Goody Two-Shoes
Manic Pixies, career girls, color swatches, oh my
I moved to New York City in 1986. I remember being astonished by how well people dressed, and most particularly how everyone wore interesting shoes. I had moved to New York from Boston, where everyone either dressed in things they found in the sale section at Talbots or in clothes they inherited from a mad spinster aunt who lived in an attic in Marblehead. New York had a different aesthetic indeed. First of all, black. Black, black, black. Even babies wore black. Did you know that you can buy black strollers? Black swaddling cloths? Anyway, I dug it very much. That year, while visiting my parents in Cleveland, I had my colors done. I didn’t want to, but someone gave me the consultation as a gift. The color person examined me closely, held a few swatches up to my face, and then announced that I needed to wear brown all the time—a color I hated. Then she added that the most important thing is that I should never, ever wear black. She sounded so adamant and spoke with such foreboding that I was convinced that even at a funeral I should dress in a mocha sheath. Then I moved to New York and the idea of wearing cocoa and russet seemed completely absurd. I dared to defy her and started assembling a wardrobe that was as black as could be.
The mid Eighties were all about business and corporate ambition in New York City. The streets thronged with women in sharp-shouldered Ann Taylor suits, nude hose, and clunky white sneakers. In their tote bags were a pair of sensible pumps. I had never really seen sneakers used this way, as a mode of transportation rather than as athletic gear. I also hadn’t encountered the two-shoe system, except in the depths of winter in Boston when you wore snow boots and had to change into shoes at your destination. I understood the necessity but for some reason it irritated the hell out of me, to have to carry shoes. I longed for the days of galoshes or whatever you’d call those rubber wrappers that people wore over their shoes: a little snowsuit for your feet. One year I determined that I would find a pair of rubbers even if it killed me. I discovered that they existed for men but the smallest size was twice as big as my foot. I know my mother had rubbers! Why had we regressed when it came to footwear?
Anyway, the sneakers and suits look was a diagnostic feature of New York in the Eighties. If you lived someplace other than New York, where you could drive to work, you probably didn’t need to do this shoe staging, but people have to walk a lot in New York and doing ten blocks of sidewalk in heels could be treacherous. It was the essential working-girl look, the Midtown middle management uniform. I felt lucky that I could wear shoes to work that I could walk in. I felt lucky I wasn’t that kind of working girl.
For a long time, I couldn’t bear the sight of sneakers with skirts because this office-gal vision, the sneaker-clad corporate warrior woman marching up Sixth Avenue, was burned into my eyeballs. But a cure presented itself. Some time ago, a friend of a friend was starting a fashion consultation business and she offered to peruse my clothes and style my wardrobe to practice her skills. She came over one afternoon and we got cracking. Most of what I asked her about was footwear because I couldn’t figure out what shoes to wear with a lot of my clothes. I had an intractable attraction to ugly shoes: big, clunky, flat things that elves might choose to wear in the forest. I wore them with everything, even when I knew, intellectually, that they were wrong. The most feminine shoes I owned were actual ballet slippers, made by a ballet company, which I wore on special occasions, such as when I paired them with a very traditional wedding gown at my first wedding. The sight of me wearing a Priscilla of Boston gown with ballet slippers almost gave my mother, a high-heel partisan, a heart attack.
My stylist friend sorted out my clothes and then scrutinized the pile I had designated as Clothes For Which I Do Not Have Shoes Nor Do I Understand the Shoes They Require. She flipped through the pile and then pronounced the solution: White sneakers. More to the point, White Keds. They were her answer to every question: What do I wear with this orange mini-dress? With this pleated satin skirt? With this denim dress? Susan, she began to say wearily, white sneakers.
If I remember correctly, the sneakers I owned at the time were utilitarian: Running shoes and court shoes for playing squash. I didn’t have any darling little Keds. Obviously, I had entirely missed the ascent of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, that durable movie trope of the cute, kooky, sprite-like female who has either a wacky haircut or wears cats-eye eyeglasses and solves male problems by being free and uninhibited and hyperactive. These girls wear white Keds with dresses, and while a proper historian, like, say, Doris Kearns Goodwin, might disagree, I say that the trend of sneakers-with-skirts as a desirable visual began there. It was a distinctly different look than the women trudging to work in Manhattan wearing chunky old-school New Balance sneakers with their beige suits and briefcases: Manic Pixie Dream Girls were wearing tomboyish childlike Keds with vintage shirtwaist dresses made out of a picnic tablecloth. The message was accidental boyish femininity belonging to a young woman who would never work in an office unless it was the office of an art gallery.
But at the time, I was not yet a student of the Manic Pixie, so I thought my stylist friend was a little crazy to prescribe flat-soled white tennis shoes as the cure-all for my closet. But I was intrigued, and a few days later bought a pair of milky white Supergas, the Italian equivalent of Keds (same idea but more comfortable). I dared to put them on with a dress and to my surprise it didn’t immediately channel my nightmare vision of Midtown and the power-dressing look sneakers with skirts had come to represent to me. In fact, I kind of liked it. Also, like the ugly shoes I so enjoyed, they were easy to walk in. I realized, too, that they dialed down the girlie quality of the dress, just enough. I am secretly a tomboy, so if I ever wear anything too feminine I feel like I’m playing dress-up. Sometimes that’s necessary, I know, but as a rule I’m happiest when at least one thing I’m wearing would appeal to a ten-year-old boy.
I meant this to be a column about wearing black but I tracked off on the topic of sneakers because both of these fashion tropes—sneakers with skirts and wearing black—remind me of living in New York and how much it changed my ideas of fashion. I just spent several days in the city so I got caught in reveries. Tune in next week for a continuation: Susan Discovers Black Clothes and then Moves to California and Reconsiders.
SHOW NOTES
—I just LOVE the AppleTV show The New Look, which is about Christian Dior and Coco Chanel and Paris in the wake of WWII. It’s brilliant. The setting and production is gorgeous, but the show is not all that fashion-y; it’s more about their personalities and struggles through the war. Ten thumbs up.
—I was in New York for a few days to help celebrate the 100th anniversary of my publisher, Simon&Schuster. Happy birthday S&S, and many more!
I was warned that if I went barefoot through the pandemic I'd never get into heels again, and it's true. White Keds with Lands End dresses. Amazon Essentials flats for dress occasions.
Interesting. The Purple wardrobe will be the best. (When I am an old woman I shall wear purple With a red hat which doesn't go, and doesn't suit me. And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves And satin sandals, and say we've no money for butter.)