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"  With This Suit I Thee Wed by Silvia DiPierdomenico Growing up during the 1980s in a Massachusetts mill town, I watched endless hours of reruns of The Mary Tyler Moore Show. No matter what difficulties befell Mary, in her stylish pants ensembles she boasted a dauntless femininity. Mary&amp;#039;s appeal lay also in the fact that, as a single woman, she was the opposite of my mother\u2014a homemaker who never wore pants. After finishing college in the early 1990s, I knew I wanted to live in a big city and try to make it\u2014like Mary. I wanted all those interpersonal adventures and triumphs, but most of all, I wanted the style and independence that her wardrobe choices seemed to lend her. I moved into a one-bedroom place in New York City with my college sweetheart, whom I married at city hall after a few years. We set the date for December 1. In October, I began thinking hard about what Mary would wear for a city hall wedding. A friend who worked at Yves Saint Laurent as an assistant to Tom Ford was willing to loan me a dress. But I decided that if marriage is a partnership between equals, then I wanted to get married in pants. Shutting out antipants protests from both my friend and my mother, I began my hunt for the ideal pantsuit. Once a week I scoured the women&amp;#039;s apparel sections of Bergdorf&amp;#039;s and Barneys and the rest. I visited designer boutiques that I had never dared enter. But after weeks of trying on pants and tops and jackets, I still hadn&amp;#039;t found the outfit I envisioned Mary wearing. I had begun reconsidering my friend&amp;#039;s offer of a dress when, two weeks before the ceremony, I fell in love with a French pantsuit in SoHo. There it draped, just so, on the hanger: the tweed jacket, collarless and without buttons, cinched at the waist with a belt of the same fabric; the pants, cigarette style and lined in silk. The label read Louis Vuitton (wasn&amp;#039;t I too young?) and the price sent a chill down my spine. But the sales assistant pointedly informed me that it was Marc Jacobs&amp;#039; third collection for the brand since creating their women&amp;#039;s lines. Reader, that suit had me bewitched. Elegant but tough, it evoked a powerful femininity I had yet to take possession of. It was also in a style of which my mother wouldn&amp;#039;t approve (never mind its cost!). Such extravagance on the eve of my wedding seemed a leap of faith, symbolizing a wild hope about my ability to live up to the suit&amp;#039;s bold image. And I was sure Mary would&amp;#039;ve been proud. I ended up getting my money&amp;#039;s worth, wearing the suit throughout the winter and into early spring. I wore it to late-night dinners at the newest restaurants, to art openings and cool bars. I even wore it to a place I never expected to visit as a 29-year-old: an oncologist&amp;#039;s office. A year after my marriage, and one month before the 9/11 attacks, I was diagnosed with cancer. In the face of the uncertainty that the whole country shared at the time, I audaciously wore my suit for what I hoped would be my sixth and last chemotherapy session; though the day marked an end to half a year&amp;#039;s worth of physical and emotional hardship, it also signaled a beginning: Bald, slim, and looking rather tall, I at last knew myself to be the confident woman typified by the suit. To test my resilience and personal style\u2014two things that kept evolving despite the darkness of that year\u2014I interviewed at a prominent Manhattan art gallery. The position\u2014personal assistant to the new partner\u2014was one for which I was both over-and underqualified. Nevertheless, donning my wedding suit and channeling Mary, I got the job on the spot. &amp;#039;ve since had numerous jobs and moved across the country to another big city. I&amp;#039;ve even recently forgiven my mother for her aversion to pants. It&amp;#039;s true that in Los Angeles, where the cold months are few, I&amp;#039;m less often in my suit; all the same, over the years, through the many heartaches and different versions of myself, it has remained a steady constant.  My Blue Period by Ayo Keys I&amp;#039;ve never been all-American. I&amp;#039;ve been mistaken for British, Korean, Chinese, West Indian, Indian, Puerto Rican. I don&amp;#039;t do much to negate such assumptions of alienness, though I do speak fairly proper American English, wear flats, eat Thai food\u2014oh, and read, which is practically unheard of for an African-American high school kid from Philadelphia. The only time I feel all-American is when I&amp;#039;m in denim. My love affair with James Dean started in eighth grade, when I watched Rebel Without a Cause. I adopted a strict, minimalist look: white V-neck, black pants, pearl stud earrings. I grabbed a faded denim jacket from our coat closet. Never saw it before. Thought it was another jacket. Gap 1969, bleach stain on one sleeve, wrinkled collar, sleeves long enough for my tall frame\u2014it was hideous! Soon, it was the only jacket I ever wore. I was James Dean, if he&amp;#039;d had mocha skin, didn&amp;#039;t smoke, and went to an all-girl high school. I stomped around in my brown riding boots and full bangs, pretending not to give a flying fuck about what anyone thought about me and my oversize jacket. I was badass! I was wearing it when, on one crowded El ride home, an old man suddenly peed on my friend&amp;#039;s white Nikes. She made a face Jim Carrey would envy and proceeded to swear for an eternity. I laughed so hard that I snorted and walked into a column on the platform. The fall of sophomore year was ridiculously warm\u2014until the transit strike. I would stand on the corner after school in my jacket, waiting for my ride in the freezing November wind. I may have been cold, but I was cute. I know I was cute because I got my first kiss that year, in that jacket. It came only after I admitted to myself that I might as well stop trying to get boys to notice me. I was almost positive that I would die a virgin. Too tall. Too skinny. Too shy and smart. And above all, far too cynical, sarcastic, and completely inept when it came to flirting. It happened on my front steps: Nighttime plus a bad boy\u2014you do the math; it was brief, thrilling, and magical: a Disney moment. He slobbered on my chin. His slightly sweaty sweet-salty smell lingered on my jacket&amp;#039;s collar for days. The time I met Halle Berry at Ralph Lauren, that jacket was in my bag. When I took a picture with fashion photographer Nigel Barker at the local Macy&amp;#039;s, I had just taken it off. Alexa Chung walked past me when I was standing outside of Madewell in it. The two summers I spent in Connecticut at an arts camp? That jacket came along. It was the most supportive friend I had. It came with me to the glassblowing studio and on sewing trips and protected me from shards of metal in sculpture shop. It kept me warm at night when we&amp;#039;d all lie down on the ice-black tar of the basketball court and stare at the stars. I saw my first shooting star in that jacket. By senior year I was rocking a pompadour and black riding boots, but every time I dropped a college application in the mail, I was wearing that jacket. I went to some amazing parties in it, opened my acceptance letter from Parsons in it, got the numbers of some particularly handsome boys in it. I&amp;#039;ve even been mistaken for a model in that jacket. Spring is turning to summer. My hair has grown into a bob, and the cuffs on the jacket are fraying. I realize that I never questioned where it came from, why it&amp;#039;s so faded, why the collar won&amp;#039;t stay down, or why I don&amp;#039;t just buy a jacket that fits me properly. I realize that even though it feels like it belonged to someone else, even though it&amp;#039;s faded to the point where you think it belongs to a John Steinbeck character, even though it&amp;#039;s strange, it&amp;#039;s beautiful. It seems like it caused all these wonderful, hysterical, and enlightening things to happen to me. While I may never be correctly identified asAmerican, I don&amp;#039;t care\u2014because as long as I have my denim jacket to help me live through all the pissed-on Nikes, slobbery kisses, and shooting stars, I&amp;#039;m as American as I need to be. I don&amp;#039;t care, because somewhere, in some mysterious fiber in that hideous jacket, is the magic and beauty of something that&amp;#039;s been beaten down and hasn&amp;#039;t given up; something marvelous with an identity all its own that&amp;#039;s just as wrong as it is right. And after all, what&amp;#039;s more American than that?  The Girl in the Pucci Dress by Daisy Dowling La Paz, Bolivia, 2005: Cocktails at a swank country club in the world&amp;#039;s highest capital. Craggy mountains loom over a perfect patch of lawn. A woman in traditional braids, a bowler hat, and thick layers of petticoats tends the rosebush beside the pool. Guests gather, and somehow, mysteriously, they&amp;#039;ve come dressed identically\u2014themen in sport coats and oxfords, the women in expensive, perfectly tailored jeans and kitten heels, little jackets, long hair down and smooth. I&amp;#039;m a foreigner in a dress\u2014worse yet, a conspicuous dress: a clingy chocolate-and-purple tissue-weight silk Emilio Pucci jersey with a deep V-neck that my mother bought in 1968. I heave a big sigh, which, at an oxygen-poor 11,000 feet, leaves me woozy. In reality, my air had been thin for a while. Six months after finishing my first book and leaving the man my friends and family assumed was &amp;quot;the one,&amp;quot; I had yet to regain my moorings. Years spent in a rocky relationship and writing had left me lonely, raw from constant criticism. Could chapter seven be completely rewritten by Tuesday? Why wasn&amp;#039;t I ready to get engaged? And when was I going to lose five pounds and look just a little more like Keira Knightley? Now\u2014alone, tired, underemployed\u2014I spent much of my time seeking approval: of my re\u0301sume\u0301, my looks, my decisions, from a man. I&amp;#039;d gotten tentative, and when you&amp;#039;re trying to create a new future, tentative is dangerous. Going to Bolivia for my dear friend Mauricio&amp;#039;s wedding was an attempt to kick-start a new, bolder me. Packing for a Latin-American wedding is something like packing for the Miss Universe contest: a week of distinct events, all requiring special clothes. In a panic, I call my mother, a sixtysomething teacher at a girls&amp;#039;school. &amp;quot;&amp;#039;Traditional barbecue followed by folk dancing&amp;#039;?&amp;quot; I moan. &amp;quot;Does &amp;#039;boat ride on Lake Titicaca, picnic lunch&amp;#039; mean khakis? What&amp;#039;s &amp;#039;cocktail attire&amp;#039; in the Andes?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Take my Pucci,&amp;quot; she says simply. My mother wears the uniform of her profession: twinsets, loafers, reading glasses. When I think of her, she&amp;#039;s standing at a blackboard or at her small apartment&amp;#039;s kitchen sink. But the photos of her buried in cardboard boxes at the back of her closet, the ones from before marriage and motherhood, show a different person. There she is at a New York party, cocktail in hand, in slingbacks and a bright sheathdress worthy of Mad Men; in a white miniskirt, long legs tanned and arms outstretched in a joking &amp;quot;come hither&amp;quot; pose, smiling slyly at the camera; laughing hard during a ski-trip lunch with a gaggle of friends on a balcony overlooking the piste, in a tight cherry-red turtleneck sweater. She was young. And having a good time. And didn&amp;#039;t look like she needed validation. The Pucci dress is produced from a box in the back of Mom&amp;#039;s closet, a relic among those photos. It travels to Bolivia in a quart-size freezer bag nestled in the bottom of my suitcase, protected from snags. Alone in the La Paz hotel, I slip it out and wriggle it on, pulling my hair into a loose knot. I wish for some of my mom&amp;#039;s younger confidence as I strike a few poses for the bathroom mirror: like Mom, I tell myself, just shorter and blonder. It will have to do. At the party, the dress&amp;#039;s slinky fit and loud chocolate swirls might as well be a flashing neon sign: Look at me. I hunch my shoulders and sidle up next to Mauricio at the bar. &amp;quot;Daiseee!&amp;quot; He points appreciatively at my chest and hips, highlighted by the dress&amp;#039;s drape. &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s good!&amp;quot; I stand up straight. A woman speaking rapid Spanish slides past me for her gin and tonic and squeals, &amp;quot;Pucci!&amp;quot; I smile back. A miracle happens: Stranger after stranger remarks on the dress, and with each compliment, I get bolder. I laugh and argue and tell stories and flirt\u2014yes, it was fascinating to write a book, and yes, I am a native New Yorker. The evening flies.I&amp;#039;m back to being myself\u2014confident, unedited, vintage me. My daughter is now five months old. The Pucci dress is curled in a sandwich bag in my dresser drawer, waiting for her when she needs it. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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