fluff

There was a girl in our school - a friend, actually - named Pam, who, in a sea of rich, thin, spoiled, beautiful girls, was particularly rich, thin, and spoiled (I remember, for example, her dad gave her an orange Porsche for her 16th birthday. She had the cutest boyfriend in the school, and when he accidentally totalled it, her dad simply gave her another one, also in orange: just a different model). She was still a perfectly nice girl, and, like most style icons, was shrouded in mystery because she rarely spoke. She had a bedroom so vast, in hot pink and lime green, that one of her walk-in closets, larger than some people's bedrooms, was devoted to just her handbags and shoes.



I thought of Pam when I met this sweet model, because Pam had a coat just like this one. Her brother brought it back from someplace exotic, like Afghanistan or Uzbekestan, and she was wearing it one time, in 'the city' (NY, that is) at a store like Bergdorf's, or was it Bloomingdales, and a buyer spotted her and asked to borrow the coat to copy it, and it became a whole line that season. Pam was that kind of girl.



Christopher Kane, as you're probably all quite aware by now, showed a lot of beautiful ethnic flowered embroidery, in his case on black (leather, knitwear), and of course, the other genius that is Christopher, Bailey, did some wonderfully unexpected turns with leather, Shearling, and fur, at Burberry. I mean, can we possibly get anything more perfectly yin/yang than this?



That same year, btw, I had that exact same mohair hat, in the same shade of beige. There was a girl named Maxine who couldn't have been more opposite to Pam. She nicknamed me Fluff and ribbed me mercilessly, but I loved that hat and wish I had it, still. Funny, the things you remember. Do you have a favourite item of clothing that has disappeared? Or, while we're at it: has any major department store copied your coat?