Peplum, empire, epaulet, portrait collar.

My mother taught me that features of fashion had names.

Her wardrobe was carefully curated, and it reflected her contradictions: traditional but also trendy with a certain creativity.

My parents shared a modest-sized walk-in closet. My father’s clothing was stored on the same side as his writing hand, on the left: tweeds, elbow patches, dress shirts, bow ties swinging from a tie rack like an octopus with striped tentacles. My father’s clothes absorbed the smell of boxes of Kodachrome film and photos he kept on a bottom shelf.

My mother’s clothes arranged on the right: her writing hand. Pantsuits, dresses, satins, velvet, polyester. A gauzy pink curtain hung from the only window in the closet. An old painted bureau sat underneath the window and stored my mother’s complicated undergarments and nightgowns. Her half of the closet scented with a mix of her Nina Ricci perfume and plastic from the dry cleaner bags, a dizzying combination. An unshaded light bulb hung down from the center of the ceiling, which turned on with a worn pull string that often ripped. Stacked in their original boxes, and labeled, were her shoes: black slingbacks, pink mules, pumps, strappy sandals.

When I was a child, I sought comfort from within the confines of my mother’s side of the closet. I would squeeze between the colorful array of dresses and inhale her essence. Enveloped by her clothes, it was as if my mother was embracing me, and her real-life embraces were hard won.
The walk-in closet had a stabilizing order that was missing from the living areas of our home, where ubiquitous towers of medical magazines and phone books were stacked on the dining room table, books and piles of unfolded laundry littered counters and couches like towering teetering cairns.

Like an archivist, my mother held on to clothing pieces from her past: her belts and a pleated plaid skirt from high school (with an enviable sixteen-inch waist), furry angora sweaters and show-stopping costume jewelry. There was also an abundance of new things, some pieces with their sales tags waving like flags from cuffs and armpits.

My mother focused many weekends perfecting her wardrobe with clothing scored at Filene’s Basement, Lord & Taylor, or Loehmann’s. I spent many a weekend morning watching my mother try on clothes in a fitting room: me perched on the tiny built-in corner bench as her image multiplied in the three-way mirrors as if my mother were spinning in a kaleidoscope.

Filene’s Basement was legendary for bargains but lacked basic amenities like fitting rooms. This attracted random men of all kinds to line the open descending staircase and brazenly watch women try on clothes. They leaned over railings and leered hoping to catch a glimpse of breast or bottom.

It was cash and carry. Women of that era knew how to adapt, and each had a personal technique to trying on clothes.

“To try on pants, first find a really big skirt,” my mother instructed protectively. “Slip on that size twelve skirt and then take off the jeans you are wearing. Now slip on the new pants. Voila!”

“For a blouse, find a roomy raincoat or trench, button the buttons and spin it around. Now you have a cape and can try on tops!” she chimed. She lowered her thick Elizabeth Taylorish brows and glared back at the lascivious men, daring them to look our way. Then she put an arm around me and steered me deeper into the crowd of bustling, bending, and fastening women.

Tea length, maxi, mini, mandarin collar.

I am old enough to recall a mother who wore kidskin gloves, was compressed by a girdle, carried a clutch, and purchased hosiery after perusing six-inch samples in a three-ring binder proffered by the hosiery clerk. She would slip her hand in a sample and assess the weave and tone. Her department store-issued credit card listed her as Mrs. Koretsky and she had to produce a handwritten note from my father at the credit office counter to permit her to use the charge card. I know this irked her to no end—she may have even huffed and said so— as she was a registered nurse earning a salary, but could not make a twenty-dollar purchase without permission.

My mother made sure the fabric and quality of her clothing was not a “schmatta”—Yiddish for rag—as my Baba would say. My Baba was an accomplished dressmaker who had escaped the pogroms in Eastern Europe to live in the United States. She made me many lovely dresses. She often made elegant party wear for my mother, whose enviable size six figure would highlight the best designs.

After a Sunday family breakfast of pan-fried cheese blintzes and bagels, my mother stood on a step stool in the family room to be fitted in one of my Baba’s creations. Baba with multiple straight pins pursed between her lips, the creases on her upper lip deepening as she tailored the dress to my mother’s waist and hips.

“I really wanted to be a fashion designer,” my mother told me on more than one occasion, “but in my high school class of 1950 there were just two choices for women: become a teacher or a nurse.”

Gauze, silk, satin, cashmere, crepe de chine.

There she was in her bedroom bathed in light from a bank of paned windows fastening her stockings to a garter belt. I sometimes opened her dresser drawer and removed one of the fastening clips to fidget with the round rubber button that snapped into the metal frame. The popping sound was fun and sounded like gum snapping. Having reached her wits end of having her midsection compressed, she twisted in the passenger seat of our family car, as my father drove the family home from synagogue, brazenly wiggling out of her girdle and hose “Thank God!” she declared swinging them in the air and letting out a dramatic sigh.

“You have no idea!” she hissed at my brothers, who giggled from the back seat.

I was forbidden from playing dress-up with her things. Although she would let me take her half-slips and push my head through the elastic waist band, so it looked like I had long, silky hair. The black slip helped me emulate Cleopatra; the white one turned me into a Rapunzel with flaxen hair. I could look all I wanted through my mother’s closet but not touch.

My childhood wardrobe was less extensive than hers; I had a few dresses and casual clothes from the once-a-year back-to-school shopping excursions. Shopping bags of my older cousins’ hand-me-downs arrived every year and I would sift through them, often preferring to wear my brother’s cast-off Levi’s and tees. When the time arrived for me to buy a Bat Mitzvah dress, my mother and I went to the regular Filene’s—not the basement—each of us having strong opinions of what that dress should look like. In the end, after enduring an exhausting session in the fitting room, we agreed upon a long-sleeved satin mini shirtdress, in the lightest shade of blue with tiny grey polka dots. It tied at the waist and had a large, pointed collar. To me it seemed exactly like the sort of dress Marcia Brady would wear, which meant it was groovy. Then we headed to the shoe department. My mother wanted me to wear a delicate and feminine shoe, like a little strappy sandal with a kitten heel. I was insistent on a pair of nude colored Kork-Ease platform shoes. The base was suede, with thick leather crisscrossing top straps.

“Those are so clunky,” my mother dismissed. “They will ruin your outfit.”

But I insisted and eventually she gave in. Those shoes not only gave me height but helped me feel proud, because they were the envy of all my friends. Yes, I felt like a woman the day I became a Bat Mitzvah at thirteen years old in my Kork-Ease shoes.

Darts, slits, gig lines, welts.

Once I started developing a feminine figure, it became obvious that I was not going to inherit my mother’s willowy form. Instead, I was curvaceous, my hips larger, my bust bigger, and my legs strong and sturdy.

One spring vacation when I was a preteen we went shopping for a new bathing suit. I was embarrassed to undress in front of my mother and felt as scrutinized as those ladies in Filene’s Basement. I put on the bathing suit top. It was a halter design. My mother untied the knot at the neck, yanked up the ties, and redid the knot much tighter.

“You need to lift up those breasts,” she snarked.

The tight knot was digging into the nape of my neck and tugged a strand or two of hair.
“There, much better.” She nodded and spun me to face the full-length mirror.

In my teen years, I stopped going with my mother on her shopping trips. Occasionally, she brought outfits home for me. It was as if she enjoyed having another, differing form from her own to shop for and wanted to maintain our old routine of being together via shared shopping experiences. I was irked that she purchased things that she wanted me to wear, sophisticated skirted suits, prim cardigans, slinky silk blouses. Not the type of things a child of the seventies wanted to wear to high school.

At fourteen, my winter coat was a long wool affair with a faux fur collar, when everyone else was wearing puffy parkas.

I soon realized that the only way I could free myself of hand-me-downs, pants suits, and to gain power over my wardrobe was to buy my own clothes.

Summer babysitting hours enabled me to purchase tube tops, Landlubber and a.Smile jeans. The leather coat that was an important fashion item for all my classmates was too expensive and out of reach. I longed for something edgy: a fitted, cropped, zipped black jacket with zippers on the sleeves. My mother took me to a leather outlet and would only concede to buying a green trench style with a tie waist or a “car coat,” declaring the cropped jacket “impractical.” And so, I relented. There were three or four small, independent clothing stores in my hometown. As soon as I was old enough to work, I applied for jobs at each. My persistence paid off, and I was hired as a cashier at House of Jeans on Mass Ave. There, I learned to fold Levi’s and stack them by size, hang Danskin leotards on a round rack, and eyeball anyone in from the street and suggest the right waist and length pants size for them. The owner, Nathan, was more interested in snorting lines of cocaine in the back room than working in the store, and he allowed me to change out the large window displays that faced the main street. I climbed into the five-foot-tall window ledge and imagined a career someday dressing the windows in New York City.

I hand-lettered the signs for the window and pinned the clothing to the burlap back wall of the window in positions of activities. There were dancing skirt and leotard outfits embracing his and hers Levi’s sets and even children’s-sized outfits stuffed with craft paper and sitting upright in a red wagon. People started commenting on my windows and I developed a newfound confidence in my own fashion sense.

Capris, Bermuda shorts, pedal pushers, pleats.

These are things I remember my mother saying:

“I don’t know why anyone would wear an empire waist and look pregnant on purpose,” stated my consistently tightly cinched mother.

“A pantsuit is a sign of feminine power.”

“A strategically placed slit is always a nice addition to any skirt.”

“Wear a long line bra to streamline your waist.”

My mother, both feminist and feminine, studied the impact clothing made on people.

“Always dress up when you go to see a doctor,” she said. “They will never admit to it, but physicians will treat a well-dressed person better than someone in casual wear.”

The signs of her dementia began in her seventieth year following a surgery. My impeccable mother started showing up at family parties wearing stained clothing, or in a zip up tracksuit jacket paired with a satin skirt. Her clothing was as confused as her deteriorating mind. I took notice.

Something was off.

The dementia took a relentless hold. She knew she was battling something nefarious. We went to neurologists and tried medications. Nothing returned her enviable, crisp brain. Instead, my mother was navigating her seventh decade enmeshed in a gauzy haze.

I moved her from an apartment to assisted living facilities, finally to a nursing home.

Each move required me to liquidate and adjust her extensive wardrobe—a process that filled me with incredible guilt. The memories came flooding back, there were the dressy sandals she wore to resort vacations with my father, here was her pinstripe suit when she was a dean at a local university, and everything still smelled like her. I hated to discard these treasures but there was no room for it all. She had forgotten about her shoe collection and her plethora of coats. Instead, all that mattered was her purse, and a set of car keys that had long been surrendered.

Elastic waist, zippers, layers, permanent press.

Soon, I was shopping for my mother’s clothing. Her needs were practical: easy to wash and wear items. I tried to purchase things that were her favorite colors: sunny orange sweaters and yellow pants. Everything had to be warm to protect her against the artificial chilly air in the locked-door environment she now lived in. No need for a bra—too tough to fasten. Underpants gave way to Depends, shoes replaced with slippers, her belts long cast aside.

Even though she had lost her ability to speak, she seemed to understand when spoken to, and she reacted with a large smile and close attention when I brought in new clothes for her and unbagged them. That integral part of her personality held on to the end.

We buried her in a plain white shroud as she instructed in her will and is the Jewish tradition.

Clothing has no purpose in the next realm.

Her wardrobe is mostly all gone now, donated to local thrift stores. Her treasured wardrobe can now be spread among many closets.

I kept a few treasured items, the knit gloves embroidered with flowers that my grandmother made for her, a scarf in a geometric print that screams the seventies, a jacket she wore to all the best parties, a jaunty pink silk blouse that my daughter now wears and my mother’s A-line cotton skirt with a white star pattern that was her go-to July fourth outfit.

In the meantime, her voice returns to me when I shop for clothing or peruse a catalog:
Peplum, empire, epaulet, portrait collar. These are words my mother taught me—she wanted me to know that features of fashion had names.

Share This: