A few years ago, I left my Wisconsin farm to visit a very stylish, beautiful, well-groomed friend in a hot Southern city. Although she is a modest person, she has ball gown after ball gown in garment bag after garment bag; shelves for her jewelry boxes; many pocketed hanging devices for her heels, her mules, her velvet sandals; and sealed containers for her sumptuous woolens, boxes no moths would dream of invading.
When I was a girl, my nickname was Mud-dog, for the same reason the dirty mess of a boy in Peanuts was called Pigpen. Through the years, I’ve learned how pointless it is to spend real money on clothes—for example, a Pollock splash of wine down the front and across the bosom of the thousand-dollar sweater, the very first night I wore it. The shameful truth is this: I hardly try anymore. I’ve nearly given up.
But in the thick humidity in the South with my glamorous friend it seemed reasonable to consider buying a shearling coat by the Canadian designer Zuki, the curly fleece pressed into shimmery gray-brown ripples, what the Badlands might look like from a satellite. The saleswoman assured me that Zuki had not killed the sheep in order to make the coat, which seemed unlikely, since the very skin side was there, a fine, soft suede. My hostess colluded too: “You have to buy this exquisite fur. Sixty percent off! You won’t be sorry.” A good friend always roots for commerce.
It seemed a bold, imaginative act, not only to dream that the world would again go cold, but that I would at some point have garments that I could wear with such a coat. Reader, I bought the Zuki. Yes, it was a great bargain, but still more than I could afford, so that the instant the salesgirl swiped my credit card I went prickly all over with regret. Also too late, I remembered that I live in a small town, that I would have no occasion to wear the coat, and that my perfectly good winterwear, a long brown Benedictine nun affair from Macy’s, served me quite well. It was a coat you could bundle up into a nice pillow shape or throw over yourself in the gate area while you waited out the delays. A little shaken, I went home, and there, during the show-and-tell portion of dinner, I took my purchase out of the box and did a runway walk for my husband and two children.
No support for old Mud-dog from that crew:
“You paid how much?”
“Are you out of your mind?”
“It’s ugly! It’s hideous! That sheep was too killed!”
Later, the neighbors had the same verdict, and my sister, the ultimate fashionista, tried to be nice but thought I’d done wrong. One thing led to the next: My son kindly offered to help me put the Zuki on eBay. He took the photos, he led me through the labyrinth of rules and regulations. I wanted to get a goodly portion of the money back, and along with the cash, the erasure of regret. But imagine! In the hottest summer on record, no one out in the climate-free cyberworld wanted to pay more than 100 bucks. And so I wrapped the thing in a garbage bag and threw it in the chest freezer, my version of the cedar-lined walk-in closet.
A few years passed; the coat remained moth-free in the basement until one bitterly cold morning when it rose before me in a waking dream. I got up, removed it from the bag, and sniffed for freezer burn. I was going to New York the next day, and if it didn’t smell of frosty ice cream, meat, and vegetables, I might finally wear it. I had no appropriate accessories, no boots, no terrific hat, no matching scarf, no elegant gloves. But my God, it was warm. I walked into the cutting wind down Lexington Avenue, and I felt like King Arthur’s sword slicing through the stone. It turns out it’s not only the sheep’s pin-size brain that allows it to stand stolidly around outside in the driving rain, but the radiating electric-blanket-like warmth of its own skin. I was a Mud-dog in sheep’s clothing: comfortable, exhilarated, and, as you will see, fashionable.
On that trip, I had occasion to go to a concert with my cousin and his friend, the one who has famously worked in fashion for several decades. I had never met this celebrity, but when I walked up to the pair waiting for me in the lobby, before we could be introduced, before a single word was exchanged, the friend reached for my coat. He clutched it and me to him. “Where did you get this?” he breathed. “I haven’t seen such a coat in years.” He pronounced: “This coat is fabulous.”
Note to everyone: Ha ha! My beautiful Southern friend had been right to steer me to the New York–certified fabulous coat, I had been right to buy it, everybody else was wrong, wrong, wrong.
It is still my best purchase to date, and so far, I haven’t wrecked it. Through the spring and summer and fall it awaits me in the freezer for next season, for those times when I again feel transformed in a glorious city on a bracing winter’s day.
