A Liz Girl
Writing by treason on Saturday, 30 of June , 2007 at 4:47 pm
“Aw. Liz Claiborne died.”
“So?”
“She was the designer responsible for my big red ones.”
“Oh. Well, in that case, she deserved it.”
Sounds harsh, but T was never a fan of “the big red ones.” I mention Liz Claiborne for a couple reasons. One, I read an article on NRO by Nancy French recalling her relationship with The Liz way back in the nineties when Nance was in – gasp! – high school. Amusing stuff.
And two – my “relationship” with the cult of Claiborne, but further back for me. It was in the Eighties and I was already out of college and in my second job. There was a girl. Actually, there were several, and they were all about fashion and hair and accessories. They shopped at trendy boutiques and knew when things would be on sale at Macy’s. I watched them the way a cat watches finches in a cage. So colorful. So mesmerizing.
One was not so flashy. I’ve written about her before here – Elizabeth, who always wore a simple strand of pearls and wanted to be a travel agent. The one who married the Belgian and who served tiny portions of attractive food on enormous platters. Definitely the loft type.
Liz was tall and slim, and she kept her dark curls clipped short. Peaches and cream complexion with the most subtle spatter of freckles across her delicate little nose. She stood straight. She wore simple flats or a sensible heel, and usually wore those well-tailored sleeveless shifts that made her look like something out of the Sixties. Something Hepburnesque. And I’m talkin’ Audrey.
She always carried a small handbag. Not a satchel, not a shoulder bag. No, this was something like a clutch. This always fascinated me. How could she fit everything she needed into that bag?
It was a Liz Claiborne bag. Clean lines, minute, but it had compartments for anything she needed to put in it. I’d been dreaming of a purse like that. So did I run out and buy one? No. I did not. (Well, not until many, many years later.) I believe at the time I was dragging around an oversized electric pink zip up hobo bag that looked like a deflated hot air balloon.
Anyway, unlike me, Liz, who was so tasteful, sporting those clean lines and such simplicity, always, as they used to say about a previous generation of young women, looked “smart.”
And there was another girl. Shorter, more athletic looking, someone my mother might have referred to as “masculine.” She spoke slowly, almost as if she had a Southern drawl, and she always wore Claiborne sportswear. Perfectly fitting trousers – slacks – and lightweight sweaters and crisp blouses. She seemed comfortable and competent. Confident, too. So much so that she approached a fabulously handsome black man in a store and told him that he smelled good. He told her the name of his cologne, then asked her to dinner. Soon they were an item.
Could Liz Claiborne clothing make women do such bold things? Liz traveled the globe and married that Belgian, then bought outrageously expensive dinnerware. If I wore Claiborne, would it change my life?
I’d been wearing contact lenses but was considering a new pair of glasses since frames had become interesting again. My sister was in serious need of a new pair, but I knew she’d never go get an exam and pick out frames if I wasn’t there doing the same thing. Our father, I reminded her, could drink a bar dry, but always managed to be at work in the morning. The only time he missed a day, our mother always marveled, was when he broke his glasses.
You see, this story haunted me and my blind sisters since childhood. We, if we were lucky, had one pair of glasses and nothing had better happen to them. I used to fantasize that one day I would be wealthy. Furs? Of course not. Cars? Just need one that runs. Mansions? Too much to dust. No, all I wanted was a drawer full of eyeglasses so I never had to wear the same frames two days in a row.
My sister had always had the same fantasy so off we went to the mall. It’s where we found the Liz Claiborne frames. At last! I could buy designer items, I told myself, and not feel pretentious or extravagant because eyeglasses are practical. I wanted the cat’s eyes because I’d always liked the style and maybe on some level I guess I wanted to look like something out of Gary Larson.
But for some reason I chickened out (I bought a similar pair, years later, as sunglasses) and picked out the LC 22s in red and in black, and the LC 19s in tortoise. My sister also chose the same red and black, but picked up white and royal blue in the LC 19s. These frames were outrageous in that they were so ENORMOUS.
Usually when the two of us planned to be together at the same time we managed to show up wearing different frames. Either the BIG circles, or the BIG rectangles. However, there were those incidents when we planned badly and found ourselves in public wearing identical frames. Like the time we had picked up Kate and Gwen – my sister’s gigantic St. Newfs – from the groomer. Their heads were like beachballs yet the dog stylist felt it necessary to affix tiny green bows on their heads after blow-drying their coats.
We drove down El Camino Real, through Sunnyvale and Mountain View, in my sister’s metallic blue AMC Hornet station wagon, with the two giant dogs in the back seat, wearing their little green bows on the tops of their heads. One over each ear. We were in the front of the Hornet, wearing the giant red Liz Claiborne frames, our hair to our shoulders with bangs. And I suddenly felt as if we were being watched. I looked at the other cars on the road and it was so: People in the other cars were staring at us.
It was then that my sister and I looked at each other and realized, simultaneously, how absolutely ridiculous this must have looked. It is a memory, thanks to a certain short-haired and bespectacled designer, that I will always cherish.
R.I.P.
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