yorker writer Judith Thurman once compared her insatiable hunt for new clothes to men who fish, or who go to the woods with a rifle; ‘While they bag dinner, I bag a dinner dress.’ It’s a joke, of course, but when it comes to how men choose to express themselves through dress, the truth has always been that a not insignificant number of them will happily release that obligation to their partners and wives in favour of other pursuits.

It is a well-known fact that if you go shopping with a particular item in mind, you’ll never find what you were looking for. The pursuit of love, similarly, is more a game of luck than design; the partnerships we form in life begin in inauspicious circumstances, and expectations never fail to give way to different kinds of realities. When reflecting on the expression of masculinity through dress, the lens through which women see their boyfriends, husbands and lovers is a useful refraction then, and one which illuminates how vital one gender is in the making of the other.

To better understand the complexities surrounding how we see men, I met five women, aged between seventeen and eighty, and asked them to speak about their significant other’s clothing. How women in love view masculinity, and how might they ‘act it out’ via the clothing they choose for their partners, is without doubt an underexplored question. These five conversations, and relationships, form only a few small fragments in response; but like most fabrics, patterns emerge in the weave.

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Elisa Benaggoune, seventeen years old from Maidstone, Kent and her boyfriend, eighteen-year-old George. Together for two years, they met ‘on Facebook through mutual friends, and then it just kicked off like that.’

Claire: What were your first impressions of George’s clothes?

Elisa: When I first met him he was wearing a purple jumper that was really silky and normal jeans, and he was wearing these shoes that had a sandy texture. I don’t know what to call them. They were like, fashionable slippers. I was like, ‘Damn, he’s really interesting.’ Oh – and we were colour-coordinated without even planning to.

Claire: And when does he look most attractive?

Elisa: On a special occasion. He’ll be wearing a blazer jacket, one without sleeves, with a smart shirt underneath and jeans. He always wears jeans. And those smart shoes that I can’t remember what they’re called, but they’re really leathery? Brogues. Best outfit ever. What I love about brogues and blazers on him is that it totally spins the whole outfit into something else. So when he experiments with smart and casual wear, I love it because it shows that he can take full power and control of how he wants to look. It just makes me fancy him even more.

Claire: How much thought do you put into a single item of clothing you purchase for George? What are the considerations?

Elisa: I think about his body shape, because it is quite different to lots of other people. He has wide shoulders and a thin waist. Because I know what it feels like when things don’t fit, I always choose things that will fit him properly. I find materials important, but I don’t look at labels because I tend to go more towards vintage. I think more about the quality. George and I don’t wear a lot of brands: he wears vintage too. Having your boyfriend wear that is, like, golden!

Claire: If George were to take upon himself some traditional markers of femininity like dresses and high-heeled shoes, describe what you think your reaction would be.

Elisa: I’d be so happy! If he wants to wear clothes like that and make it look manly, then I’ll love that. It’s so cool because it would look so different on him. I’ve always wanted to explain to people that you can wear women’s clothes and still look like a man, and we can still wear men’s clothes and look like a female – there’s no difference. It’s like David Bowie. And we share clothes all the time. He gives me his jumpers and shirts, and I just wear them out. And he wears my clothes. A week ago, he was wearing my joggers: he wore them at home and in town, and I was like, ‘Oh, George.’ (Laughs.)

Claire: So it is important to you that George looks ‘manly’ in some way?

Elisa: I think it’s definitely important for him because that’s a part of you that doesn’t really go away. It’s important for everyone, because as you grow with yourself and with your partner there’s always that reminder that tells you that you are a female or a male or… other. It’s always going to be important for everyone because being feminine or masculine is self-expression, and you have to remember not to lose that expression.

*

Stephanie McCabe, a fifty-five year-old plus-size clothing storeowner from Newbridge, co. Kildare, Ireland, on her husband Morgan, fifty-seven. They have been together for thirty years.

Claire: What were your first impressions of Morgan’s clothes when you first met him?

Stephanie: When I met him first he was wearing a grey pinstripe suit and a white short sleeve shirt, which I hated. Bear in mind this was thirty years ago. Even though it was kind of preppy really, and I like that look, there was a bit of tweaking to be done I felt – over time I got there. I wouldn’t have had much time for him, looking at him from a distance, because he was so conservative: I thought he wasn’t going to be fun. I just thought, ‘He’s not for me.’ I actually told my parents, ‘Oh God, I wouldn’t ​sit on him!’ That’s exactly what I said! Then about three weeks later I met him in a nightclub in Dublin, and he’d just finished work or something before he arrived in. And we started talking. And there was a whole different person behind that conservative look. And the rest is history really.

Claire: So his personality was different to the signals his clothing gave off?

Stephanie: Even growing up, he was conservative, but a little bit different. He wouldn’t be afraid to push the boat as regards clothes and style. Back in the mid-Seventies – before I met him – his mother was very involved in this charity organisation that she had to go over to Chicago once a year for. And she used to bring him home clothes. She brought him home like a ‘Saturday Night Fever’ white suit. It was actually kind of a cream suit, with huge big lapels on it. And he wore it to the local disco. The ultra violet lights were on at the disco, and he was wearing white underpants, and all you could see on the dance floor were the white underpants through the cream suit. (Laughs.)

Claire: What has changed most about his appearance since those days? What was your role in these changes?

Stephanie: He’s put on weight, but you know, not an awful lot. He won’t wear short sleeves anymore. Mainly he’s wearing finer clothes now, things that are a little bit better, more expensive. He’s on the local county council, and he works in the equine industry now, and he’s very involved in the Gerard Manley Hopkins Literary festival that’s on every year. So he has a different look for each event. He has a more flamboyant wardrobe for the artsy part of his life, if that makes sense. And for the equine part of his life, it’s very much a preppy, Ivy League look. I really love that look. We very much have the same taste. Every single morning for the thirty years that we’ve been together, without fail, every single morning, he stands beside ​me and the mirror, and says, ‘Do I look okay today Steph?’ Does this look okay with that?’ Every morning. He likes to look well.                                                                                                                                  Claire: Who wears the trousers?

Stephanie: One leg each, Claire – one leg each.

*

Justine Picardie, fifty-five, a writer and biographer from London who has written books about both Chanel and Dior, on Philip Astor, fifty-seven, aristocratic barrister and owner of Tillypronie Estate, Scotland.

Claire: What was your impression of Philip’s clothes when you first met him?

Justine: Although it sounds a bit odd, I don’t think I had any distinct impression about his clothes. You know, at the time I met Philip I had worked for Vogue and Harpers Bazaar and was deep in research for a biography of Coco Chanel, so hopefully I’m somebody who is alert to the signals that clothes give us, which is why it’s interesting that when I met him at a dinner party in London, I genuinely have no recollection of what he was wearing. But I think it’s something to do with the fact that I found him so… his conversation so engaging. When it comes to Philip and clothes, I would say my first strong recollection was when I first went to stay with him in Scotland.

Claire: What shifted in your perception when you saw him in his family home?

Justine: Tillypronie had belonged to his family, and he inherited it when his father died in his early twenties. But the house has got lots and lots of clothes in it, signs of the family past and present. Traditional Chameau boots, not fashionable Hunters, and tweed jackets – I think the first thing I noticed was the tweed. It’s called Tillypronie tweed, and it’s made by a local person in the village. When I saw that I thought, ‘Gosh, that’s so beautiful.’ I was brought up in London so I don’t know if I’d ever seen tweed like that; it’s the colour of the landscape, a very soft green with a heathery colour threaded through it. I do remember thinking that it was extraordinarily beautiful.

Claire: It’s interesting that clothing as a symbol of that lifestyle is important to Philip and yet separate from his everyday sense of style.

Justine: Exactly. I’ve never seen him in court, but the thing about being a barrister is that you don’t want to stand out in any way. But in Scotland, how he wears clothes is very different. I didn’t see what he wore until the shooting season started on August 12^th – the glorious 12th. That’s when they go up in the hills and the men wear these old tweed plus fours and knee length hand matted traditional socks, tied at the knee with old, traditional ties. The way the people dress hasn’t changed for generations, and I remember thinking how there was a real sense of authenticity and integrity to the way Philip and other people up there were dressing. There are also other sartorial signals that anybody might pick up about Philip – Eton slippers, the old school tie: they’re little signals, just like people would pick up little signals about me, whether it’s a Chanel jacket, or a Dior bag.

Claire: Do you ever buy clothes for Philip?

Justine: I do. One of the things I became aware of very quickly when we first met, is that he is interested in my world though he is entirely himself. He’s very sure of who he is, so he doesn’t have to wear a fashion-y label to try and prove anything. He wears his own thing: he doesn’t have to prove anything. He will have a collection of Hermès ties, some of which probably belonged to his father, certainly no influence from me. Astor is an old family so Philip had a very traditional upbringing; he’s worn a lot of uniforms in his life. He went to prep school at seven, then Eton, then Christ Church in Oxford and then he joined the bar, you know, the chambers in the inner temple. He still wears his navy blue corduroy Eton slippers – they’re probably forty years old.

*

Margaret Walton, eighty years old from Hull, on her husband Harold, eighty-two, a former army officer. They just celebrated their diamond wedding anniversary.

Claire: How did you first meet your husband?

Margaret: We first met dancing at Racquets. We used to go every Monday night and we did the waltz and all things like that. That would have been the late 1950s; I was seventeen.

Claire: Can you remember what he was wearing?

Margaret: Crepe shoes – we didn’t have leather then. And a slim kind of suit and a thin, crochet tie. I’ve got a photograph of him – he’s got a light pair of grey trousers with a navy blue blazer. That was his best, best suit, you know. The ladies, the shorts was in – you know the hot pants – and then when we used to go dancing in town we’d wear the long dresses. Then the long dresses went out and other things came in. But the men didn’t really change.

Claire: Do you think your first impressions of him had much to do with the clothes, did you notice them?

Margaret: No, granddad didn’t have a thing like that. He didn’t have much money; he weren’t quite well off at all. He would have saved up to buy a suit. After we met he went in the Army you see, and then he lost a lot of weight. When he came home he’d only wear a suit and then he’d be back again in the Army. He’s never worn jeans in his life. He can’t stand jeans; he’s never had a pair. That’s something to say, isn’t it?

Claire: Do you buy him clothes?

Margaret: No, he likes to get them himself – we wouldn’t agree. I ironed three shirts for him before our anniversary party. One was purple. I said, ‘Wear the purple’ because our theme was purple, but he wanted the one with the flowers. I said, ‘No, put that one on,’ but he didn’t – he went for the other one. I said, ‘Ooh, that looks lovely with the grey suit,’ but he still went for the flower one! (Laughs.) I thought, ‘Would you believe it.’

Claire: When has he looked his best, in your memory?

Margaret: It was in summer. The late Fifties I think. I don’t think he was in the Army then… or he’d come home. We must have had our own little camera, and he was just stood with his back to this hedge. And he wore this blazer and the grey trousers and I really liked him in that – really nice. And of course he had a lot of hair then, black hair. He has looked well, I mean especially when he was younger; he was really smart.

Claire: What do you think your reaction would be if he were to suddenly dress in something more feminine – like putting a dress on?

Margaret: Oh, gosh. Terrible. Your granddad can’t stand ought like that. He hates anything like that – oh dear, no. Not for us, no. I hate to see that, anyhow. I never wear any of his clothes.

Claire: Do you think the men decide to be well-dressed or have the women encouraged what they look like?

Margaret: They’ve all lost their wives now, so I don’t know if the wives influenced them at all or what. But I often say to granddad, ‘Oh you’re not going in that are you?’ But he don’t take any notice. He’d do it all the more because I’d said something, you see. I think men make their own choices.

* 

Lizzie Chappel, nineteen, a maternity nurse, on her boyfriend of two years, Josh, a twenty-one year-old building apprentice. She buys all his clothes.

Claire: When did you first meet one another and what were your first impressions of Josh’s appearance?

Lizzie: We’d be chatting on Facebook and then we went on a date. My first impressions of his clothing were pretty standard, nothing special. He was wearing straight leg jeans, which I hated, and a polo. It was a bit boring.

Claire: What has been your role in his changed appearance?

Lizzie: I’d say he was more fashionable now, and stays with the newest trends. I shop with him so I can pick and choose if I like what he picks. He doesn’t really buy a lot of clothes without me seeing it first. I buy clothes for him online, or in the town centre, in shops like River Island, Asos, Urban Outfitters, but he also shops a lot at Adidas.

Claire: When have you looked best as a pair? Why? What does that require?

Lizzie: At weddings we usually coordinate our colour scheme: one wedding I wore a pink dress, he worked a navy blue suit and a pink tie the same shade as my dress. But my favourite outfit of his is a crisp white short sleeve shirt from Next with a pair of nice jeans and tan coloured leather shoes. Because he doesn’t dress up smart often, I like it when he does. I do like him in a tracksuit and trainers as well.

Claire: Seeing as you buy most of his clothes, do you think he cares what he looks like? Or does he care more what you think?

Lizzie: He cares more what he looks like now than he once did. He often asks what top he should wear out or whether things match, like shoes with a top, or a top with a particular jacket. But sometimes he doesn’t really care what I think, especially with sportswear and things – he always wants the latest football jacket and I hate that sort of thing. He tries to fit in with the lads he is friends with, as well as the fashion now.

Claire: And if Josh was to take upon himself some traditionally feminine items of clothing, like dresses and high-heeled shoes, what would your reaction be?

Lizzie: Shocked! It would be totally unlike him; I’m not sure I’d be able to accept it.

Claire: Who wears the trousers?

Lizzie: I wear the trousers but he thinks he does.

Claire Marie Healy is a writer and editor from London. She’s working on her first book. These interviews were previously published in Vestoj ‘On Masculinities’ (2016).

In 1992, a new family with five children moved into our street. Growing up with two brothers, I was excited to hear that there were two other girls in the household. Upon meeting them and surveying their rooms, I marvelled at their toy collections: they had all the Barbie stuff my dreams, but not my room, were made of: a pink mobile home, a convertible car, a Barbie house and several Barbie horses. One doll however, struck me as the most exotic, incredible and most beautiful creature: it was the 1992 Totally Hair Barbie, designed by Carol Spencer. She had a mini dress in fluorescent Pucci-style print, and her extremely long, floor-grazing locks were permanently crimped and came with hair gel. That day, I started a campaign with my parents to obtain a Totally Hair Barbie, even though up till then I’d only had a few basic dolls, one Skipper and many hand-me-down Barbies, since my green-party parents were not very enthusiastic about the American ‘teenage fashion model’ with pink plastic accoutrements. Once I got one, the best thing to do was go over to my neighbours’ house, where two of those dolls lived with the two girls, and add mine to their pair, so we could play with a Total Hair extravaganza set of three dolls, twisting the different strands and braid them together in a sort of octopus-like hair situation.

*

Carol Spencer: In those days, Pucci was all over the stores in the USA, and I mocked up the dress by glueing separate Pucci-print-shapes onto a small scale model, because it was right before the time when I learned to do this on the computer, and we made custom prints. At Mattel, we could not source fabrics with a print small and legible enough for the doll so the print fabric had to be created from scratch.  I just came back from a time living as an expat in Hong Kong working for Mattel’s Design Studio (1988-92), and wanted to prove my seniority to the design team in LA. There was a rigorous process of approving designs, going through many different departments at the company, and I ‘sold’ the marketing department the idea of dressing Barbie as a sort of Eve in her long, crimped hair, with a short dress to set off the length of the hair, and they approved. Then I had to talk to the engineers, because apart from marketing and aesthetics, every Barbie doll was also a technical feat. Our chem lab had just gotten a call from Japan that the factory who could make the special permanently-crimped hair feature was involved in a tragedy with a helicopter crash on Mount Fuji, so we had to find a back-up company and found one in Georgia. At the board meeting, one of our directors suggested the doll came with real ‘Dep’ hair gel. She became the best-selling Barbie of all time.

Introduced in 1959, Barbie, the ‘teenage fashion model,’ was supposed to crystallise the quintessential Californian look and lifestyle. Mattel, headquartered in Los Angeles, conquered not only the American but the global market (and households) with the doll with signature pink clothing and blond hair. But what exactly would one understand as the ‘California’’ style?

CS: When I arrived in LA in 1963, the ‘California look’ was very trendy. I was from Minnesota, so for me it was very clearly different: it had to do with the temperate climate, the laidback coastal ‘surf’  lifestyle, and the presence of natural elements. The bright sunlight was mirrored in strong, bold colours and patterns. A few years before, the American pavilion at the Brussels World Fair had been very successful, showing fashions chosen by Vogue, from over sixty manufacturers from all over the USA, and these were linked to the sporty and modern Californian lifestyle in the public’s mind.

Indeed, in 1958 Vogue US April’s issue, dedicated to the Brussels World Fair (‘Fashion: Belgium 1958 — the land, the new world’s fair, and us — an on-the-spot report’), the fashions presented feature clean, modern lines, some jeans and bathing suits, as well as bohemian blanket-like dresses with capes, and summery polka dots, stripes and floral patterns make up the rows of miniature silhouette images. A plaid cotton bathing suit by Claire McCardell epitomises the ingenuous American mid-century modern style. Occasions for donning the looks are described as distinctly American: sports car meets, poolside parties, city luncheons, tennis games and deep country sweater dressing. The designer list ranges from Cole of California to Philip Hulitar, Mollie Parnis, Jane Derby, Ben Banack, Lilly Daché, Adele Simpson, and more illustrious names such as Arnold Scaasi, James Galanos, Bonnie Cashin, Tina Leser, Claire McCardell and the Brooks Brothers. The patriotic captions read as thus:

‘Most American look on two legs: jeans. Here, at home with a Western shirt.’ Levis

‘Chemise bathing suit and a cut you’d know automatically — American as they come.’ Claire McCardell

‘A tennis dress in white piqué, American classic for American figures.’ Cabana

‘Most American dress in the world: the shirtwaist. This is orange chiffon; afternoons, evenings.’ Talmack

‘Red, white, and still champion: ‘T-shirt’ knit. (50,000,000 dresses can’t be wrong)’ David Crystal.

‘American by choice — the people’s choice: Cardigan-suit idea. This, red and navy-blue Tweed.’ Davidow

‘At-home, slim silk pull-over and sharkskin pants, a touch of Americanitis in the pink.’ B.H. Wragge

*

Having trained and worked at different American fashion brands before, Carol now worked for Mattel in Los Angeles, making mood boards and mock-ups, prototypes and samples for Barbie, just like a normal fashion designer for adults would. I’m curious about what her fashion references were, and whether she visited trade or fashion shows like any other professional.

CS: The type of research I did,  and my day to day workday changed per decade, because technology changed. First, magazines were very important inspiration sources, especially for colour and trend reports, Women’s Wear Daily, California Apparel News. At Barbie we also embraced Mary Quant youth fashions when they came out. Then, everything ‘pop culture’ on TV: the program Style with Elsa Klench on CNN (1980-2001) was very important, and also, Charlie’s Angels in the 1970s-80s, Dynasty in the 1980s and Baywatch in the 1990s. All these programs influenced Barbie’s style. For the Malibu Barbie set, I would literally go sit on the Malibu shore and think of Malibu Barbie, Ken, Christie and Skipper, and ride horses with friends along the bluff. I  rewatched Gidget with Sandra Dee. Apart from these Californian inspirations, I also travelled widely to Europe in the 1970s, in order to watch people in the streets, and go to some fashion shows.

But was Barbie meant to be a trendsetter or a trend follower?

CS: We had to take into account a fashion that was understandable for a child, and remember that a doll came out one year and a half after designing her and a year after presenting her at the toy fair in Nurnberg. The outfit had to be at a certain point on the ‘fashion curve,’ right after the peak, when it came out. This meant that the market was well saturated with this type of look and the child would recognise the fashion. The play pattern was important, it had to appeal to a mainstream children’s audience. If Barbie was too fashionable or ahead in style, she would lose her appeal.

*

Mattel had started, like so many Californian corporate wonders, as a start-up with its founders Elliot and Ruth Handler selling picture frames from a garage. In the early years, the goal was to make the rigid plastic doll more life-like, such as through the introduction of bendable legs. Engineers from aerospace and ex-military technicians which had lingered in LA after the war,  flocked to Mattel, each with their own special skill. Charlotte Johnson was Barbie’s first fashion designer, she taught art history during the day, and designed for Barbie as an evening job. For Carol, too, it was hard to be taken seriously when she had to introduce herself to people as Barbie’s designer, which was not considered a serious profession. ‘It was just laughable,’ she told me. Carol was part of a four-people design team, which grew over the years into a thirty-people team. The group of four designers were always competing with each other to get their designs approved, and communicated with rapid mockups with engineers, for special features like the fabrics that changed colours underwater, and hair colours which changed with water application, already introduced in the 1970s. For the clothes, the designers had free creative reign, and had to make a pattern to be tried out with sample makers, and then adjust and finalise for production. The sewing of the miniature garments, made from fabrics sourced in Asia, was tested in different factories, and were eventually sent off to Japan, where dexterous teams sewing tiny clothes by hand obtained the best results. Each designer cut six sets of patterns for a design review meeting, and then the design would move through different meetings with marketing, children and parent feedback tests and more. All in all the process took up one year.

The in-house motto with regards to the social and physical evolution of the dolls, was ‘Barbie changes as we change.’ Usually, market research had to prove that there was a market for a new idea, and then that change would be approved. The first black doll ‘Christie’ came quite early, in 1968; she was a talking doll (‘You’ll never know what I’ll say next’) and introduced as a friend of Barbie’s. It took until 1980 for a black Barbie doll to be called ‘Barbie’ herself. Carol Spencer had to prove to Mattel it was time to add more dolls with different skin tones to the market: the Magic Curl Barbie Doll of 1981 was the first series of dolls which had a Caucasian, African American, and Hispanic type. Later in the 1980s, a Japanese Barbie doll was made by Mattel’s licensee Takara. This Caucasian doll was different from Barbie to better appeal to the Japanese customer: she had a closed mouth, was shorter in height and had large manga-style rounded eyes. ‘It was a very popular and cute doll but the license was broken and the doll was pulled, since the Japanese managers were somewhat old-fashioned: they did not like this westernized doll with Japanese look and wanted to uphold the ideal beauty of the Edo period.’

Even though Barbies were tested in various settings before being released, Carol learned a lot about desirability, societal norms and expectations from the feedback she got at live events: ‘At a convention in the 1990s, a grandmother once came up to me and asked, where are Barbie’s underpants?, which I thought was a good point, so I designed white lace briefs for My First Ballerina Barbie, together with molded-on ballet slippers and painted white tights, for convenient dressing. The most important thing was always that it had to be easy for a child to dress. Later, Barbie would get flesh coloured undies and permanently fixed underpants.’

Another change which came in the 1990s, was the addition of Chelsea (Kelly), a baby sister doll for Barbie. Barbie could not have a child out of wedlock with Ken, and had to remain eternally unmarried/single or it would stop the play pattern of identification for a young girl. Spencer had suggested that children needed more nurturing features, rather than just projection, so they would play longer with Barbie. Child testing had proven that children grew out of playing with Barbie by age 5-6, with kids starting to play with her as early as age 2.

In her private life, Carol Spencer had to navigate multiple roadblocks to do the type of creative professional work she wanted to pursue, rather than the five predetermined professions for most American women of her generation (teacher, nurse, secretary, shopgirl and seamstress). Spencer convinced the marketing team that Barbie could thus also be more than a nurse or teacher, and already in 1973, she created outfits for new professions: a flight attendant costume and an MD costume with an on-call pager phone. Later, she created Barbie’s astronaut suit, with aviation shoulder pads. As she told me,‘The play value of these professional costumes was high, it was not so much about the fashion. A child could relate to these professions, and that’s what was most important to me. Everything was child tested, and the problem was that children were fearful of space.’ So Carol’s racer suit and even pajamas for Barbie to wear in space were not commercially successful – instead, Barbie turned back to fantasy, in the form of 1980s glamour. The 1981 wedding of Princess Diana, the dramatic costumes of Dynasty, and the fashions of Claude Montana and Thierry Mugler all gave a new high fashion focus to Barbie’s wardrobe after the more sports-focused 1970s.

Carol, whose name started to appear on the boxes of her Barbie designs (a special honour and name credit not easily won) also started to travel more to adult conventions and Barbie fan meetings in the 1980s to sign her dolls, so she convinced the board to create Barbies especially for this growing adult market, which would spend more money and had different tastes than the children’s market. In the 1990s, Mattel had a line called ‘Great Era Barbies’ with historical and film costumes, for which Carol visited the LACMA museum’s collection to learn about period gowns. She designed a Sissi-gown and a Scarlett O’Hara-gown for Barbie, which became very popular with collectors. Barbie with clothes designed by ‘real’ fashion designers followed. The first fashion designer with his eponymous Barbie was Oscar de la Renta: ‘He could choose to either design the doll himself or approve one of our designs. Oscar approved my design, a high glamour, black with gold extravagant dress. He entered the room, nodded at those designs he liked, and left with no words.’  In 1994, Carol created one of her last collectible dolls, Benefit Ball Barbie, for the 35th anniversary of the doll. It was a golden extravaganza, with Carol’s name stamped not just on the box but on the doll in gold lettering. Her final creation before retirement, Café Society Barbie in 1998, wore an Art Deco inspired sheath dress in gold lurex lace over satin. A career which had started with pragmatic, sun-kissed American sportswear came to an end with couture-like, dramatic silhouettes.

Today, after decades of feminist and pedagogic criticisms of Barbie, one can find Barbie dolls in many different body types (petite, curvy, tall), various skin tones, Barbies with disabilities and Barbies with gender neutral professions (such as truck driver Barbie, game developer Barbie, vaccinologist Barbie, and of course, President Barbie). These have been welcome and necessary changes to the Caucasian blonde archetype with tiny waist and unnaturally long legs, which Barbie has represented to so many children and parents over the decades. According to Carol though, the elongated body was not just due to an impossible beauty ideal, but a pragmatic solution to technical and commercial issues: ‘You have to realise that with more diversity in body types, not all the clothes will fit the same Barbie anymore, so you will have to buy different sets. The design for Barbie always had to do with the right scale and the right fabrics, with clean seams and seam allowances, which were very difficult to execute in miniature garments. Often fabrics were too heavy or too thick for a small doll, especially when doubled at the seam. This is also why she has a tiny waist: because the skirt and shirt fabric meet in the middle part, when she lays flat for dressing, there’s often a double piece of fabric there. This is why the waist is smaller than normal, to make it appear normal under several layers of fabric. Then, because children could not fit sleeves on full, upward arms, the arms had to be hollowed out, so there would not be too much fabric at the sleeve inset. And yet another factor is artistic: the proportion of the doll was based on a figure sculpted by an artist, who used the ideal proportion of three heads to the waist, where a normal person is usually 2,5 heads to the waist. The eternal problem was that, even on a tall Barbie, even the smallest buttons were too big.’

*

A few years ago, I attended a seminar on fashion and disobedience in Santiago de Chile. One of the workshops was given by Maria Galindo, a Bolivian anarcho-feminist from the collective ‘Mujeres Creando.’ She made head dresses with the participants which deconstructed Latin stereotypes of femininity through tropes such as Carmen Miranda, exotic fruits  and Barbie dolls. The result of the workshop were joyous, colourful head dresses full of long-legged Barbie dolls, sticking out like totems of feminist salvation. Nothing more defiant than a carnavalesque headdress full of perky Barbie dolls. I looked through the various dolls on display and found, both to my adult relief and childish disappointment, no sign of Totally Hair Barbie amongst them.

Karen Van Godtsenhoven is a freelance curator and fashion researcher at Ghent University. She greatly enjoyed reading Carol Spencer’s book ‘Dressing Barbie.’

The first time I meet Kenneth I’m struck by his guilelessness. There’s something boyish about him, even though he’s a man, and an accomplished one at that. His face is open, and his body language suggests someone who is finally at ease with themselves. He lives a little bit in Nigeria, a little bit in Italy, a little bit in Austria, and all the travelling seems to have given him a particular way of engaging with strangers.

I was born in Lagos, and when I was four my family moved to the Austrian countryside. My dad got a job at Ikea and my mum eventually started working as a cleaner in a nursery. In Nigeria my mum had owned a restaurant, so when I was really little she was always beautifully dressed. In Europe she continued wearing a lot of African clothes, for going out or to church or just on a regular day. She would wear head-wraps and import fabrics from Nigeria and have her clothes made. She used to get clothes made for the rest of the family too, but my dad always preferred his three-piece suits. He worked for the government when we lived in Lagos, and he had a really good sense of Western style even then. On weekends, he would wear nylon tracksuits – this was the Nineties – and Nike sneakers but on weekdays he was always in a shirt and a tie. He was super precise about everything: his shirt had to align with his trousers and his tie had to be just so. I grew up in a super African home, moving to Austria didn’t change that. My way of dressing did change though. I hardly ever wore my African clothes anymore, maybe once a year or so. I preferred Western styles: Nike, Adidas, Timberland, Fubu. I suppose traditional clothes felt too much like costume to me in Vienna, they made me feel self-conscious. I already stood out like a sore thumb. For my mum though they were just clothes, her clothes, and she always carried them beautifully. I still remember the silhouette of her kaftan sleeves as she was making a particular gesture. There’s actually no one who has influenced me as much as my mother has. I think of my collections as a part of my mother’s story and legacy, and I can see her wearing most of the pieces. My mum always had a great eye for detail. I remember her getting ready for church on Sundays, and putting on her extravagant trads with Italian shoes and gold jewellery.

When he was alive my dad was the dandy in the family – I really looked up to him. His attention to cut and silhouette is something I’ve tried to emulate in my work. My parents really instilled in me the importance of self care: my dad wouldn’t let me leave the house if I hadn’t showered, and my mum taught my brother and me to lotion our bodies every day. I really think my parents are the reason I love clothes. Even though I knew nothing of the Western fashion industry, I always knew the value of beautiful clothes, and of looking good. My parents had their work clothes, and their traditional garments, or trads as we call them, for special occasions. They were always dressed for the occasion. Eventually, in Austria, my mum started wearing Western clothes too. I think I must have been ten when I saw her in jeans for the first time. Throughout my early childhood she was always this very traditional African woman, and women like that don’t wear trousers. As a married, traditional, African woman you don’t wear anything that shows your body off too much. But moving to Europe changed her, and with time she adapted to the customs of her new country. I still remember being with her when she got her first pair of jeans – she was so excited, ‘Oh my god, my body is so nice. It’s so nice to see my body!’ She started wearing sneakers and hoodies, and I’d be like ‘Mu-um you’re wearing my shoes!’ [Laughs] I’m still really close with my mum. We’re the same star sign – Aries – and we’re both really stubborn and hardworking, always looking out for others and trying to provide.

I didn’t know much about Western designers or the fashion industry until I got to fashion school. We never had any fashion magazines in the house, and my parents didn’t take us to museums or anything like that. A friend of mine showed me Vogue when I was a teenager. I’d heard about Giorgio Armani and Versace but I didn’t know who Margiela was until I started studying fashion at university. I remember when I first had the idea of becoming a designer: I’d already enrolled in psychology at university when my friends told me about this place where you could study design and fashion. I knew immediately that’s what I wanted to do. So I called my mum and said, ‘Mum mum I think I want to study fashion!’ And she told me, ‘I’ve been waiting for you to say that Kenneth.’ She already knew. So, at nineteen I moved to Vienna. I loved studying; if I could I’d do it again and again and again. I loved the freedom and the sense of experimentation and acceptance: wearing skirts in the street, or just a piece of fabric wrapped around your body. The first day of uni I wore a cheap fabric from the market wrapped around my waist with a shirt and platform shoes. My hair was styled straight up, punk style. I felt great.

It’s funny actually, when I was a student the people who wore their own designs were never seen as cool. I stopped wearing the clothes I made then. The anti-fashion trend was really strong back then, norm-core, plain and sombre pieces. People wanted to look as if they didn’t care too much. Now I love wearing my own designs, and if I wasn’t working so much I’d wear them all the time. I’m not yet at the stage of my career, when working means looking fancy behind a big desk. I move around constantly, between all sorts of environments so I can’t wear anything too precious. Also I can’t afford too many of my own clothes yet. [Laughs] That’s the reality. I tend to be quite pragmatic about my work, I think about how comfortable the clothes will be, and how people will be wearing them in real life as opposed to in a magazine or Instagram picture. I don’t want to make something that isn’t relevant. Actually when I talk about ‘comfort’ I think of it not just in terms of how a garment feels on the body but also about the story behind it. I think clothes should make their wearers feel comfortable, in their own skin and in the world. If you feel comfortable, confidence follows. I want my clothes, the ones I wear and the ones I make, to have something to say. A lot of craftsmanship goes into my work and the details are really important. In my own clothes I also want to feel, and be seen as, aware. Aware of what’s happening around me, on a micro and macro level. I’m talking about awareness on multiple levels: about the history of the garment, and its provenance, about where the wind is blowing.

I like to show my body off, yes, but it depends on the context of course. I love the waist, the shoulders, the arms, on both men and women. I’ve been making backless jackets for my collection recently, and I love wearing those. Sometimes, in Lagos, I’ll put a sleeveless, backless T-shirt on, just to provoke. Lagos society is traditional and conservative: it doesn’t fully allow you to express yourself, or even be yourself. If you see a woman in a miniskirt, people assume she’s a prostitute. Gender roles are conformist, and respectability is extremely important. So that makes me want to rebel a bit: I want people to be like, ‘What is going on here?’ I get a lot of looks. I want to provoke the system, question it a bit and make a statement. In Europe I dress differently. That tension that’s so pronounced in Nigeria isn’t there in Vienna or Milan or Paris. People also don’t dress up like they do in Lagos. They wear the same clothes day and night – I do too. I dress in a more relaxed way, and I’m not really concerned about making a statement. A few years ago I loved wearing super-tight sports clothes, top and bottom. I’d put a pair of tight running shorts on and go about my day. Like I said, I like showing off my body! But now I dress differently because I’m always working so I have to be comfortable and able to move around. On a typical day I’ll put on a cashmere hoodie and white denim trousers. But then if I’m invited to dinner at a friend’s house say, or if I’m going out for drinks later I’ll get changed. Then I don’t dress for practicality anymore – I dress for fantasy. Fantasy is actually a really important part of dressing. Mostly though I just dress for happiness. That’s a state of mind I try to invoke: joy.

When I wake up in the morning, the first thing I do is put on body lotion, just like my mum taught me. Then I think about what to wear that day. I sleep naked so I always take all my jewellery off before going to bed. In the morning I put it back on again. My jewellery is usually delicate, and all gold. A lot of it I got from my mother: necklaces, rings, earrings, bracelets. I wear them everyday so they start feeling like a part of me. I’ve probably worn most pieces at least a decade, some I’ve had for fifteen years. When I’ve had a shower and put my jewellery on, I think about what I’ll be doing that day and what clothes to put on. If I’m in Lagos that’s particularly important. I mean, yes I like to provoke but I also need to get work done. So if I’m going to an area that’s more conservative and homophobic, I’m obviously not going to dress in transparent trousers or a backless jacket. Then I wear classic, practical pieces: shirts and jeans. Or I’ll wear trads. I like wearing traditional clothing in Nigeria, people take you more seriously then. You can get more money wearing trads actually. If I have a meeting in an office I’ll put my trads on and hold my mobile phone in a particular way so as to command power. When I’m dressed like that, I hear ‘Yes sir yes sir yes sir!’ You really get treated differently depending on what you wear in Lagos. If the police stop you, and you’re young but wearing trads, you’re much safer. Then at night I’ll change into something more fun and experimental: Issey Miyake or my own design. Night time is for play. How to dress to attract a lover? Well I think about my body first; which part of it do I want to show off? I like to dress sexy for moments like that. There was a time when I was super into ankles: I wouldn’t wear trousers that came below my ankles and I paid attention to everybody else’s ankles too. Now I love necklines, how they frame the face and shoulders. It’s important to think about proportion. I like tank tops to show my shoulders and arms and I like see-through – up and down. I love a see-through pant. And I love it when people show their bodies – as long as it doesn’t look cheap. That’s a fine balance though and there isn’t a precise formula for how to avoid that particular pitfall.

Sometimes in Nigeria I get frustrated, like, ‘If I was in Europe I’d be able to wear that jacket. Oh my god I wish I could wear it right now!’ That actually happens to me all the time. Things are changing slowly though; a lot of people from the diaspora are returning and they’re bringing different, less conservative, ways of being and dressing with them. I love wearing kaftans in Nigeria but I would never wear one the West. I don’t wear my trads in Europe at all anymore; I get looked at in the wrong way. Moving between continents and cultures like I do requires some skill when it comes to dressing. I have to be mindful of how much I push rules on both continents. I mean, I try not to care about what people think or if I’m being stared at. I want to retain the power; I don’t want the wrong looks to make me waver or feel insecure. But it doesn’t always work. I remember once, six or seven years ago in New York. When packing for the trip, I was thinking about how multicultural the city is, and how many black people live there. This was during an Afrocentric moment in fashion; Solange was wearing headwraps and colourful patterns and fashion was full of ‘African-style’ prints. So I packed a bunch a trads. The first day I went out wearing a kaftan people wouldn’t stop staring at me in the street. And the ones who stared the most were other black people. I felt so uncomfortable, I just turned around and went home to change. [Laughs] It was really bad actually. I felt like Eddie Murphy in ‘Coming to America.’ That was the last time I wore trads in the West.

Growing up as an immigrant in Europe was really difficult. In small town Austria I stood out in too many ways. My headmaster actually said to my face that I would never amount to anything, and then I was kicked out of school. I was spat in the face by my classmates. There was a lot of racism. At the time I didn’t really understand why I was being singled out, and when I would get back home and tell my parents they would make it seem as if it was nothing. They were scared I think. Imagine coming to a new country as a refugee. When you’ve finally been given permission to stay you don’t want to rock the boat, you don’t want to fight. You put your head down and get on with it. Don’t make a fuss, is the attitude I grew up with. I still carry the grudge of everything that happened inside me, and the only way I know to move on from it, is through my work. I want success I do, but more than that I want my work to be meaningful. I’m not a power hungry person. I don’t care to be the number one of anything. I just want to do what I love.

A version of this article first appeared in Extra Extra magazine issue 16 under the heading ‘Kenneth Ize on Dressing to Feel Good.’

THE YOUNG QUINCEAÑERA IS seemingly always in a ball gown. She is in pink, green, blue or other pastel colour, festooned and bejewelled, and with a large skirt that sways in a way that affirms the hooped crinoline underneath. She is beautiful and brimming with excitement for her impending journey into womanhood. Her mother typically accompanies her, helping her with her dress and fixing her hair just so as the photographer captures the moment in front of a city’s landmarks.

The fiesta de quince años, simply called a quinceañera in the United States, celebrates a girl’s fifteenth birthday, her transition from childhood into adulthood. The significance of this day has roots in both Aztec rite-of-passage ceremonies and Spanish debutante traditions, but the quinceañera is uniquely Latin American. The customs vary from country to country, but all share the common thread of family and community. A regular occurrence throughout the U.S. where Latin American immigrant families live, such a milestone event has slowly evolved into its own.

All activities and objects that surround the quinceañera are symbolic, especially the dress which literally reshapes a girl’s body into a woman’s.

The quinceañera begins at a church with a Catholic Mass, the girl typically accompanied by her parents, her godparents and her court of honour comprised of selected female and male friends, siblings or cousins – her damas and chambelanes. She might wear a crown or tiara, a symbol of her upstanding morality – a princess before the eyes of God – or a necklace with a cross or pendant of the Virgin of Guadalupe, blessed by a priest. Her father might present his daughter with her first pair of high heel shoes. He might give her a doll (usually in a dress similar to the celebrante’s), the last doll she will ever be given.

Afterwards at the reception is food, cake and dancing. Such an event, which can include stretch limousines, professional photographers and event planners, can total many thousands of dollars. However, true to the way of dear family and friends, these costs are commonly shared with individuals sponsoring parts of the celebration or donating time to make the day possible.

The day after, the quinceañera and her family informally continue the celebrations with the recalentado (‘re-warming’). Gathered together at a family member’s home with a brunch of food not eaten from the previous day’s festivities, they reflect on the party, reliving their favourite parts.

The following interviews with three Mexican-American women living in the Los Angeles area speak to the memories they hold of their own quinceañeras. Each woman represents a different generation and brings their unique perspective to this important milestone. Each reflects on her passage into adulthood, family and cultural identity, and what it felt like to finally bare the physical and symbolic weight of her quinceañera as she donned her dress for the first time.

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Julie Regalado, Pico Rivera, California, Age 50

My dress was white – back then it was white – but I didn’t wear heels. We wore either sneakers or flats to church and at the party the dad or godfather changed the shoes from the flats or tennis shoes to a small heel to let people know that the quinceañera was now a young lady. That was before the traditional waltz, when the quinceañera dances with her dad.

The court – mine were cousins, males and females, fourteen of them – surrounded me while I did the special first dance with my dad. Then my father gave me to my godfather who danced with me. And then I danced with the seven boys on the court. The symbol for this was that as a young girl, I was protected by my dad. As the waltz finished and the circle around us started to open, I became a young lady. We rehearsed the dance because it had to be in a certain way. First the dad, then the godfather, then the seven boys.

I lived in East L.A. and my quinceañera was in Mexico. It was in Jalisco in a little town called Cihuatlán. It wasn’t really my decision. My parents are first-generation who came to the United States for a better life. But also they didn’t want to lose the tradition, the culture. Because my mom was poor and had a really small quinceañera with just family, it was way different from what I had, where I had my dress, my shoes, everything was planned, and with really traditional food and mariachi music.

My dress was white and poofy, with tiny blue flowers around the edges and along the bottom of the dress. My mother made it for me. I was not asked, ‘How do you want your dress?’

When my friends and I were having quinceañeras the dresses were all white with a little bit of pink or blue or a favourite colour. But very light, not a whole lot of colour, because white signifies purity. I think for many families that celebrate the quinceañera, it was for the adults. They kind of ran the show. I was just happy I was having one.

The blue flowers were my choice though. The cake also had blue flowers. It had to come together with the boy cousins wearing light blue shirts, and the girl cousins wearing light blue dresses, and the cake with light blue flowers too. I was telling people that these are my friends, my cousins that will accompany me as I make the step from being a little girl to being a young lady.

The first time that I wore the dress, it was in a fitting for my mom. My mom was a seamstress, so she wanted it to look perfect. When I tried it on, I felt like crying. I was the last one of my friends that turned fifteen, so I saw my friends here in the States having their quinceañera and how pretty they looked, how loved, and the family… It felt like a dream come true for me. Yes, finally, I had my own.

During the ceremony, oh my goodness, I felt like a princess. That day was the day I felt the most beautiful in the world. I thought I was in heaven. I felt so loved. I had my dress and the accessories that were bought for me and given with significance. I had a little golden cross so that God will always be with me and protect me. And I had a small crown. It was just a little daisy crown that had a little ribbon and the ribbon hung at the back of me.

The celebration lasted four days. I think at the end of the four days, I felt – with everybody coming together and constantly telling stories about me when I was little, what I used to do, how I acted – at the end of those four days I felt like, OK, I’m an OK lady! It started unfolding, how hard everybody worked to come together to make it happen. It was a family effort. Everybody would just start saying, ‘I have a flower shop so I’ll give her flowers. And I’ll get the goats. And I’ll get the decorations. And I know the priest in the church.’ My godparents bought a pig just for me, just for the quinceañera.

The next day we had leftovers and everyone came together to my grandma’s house. And the topic was the quinceañera. That makes it nice, special, to hear that all these people are a part of your life. I appreciated it more because I knew that my mom and my dad were not rich. They came here for us to have a better life yet wanted us to experience the quinceañera ceremony from the beginning to the end.

I am married – a beautiful ceremony – but it doesn’t compare. I still remember my quinceañera; it is my best memory. It even tops me getting married. I have a nineteen-year-old daughter, she had a quinceañera and I tried to make it the same. But I think as time has passed, quinceañera are a little different. The ceremony part has changed a whole lot.

You know, I love my father to death. He is no longer with me, so when I think of my father, that’s the moment that I remember. It was the only time I walked down the aisle with him. My father had six girls, but with me that day, I really felt I was an only child. No one else existed except me and our bond, the experience we shared. He also did a speech of how he saw me grow up and how I was now fifteen. And having six girls and for him to come out with six different speeches, to me it was, wow. I felt that day like an only child.

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Marvella Muro, East Los Angeles, California, Age 41

I’m an only child, but I also had a babysitter with four daughters who were older than me. I basically mimicked them. I think that I just thought it was part of the process. Qunceañeras are also connected to Catholicism, so although I don’t consider myself a devout Catholic, it was part of the culture and I was excited about it but also hesitant because I’m very shy and I don’t like attention. I didn’t know if I really wanted to go through with it, but I just said, OK, what the hell.

I had a dress and flowers; we also had a car decorated with tissue flowers. A lot of people get low riders, but I didn’t. My quinceañera was on a budget. Usually people have them in a hall with a whole court with fifteen people, but I didn’t have that. I just had two little girls, myself, and my godparents, and then we had the party in our backyard. My mom’s co-worker’s son was the DJ, and there was a pot luck and my friends from high school.

The dress is not supposed to be purely white; there are always different colour accents. Pure white is for a bride, so I added peach. Going back to the four girls that I grew up with, they had a collection of bridal books from the late eighties and early nineties. I would look at those dresses and I liked the simplicity. I think that’s why I liked my colours, the off-white and peach. I think it was satin; nice but inexpensive. The colours today are so bright sometimes – they look really great because they are so out there, but again I don’t like attention.

I had my dress made from those bridal books. We got a family friend that knows how to sew to make the dress. She was the neighbour of my mom’s co-worker, a Cuban lady in her sixties in Alhambra. I showed her the picture and she said OK, this is what you can do, and she told us where to get the material. We went downtown to the Fabric District for the fabric and the flowers too.

I made all the centre table arrangements. I turned over a small styrofoam bowl and put fake baby’s breath on it and a candle in the middle with a ribbon around it. I also made the party favours: a little straw hat with a ribbon that said ‘Marvella Muro’ and then ‘Quinceañera..’ I glued a little magnet at back and I burned myself with the glue gun. I think it took two months because it was after school after homework, an hour or something every day.

The ceremony of wearing flats to heels to transition into becoming a woman, no, I didn’t do it. There was a hesitation of having so much attention on me, so I just did the bare minimum. I did have the waltz, but the waltz was with my godparents and then the men came in and they danced with me, so it wasn’t rehearsed. I participated in other quinceañera where there was a rehearsed waltz, and we would rehearse for a month, every Saturday. And it’s fun, but the limousine and all of that… people will spend thousands of dollars.

I felt excited and embarrassed when I first put on my dress. It was the same feeling when they did my hair and put on my make-up. It was the first time that I was allowed to wear make-up, so it was toned down, not too flashy.

My quinceañera was in a small chapel in East Los Angeles, the Santuario de Guadalupe. I think the majority, if not all Catholic churches, have the Guadalupe because if its prominence in Mexican culture. Fresh flowers were offered to her as a thank you and protection.

After the ceremony, I felt different. It was a combination of two things: you are still the same, your body is the same, but at the same time, I was like, wow, you’re fifteen and you’ve gone through this whole process and, you know, you make up new responsibilities for yourself as a teenager. Like social responsibilities as you go through your teens, through puberty, as your body changes. And now you can wear make-up and what does that mean? What colours are you allowed to wear or should you experiment with? I was actually a late bloomer in regards to feelings to boys. I think in Mexican culture, dads are more strict with the girls than they are with the boys. The boys are out all night – I think that’s in many cultures – while the girls have less liberties. I grew up with a single mom so… it had nothing to do with parental restrictions. I think it was just me.

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Natalie Jimenez, South El Monte, California, Age 17

The whole experience was magical. Everyone is there for you.

My dress was a light pink colour. It was poofy at the bottom with a diamond design on the top, and a heart in the middle. We went shopping downtown and bought it at the first store we walked into. I saw it and was like, ‘Oh my god it’s the one.’

As soon as I put it on I didn’t want to take it off. It was a girly feeling, like I was a princess. I honestly felt like a princess. I had hoped that it was going to feel like that; it was how I always pictured my quinceañera to be.

I had a crown, nothing big or anything. But when I put it on I felt like a grown up because they were crowning me in a new stage in my life. I had high heels too. I was in flats and then my dad put the high heels on me during the event. When I was putting them on it was like, OK… you know, grown ups and teenagers are always wearing high heels, so that was basically another step in your life too.

For my court, I had six guys and that was it. I didn’t have any damas, just chambelanes. They were mainly just my cousins. It was easier to get them to do it and we knew their moms for their tux sizes. There were only two that weren’t cousins, but they were childhood friends.

My ceremony at the church was kind of eye-opening because I was in the middle of the church and everyone is on the sides. I had to take the flowers to the Virgin Mary as a sign of thank you and grace, so that was really nice. I think there were around two hundred people. That was just close family – it wasn’t everyone.

For the dances at the reception, we started rehearsing a month before. My waltz was the song ‘A Thousand Years.’ My surprise dances were ‘Greased Lighting,’ ‘Footloose’ and ‘Come On Eileen.’ A surprise dance is when you go from the waltz, which is more formal, to the surprise dance where you get to really express yourself. For the waltz, I wore my big pink poofy dress, and for the surprise dance I wore the same colour and design but basically in a mini version so I could dance.  My mom choreographed the waltz and my dad choreographed the surprise dances. Then the official dance was after that, with a variety of music played throughout the night like cumbia, eighties, pop and rock en español.

My mom didn’t have a quinceañera. One of my close girl cousins had one; she had it in August and I had mine in December. I saw how pretty girls were in their dresses, like my cousin and friends who had quinceañeras. I always wanted one. Seeing pictures of the dresses and the parties, it just always caught my attention.

I feel like everyone should have one. Even if it’s just a small party. It really is a good feeling. You’re with your family, you’re celebrating yourself and it’s not like any other birthday. It’s great. They should have that feeling of going into womanhood. I think because Mom didn’t have one she wanted me to experience what it was to have one. She was dancing all night.

Clarissa M. Esguerra is Associate Curator of the Costume and Textiles department at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.