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"  From Cleavage To Chlo\u00E9  The Texas socialite has evolved into a chic creature. But Mimi Swartz still misses the old model. In Houston, nostalgia is a heretical and hopeless pursuit. Anyone caught looking backward in this most forward-looking of American cities is usually a candidate for emigration or exile, which is why I almost never confess to missing the good old days, the ones that span the oil boom of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Not that things aren&amp;#039;t great here now: As the nation&amp;#039;s fourth-largest city and the capital of the worldwide energy business, this Houston is multicultural, multiethnic, and, with oil at about $100 a barrel, blessed with a robust economy. But life isn&amp;#039;t quite as much fun as it used to be when it comes to fashion. If you remember the Oscars before the advent of the personal stylist, you know what I&amp;#039;m talking about. When I arrived in Houston in 1976, the wives of fantastically wealthy oilmen, who sat at the apex of the city&amp;#039;s social scene, abided by the only Texas dictum that mattered, which was to show off how rich you were as often and as intensely as possible. Sure, there were some old-money people with understated taste, but they weren&amp;#039;t very entertaining. There&amp;#039;s a bit of dialogue attributed to the unsinkable Molly Brown that has been locally adapted to apply to two oil dowagers lunching in the 1950s. One eyed her friend&amp;#039;s ensemble: &amp;quot;I didn&amp;#039;t think it was proper to wear diamonds in the daytime.&amp;quot; Dowager no. 2 replied, &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s what I thought, until I got some.&amp;quot; Hence, for decades, women dressed, and then dressed some more, to prove that they weren&amp;#039;t the oil-field trash other people thought they were, even though the lavish displays kind of undercut the purpose (and reinforced the stereotype of the tacky Texan). By the mid-1970s, things had settled down a bit, but not too much. The society pages kept breathless track of Joanne King Herring, who, besides being the wife of a natural-gas magnate, was famous for her bountiful blond hair, her daytime d\u00E9colletage revealed by the ruffled satin creations of European designers, and her party-giving skills, which included hiring a Boy Scout troop to imitate Nubian slaves for a bacchanal-themed party. (We now know, thanks to Charlie Wilson&amp;#039;s War, that Herring was busy fighting for freedom in Afghanistan at the same time she was entertaining so lavishly here.) Then there was Lynn Wyatt, who was the anti-Joanne\u2014her family owned Sakowitz, the Bergdorf of Houston, and she wore Yves Saint Laurent couture before most Texans knew there was such a thing. Her second husband, oilman Oscar Wyatt, underwrote her jaw-dropping wardrobe and theme parties in the south of France. (One year Oscar dressed as a knife-wielding raja. Some weren&amp;#039;t sure he was joking.) Lynn Wyatt knew how to look exquisite without looking showy, but there was also a host of less restrained bold-faced types, and they provided constant joy for hoi polloi like me. My favorite was Lady Walker, the ex-stripper who became mistress to J. Howard Marshall II. That multimillionaire oilman, in his grief at Lady&amp;#039;s death (on an operating table during cosmetic surgery), found solace in the arms of Anna Nicole Smith. Lady Walker liked her hair dyed raven black, her makeup heavy, and her luncheon suits low-cut, in a shade of white that always, always had to match her Rolls-Royce. Now, there was a woman who followed her own fashion dictates. I blame globalization and the growing maturity and security of wealthy Texans for the virtual vanishing here of that kind of dramatic and ebullient, if not exactly tasteful, dressing. The new stars of Houston&amp;#039;s scene, youngish women such as Phoebe Tudor and Courtney Sarofim\u2014there are lots of them these days\u2014are all elegantly turned out in the latest from Proenza Schouler and Giambattista Valli. Their hair is done to look impeccably undone, with excellent highlights and no trace whatsoever of lacquer. Their makeup is natural and their cleavage respectable, even at late-night black ties. In other words, they could pass for the best dressed in Paris or Manhattan. But, says Clifford Pugh, for years the Houston Chronicle&amp;#039;s style critic and now the editor in chief of CultureMap, a website devoted to all things cultural in town, something has been lost. In the past, Pugh says, Houston women dressed for themselves. &amp;quot;Now they dress for others and for what they think the trends are. They want to look like the fashion magazines think they should look, as opposed to the way they want to look.&amp;quot; As a photo caption in the Chronicle&amp;#039;s 2011 Best Dressed list put it, &amp;quot;Many women wore creamy neutral colors to the luncheon, but a few made a statement in black.&amp;quot; At least Chiclet-size engagement diamonds still seem to be very popular. And every once in a while, someone emerges to prove that the old Texas spirit lives. My heroine these days is Becca Cason Thrash, who holds a benefit for the Houston Ballet titled &amp;quot;Dancing With the Houston Stars.&amp;quot; In 2011, the event, a local homage to the popular TV show, was held atop a dance floor constructed over her mammoth indoor pool (Thrash is married to a natural-gas heir), where socialites in skimpy rhinestone-studded costumes compete with the help of professional local dancers. Breasts and booties bob through dramatic splits, cartwheels, and enthusiastic head-to-crotch dance moves. Last year, the popular male Houston hairdresser Cer\u00F3n performed Lady Gaga&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;Born This Way&amp;quot; in a silver pantsuit. In 2010, Lynn Wyatt, still glam in her seventies, competed in slinky black tights, and then changed into a ruby-red lace Elie Saab gown. As we say in Houston, it&amp;#039;s d\u00E9j\u00E0 vu all over again. Once a year, at least. \u2014Mimi Swartz  &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s So First-Term Obama&amp;quot;  In DC your job has a uniform. Yet there&amp;#039;s hope, says Sarah Haight; color has been sighted. Meryl Streep, chestnut locks cropped into a gamine mess, was wrapped in a palest pink bathrobe, uncoiling spaghetti into Jack Nicholson&amp;#039;s open mouth. They were lying in bed in a charmingly dilapidated Georgetown townhouse, trading barbed quips\u2014a food writer and a political correspondent, falling for each other over postcoital carbonara. It was 1988, and I was 10, crouched on the stairs of our Connecticut colonial as my parents watched Heartburn, its sweeping shots of the Washington Monument filling the screen. I fell asleep that night dreaming of the nation&amp;#039;s capital, a place where journalists ate dinner in bed wearing silky underthings: glamour incarnate. One Sunday many years later, flipping channels in my own Dupont Circle living room, I stumbled upon Meryl and Jack. Why was she wearing that ridiculous white jacket that made her look like a linebacker in Jones Apparel? How had her chic haircut turned into a helmet? Heartburn, it turns out, is an ode to banal, thigh-skimming blazers, droopy pencil skirts, and DC-style failed marriages (the kind in which one half falls for an ambassador&amp;#039;s wife). The ubiquitous &amp;#039;80s shoulder pad may have given way to today&amp;#039;s possibly even more prevalent skinny belt, but to an outsider the sartorial conundrum of Washington women might seem eerily unchanged: how to dress for power without descending into tailored blandness? Often, in an effort to appear serious or substantive, DC women become studies in conformity. They eschew signifiers that shout fashion: a heel that teeters a little too high, patterned tights, clashing prints, cleavage, bags whose names you might actually know (inside the Beltway, the Motorcycle is something Jon Huntsman rides). But scratch the city&amp;#039;s limestone veneer, and a sector-related style code emerges, with flourishes\u2014if you could call them that\u2014that telegraph provenance and profession. Take the city&amp;#039;s think tanks, where shades of pale to navy blue, those hues of coolness and neutrality, influence everything from sweater sets to logos. At the Aspen Institute, where I work, I once slipped past a trustee\u2014late sixties, bow tie\u2014who hollered to his companion, &amp;quot;She wears some crazy outfits!&amp;quot; I was wearing a sleeveless blue-and-yellow print shift from Ann Taylor. Commentaries of the silent sort were directed toward a friend who works at the State Department, where diplomats use souvenirs from far-flung assignments to punch up a look; think black pantsuits with ikat scarves (Istanbul tour) and geometric pewter earrings (NATO meeting, Brussels). Donning electric blue stilettos (posting in Kabul) with her demure gray suit last spring, my pal realized that the brows furrowed in her direction by the building&amp;#039;s entrance guards were not expressions of security alertness. She traded the blue for neutral Manolos (downtime in Duty-Free). Over on Capitol Hill, style fissures along party lines: Red-state press secretaries and lobbyists are usually the ones in the most polished, traditional looks\u2014Louis Vuitton logo totes (brand-savvy but far from flash), diamond studs\u2014while their Dem peers skew toward still-preppy shapes, but in a bolder mash-up of fabrics endorsed by the first lady. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s so first-term Obama,&amp;quot; I overheard one girl telling her friend\u2014joking, I think\u2014in a J.Crew dressing room recently. She was wearing a brocade skirt and cotton cardigan. In Georgetown, now a retail mecca cushioned by brownstones, WASP standards still reign (rendered a little less Preppy Handbook by pops of color on the dresses from Zara along Wisconsin Avenue Northwest), but if you see a black motorcycle jacket or a Zero + Maria Cornejo\u2013esque bias-cut dress, you can bet the wearer lives in the hipper U Street area, where midcentury furniture stores and vibrant jewelry boutiques are packed on Saturday afternoons\u2014and that she&amp;#039;s the rare DC bird who doesn&amp;#039;t work in government. The taste of the city does sway conspicuously with each administration\u2014certainly Michelle Obama, that lover of Azzedine Ala\u00EFa and Alexis Bittar, has emboldened a younger, more diverse band of Obama-ites to embrace the bold accessory. And, note to retailers: Strike now. Last fall, after Tory Burch opened a new store in tony Tysons Corner, Virginia\u2014a 30-minute crawl from Capitol Hill\u2014a slew of Washington power brokers eagerly showed up, including Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett. On a rainy weeknight. In a mall. Even the city&amp;#039;s journalists\u2014for whom staid has long been a sign of supposed seriousness\u2014appear to be tiptoeing into sexier, riskier territory: At a recent party, I noticed CBS&amp;#039;s chief White House correspondent, Norah O&amp;#039;Donnell, in a vivid bubblegum-pink sheath, while nearby a prominent online news editor wore a scoop-back Marni blouse\u2014in a pattern, my companion pointed out, that brazenly did not match her skirt. It is kind of glamorous, no? Perhaps now having a diverse band of high-profile female politicos in power\u2014on both sides of the aisle, from Kirsten Gillibrand and Nancy Pelosi to Michele Bachmann and Lisa Murkowski\u2014will enable the rest of the women in Washington to embrace their individuality (dare I say, femininity?) without seeming frivolous. It&amp;#039;s not such a bad thing to stand out among the Brooks Brothers. \u2014Sarah Haight  High Fidelity  Midwest girls swear allegiance to their cities&amp;#039; roots and make it cool. There she was, perched on a Schwinn at a dingy intersection: a striking blond in a vintage blue-plaid car coat, a striped cap cocked French sailor\u2013style, brown tweed culottes, and cherry red Beatle boots. As she shoved off her corner, pedaling past my car, I thought, Respect, Sister! There is no reason you need to look as grand as you do on a gray Tuesday in Madison, Wisconsin. And yet: There you go, rocking a sweetly nostalgic look (part Scottish lass, part Pearl Jam superfan) that&amp;#039;s brimming with wit and, key in this part of the country, real-world wearable and budget friendly. The rumor about fashion sense in the Midwest, where I grew up (in Milwaukee) and returned to live (in Madison) after 13 years in Manhattan, is that we don&amp;#039;t have much of it. True, even in the Upper Midwest&amp;#039;s most cosmopolitan cities\u2014Chicago, Milwaukee, Madison, Minneapolis\u2014some people wear sweatshirts adorned with howling wolves and sports insignias more than they should. In contrast, though, to the way life can become rigidly channeled in immense places like New York, so that bankers mingle only with bankers, chefs with chefs, writers with writers, each group dressing within its prescribed boundaries, walls in the Midwest tend to be lower and more permeable. For those of us interested in all the possibilities of style, this fosters faith, naive perhaps, yet moving in its conviction, that we are free to create our own dress codes. But more importantly, we look to one another, and to our own histories, for inspiration. And we all know there&amp;#039;s some truly great style going on in each of these cities, where we have shops offering beautiful, idiosyncratic clothes that deeply enhance the pleasure of getting dressed: Milwaukee&amp;#039;s I See London, Madison&amp;#039;s Twigs (for great low-key, chic pieces by Rag &amp;amp;amp; Bone and Steven Alan), Minneapolis&amp;#039; Grethen House (for Maison Martin Margiela high-top suede sneaker booties), and the boutique Michelle Obama made famous, Chicago&amp;#039;s Ikram. Owned by Ikram Goldman, the store serves as a canteen and clubhouse for women seeking labels with global street cred: Rodarte, Rick Owens, Yohji Yamamoto, Prabal Gurung. &amp;quot;All of my clients,&amp;quot; women from all over the world, Goldman emphasizes, &amp;quot;come because they want pieces that represent them. They take dressing up very seriously.&amp;quot; I can imagine a young woman who grew up in central Illinois corn country, pining for high fashion as something existing only in a far-off galaxy, walking into Ikram for the first time. It would be the moment when her world suddenly went from black and white to Technicolor. This is not to deny the strong conservative streak here, reflected in the armies of somber charcoal suits marching up Michigan Avenue. But Chicago is a big town with plenty of room for the Ikramites, the suits, and the rockabilly barmaids, too, leaning hard on arm tattoos and, lately, hot pants. What moves me most are the regional variations that give each midwestern city its own aesthetic. Madison, a college town with liberal attitude, has its own loose, rootsy look, as modeled by Schwinn girl. Then there&amp;#039;s cold, cold Minneapolis, where hearty Scandinavians flocked in the 1800s to toil in the lumber and flour mills and whose descendents are the originators of the hipster-beloved woodsman look: buffalo-check loggers&amp;#039; coats, earflap caps, and leather lace-up boots, the higher the sexier, particularly on women. Minneapolitans are fiercely loyal to their heritage brands, such as Minnetonka Moccasins&amp;#039; golden tan mocs (the inspiration for Bottega Veneta&amp;#039;s new line of suede slippers?) and J. W. Hulme Co. bags (now in deliciously buttery women&amp;#039;s satchels). The pie bakers, sausage makers, and ad execs of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, may be aping Minneapolis&amp;#039; uniform, but the emotional connections locals feel to their well-made, hardworking clothes is what makes this style so cool in situ. And, a friend reports, people here have finally figured out how to mix a bit of Prince\u2014that other native-style tower of power\u2014with their Paul Bunyan. Hence the woman spotted clubbing in a Fleet Farm barn jacket, shiny Marni parachute pants, and towering Azzedine Ala\u00EFa platforms. I steer my own style in the direction I think of as &amp;quot;Milwaukee.&amp;quot; As in any city today, some women here wear $300 jeans and fox-fur chubbies in an effort to go Kardashian. Yet out of respect for the city&amp;#039;s faded blue-collar glory, and the long-standing habit of dressing up every day (my grandpa used to fish in a suit coat and fedora), the city&amp;#039;s most stylish citizens turn out in clothes either officially retro or retro-respecting as a hat-tip to our own backstory. Two close friends from Milwaukee\u2014one a punk-rock schoolmarm who tricks out her workwear with sly leopard-print accents, the other a bookstore clerk who&amp;#039;s been looking superfly in a long leather coat and oversize orange sunglasses\u2014are always ridiculously stylish and perfectly, politely presentable. We grew up in the 1980s, a golden age of vintage shopping, when a lot of grammas and grandpas were, for whatever reason, dying or downsizing, and thrift shops overflowed with prom dresses, spectator brogues, military jackets, the odd Herm\u00E8s scarf, and triple-swagged rhinestone necklaces. We didn&amp;#039;t wear all this stuff at once\u2014but at $2 for a 1930s silk frock, with Hollywood costumers flying in weekly to steal our bounty, we did snap it up fast. We developed a deep appreciation for well-cut clothes as well as our own crafty home-ec sewing skills, taking in seams and lopping off dress skirts to make pretty tops. We experimented wildly, putting disparate pieces together to see what magic we could work\u2014or, failing that, cracking one another up. Now I see how even the new clothes I buy\u2014such as the pair of insanely wide-legged, high-waisted jeans I found recently at Shopbop&amp;#039;s only brick-and-mortar store, in Madison\u2014have a sense of history, reminding me of that hot 1970s mix of hope and turmoil from my mom&amp;#039;s own feminist fashion phase. In them\u2014plus my treasured 1940s nipped-waist, sharp-shouldered navy blue jacket, reminding me of my grandmother&amp;#039;s love for polished, pretty clothes\u2014I feel confident, sexy, mindful of the ups and downs women before me have moved through, and, best of all, like myself. \u2014Louisa Kamps  Dixie Chicks  Nashville&amp;#039;s a little bit country, a little bit rock &amp;#039;n&amp;#039; roll, with a little bit of Helmut in her soul. Whenever I&amp;#039;m out of town and tell people that I live in Nashville, I get one of two reactions. The first: &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ve heard it&amp;#039;s a really cool city. I&amp;#039;ve always wanted to go there.&amp;quot; The second, which until a few years ago was more common, includes a snarky dig. &amp;quot;Where are your overalls?&amp;quot; is pretty popular. It&amp;#039;s a stupid thing to say, obviously, but unless they&amp;#039;ve visited Nashville and seen for themselves that we&amp;#039;re not all wearing 10-gallon hats, most people are working from a pair of deep-rooted cultural clich\u00E9s: the gaudy satin, spangles, and fringe of the country-and-western star and the toothless, barefoot style of the stock Hollywood hillbilly (never mind that Nashville itself sits on a plateau). Oddly, Italian designers\u2014Dolce &amp;amp;amp; Gabbana, Roberto Cavalli\u2014are the ones who seem to get the most mileage out of reinterpreting the whole giddyap thing. Even if they show something cool and wearable (who doesn&amp;#039;t love good denim?), there&amp;#039;s always at least one pigtailed country darlin&amp;#039; in a gingham half-shirt and cutoffs dodging decorative hay bales down the runway. I admit: Sometimes Nashville asks for it. Cowboy boots and gee-tars are still the go-to iconography for Music City&amp;#039;s tourist trade. And the country-music industry didn&amp;#039;t do us any favors, churning out decades of rhinestone cowgirls. But over time even that arena has classed up: From Tanya Tucker slinking onstage in a circa 1978 skintight spandex jumpsuit to Taylor Swift walking the red carpet at the 2011 Country Music Association awards in silvery white J. Mendel, we&amp;#039;ve come a long way. In truth, country performers have had little influence on what real Nashville women wear. The ruffled, gewgawed Western stuff that Grand Ole Opry performers such as Patsy Cline and June Carter Cash wore in the early days of their careers never really set the dress standard for Nashville women back in the &amp;#039;50s and &amp;#039;60s. Similarly, the couture-filled wardrobes of Carrie Underwood and Faith Hill aren&amp;#039;t inspiring the outfits that inspire street-style photographers (yes, we have them; check out Undertheguise.com, one of the best) on the sidewalks of the hip East Nashville and 12South neighborhoods. Nashville women love fashion. They study runway trends like the stock market. They track when the C\u00E9line resort line is going to drop locally. They love runway shows (tickets to our inaugural Fashion Week last year sold out) and pursue new brands with a worldview that&amp;#039;s not constrained by oceans, much less the state line. Sure, there&amp;#039;s denim in our closets\u2014that&amp;#039;s the case in any city\u2014but here the fashion-conscious pair theirs with slim leather jackets or structured blazers and simple tanks or retro blouses. (Nashville&amp;#039;s secondhand shopping is divine.) We&amp;#039;ll liven things up with a chunky necklace, a hand-tooled leather belt (we love craftsmanship), and a pair of oxford-style wedges or even vintage cowboy boots. Balance is key: A tough leather jacket takes the boot from country to rock &amp;#039;n&amp;#039; roll, that other essential if less ballyhooed local influence. (My best friend has a terrific line about Nashville&amp;#039;s split music personality: Country, she says, is the public relations. Rock is the reality; you just don&amp;#039;t hear as much about it.) One of our reigning style ambassadors, Holly Williams, has this down pat. Williams is a scion of Nashville country-music royalty, the lanky granddaughter of the famous singer-songwriter Hank Williams Sr. and daughter of the recently infamous Hank Jr. She&amp;#039;s a songbird herself\u2014with an Americana album out this spring\u2014but she also moonlights as a lifestyle blogger ( Theafternoonoff.com) and owns one of our most fashion-forward boutiques, H. Audrey, the only place in town to buy Clare Vivier and By Malene Birger. At 30, she&amp;#039;s a study in contrasts, as comfortable air-kissing designers on buying trips to Paris, France, as she is deer hunting on her dad&amp;#039;s 800-acre farm in rural Paris, Tennessee\u2014wearing Herm\u00E8s riding boots to do both. &amp;quot;It never occurs to me to try and dress a certain way in order to fit into some `Nashville mold,&amp;#039;\u2009&amp;quot; she says. Though she admits to having a soft spot in her heart (and a shelf in her store) for Golden Goose&amp;#039;s haute take on Western-style boots, Williams can count on one hand the times that she&amp;#039;s intentionally dressed &amp;quot;country.&amp;quot;  Make that one finger. &amp;quot;Last year I went to a Garth Brooks concert and wore the giant belt buckle that Kid Rock wore in his `Cowboy&amp;#039; video, that he&amp;#039;d given me,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;That was the only time in recent years that I can remember purposely dressing the part. That said, that belt buckle is totally badass! I definitely want to wear it in New York this spring with Mother jeans and a shirt by Alexander McQueen.&amp;quot; The last time I saw Williams play, at a small theater in town, she was dressed in a pleasantly boxy Iro jacket, a slouchy A.L.C. T-shirt, and her favorite black Helmut Lang leather leggings, with her long blond hair flowing loose over her shoulders.  Of course, it&amp;#039;s not lost on her that the Country Music Hall of Fame and Mu\u00ADseum dedicated an exhibition to her colorful clan that ran for nearly four years (sadly, it closed in December). It was full of everything from Grammy awards to a taxidermied squirrel &amp;quot;band&amp;quot; playing miniature instruments\u2014plus one of Hank Sr.&amp;#039;s glitzy Nudie suits, named for Nudie Cohn, the Russian-born tailor who spangled everyone from Elvis to Cher. (His prot\u00E9g\u00E9, Manuel Cuevas, moved to Nashville more than 20 years ago and is still designing suits for the likes of Jack White and the Killers.) Some people loved the Williams family exhibition for its deep-dive musical background; I liked it because it laid out how three generations of local performers refined and redefined Nashville style, making it their own. Hank Sr.&amp;#039;s stage presence was all spit-shine and polish; Jr. followed with a glitzier vibe (his heyday was the &amp;#039;80s, after all); and now Holly and her siblings (Hilary and Hank III are both performers, the latter in a hard-core country-punk band) carry the torch, dressing not so much like caricatures of what came before but like an evolution of old Nashville into modern Nashville. There&amp;#039;s no denying the magic embodied in the grand, gleaming stage clothes behind the glass at the Hall of Fame. Every time I come upon the case bearing the fringed and sequined wiggle dress that a wailing teenage Wanda Jackson wore to her first performances, I get goose bumps. That&amp;#039;s the upside to living in a town that elicits an instant, if sometimes dubious, reaction: There are only a few places in the United States\u2014the world, really\u2014whose name you can say aloud in a crowded room anywhere and know that practically everyone in earshot has at least a vague notion of what the people there look like, even if that notion isn&amp;#039;t 100 percent accurate. The clich\u00E9 might be questionable, but damn if it isn&amp;#039;t iconic. \u2014Libby Callaway  Desperately Seeking...  ...You, New York Girl. You&amp;#039;re a style goddess, and Maggie Bullock worships at your temple. New York Girl, 8:30 A.M. last Tuesday: You were walking up the stairs out of the N/R subway station at the corner of Prince and Broadway. I was at the window of Dean &amp;amp;amp; Deluca, stirring my coffee and pondering the provenance of your coat, which seemed expensive in its subtleties: sharp-shouldered, inky black, and, I&amp;#039;d guess, cashmere. You stopped right in front of me, tucked your New York Times under your arm, and extracted a pair of four-inch platform booties from your canvas tote. Bent over and balanced on one foot, earbuds secure in your ears, you didn&amp;#039;t see what I saw: the bike messenger, routed off the street by a cabbie, about to sideswipe you. I yelped\u2014needlessly, it turned out. Even as he veered close enough to blow back your bangs, you remained oblivious, stepping coolly into one heel, then the other, dropping your subway flats in your bag and setting off. Leaving me lost, once again, in the daze of another New York sidewalk girl crush. New York Girl, Friday night. You were salting your popcorn before a midnight showing of Last Year at Marienbad at Film Forum: cream fisherman&amp;#039;s sweater, cropped gray leather jacket, studded, cheetah-print sneakers, tangerine-painted lips on an otherwise unadorned face. I confess, I felt momentarily diminished by the grandeur of it all\u2014who could compete?\u2014but then I thought, Bravo. In New York, dressing is a citywide pastime, a historically and economically sanctioned sport. While being dress-bested can cause doubt, maybe a whiff of insecurity\u2014&amp;quot;How&amp;#039;d she do that?&amp;quot; or, &amp;quot;Why didn&amp;#039;t I think of that?&amp;quot;\u2014there are certain Olympic-level swans here with whom we&amp;#039;d never dream of competing. It&amp;#039;s women like you, New York Girl, who preserve the style reputation of all New Yorkers, even the vast majority of us who can&amp;#039;t hold a candle to you. Sure, thousands of us know our Wang from our Wu, and the city has enough dogged, dedicated shoppers to make those gold-swagged Dior moon boots move. Yes, plenty of New Yorkers are so far ahead on the trend continuum that they&amp;#039;re several steps past the &amp;quot;new&amp;quot; peplum. But to have that ineffable thing that you&amp;#039;ve got\u2014to be a fashion one-percenter, a rubberneck-causing, traffic-stopping style standout in the city where anyone with any fashion ambition comes to make it? That&amp;#039;s something. New York Girl, I don&amp;#039;t understand. How did you manage to get your hands on that spring/summer 2012 Balenciaga jacket? I saw you wearing it while you were eating chopped salad at Barneys on Wednesday. I raced downstairs, but the saleswoman said it wouldn&amp;#039;t be out for another seven weeks. New York Girl, Your chic is reaching critical mass. I noted today, with some regret, that the blogs are onto you. They got a shot of you on University Place, an aggressive column of black: leather T-shirt, skirt that literally swept the sidewalk, a single skinny diamond bangle the only glint of light on your person. Your hair was loose and straight in a way that utterly negates the hours other women waste trying to replicate the Hollywood wave. Such exaggerated simplicity, such luxe carelessness...it looks almost dangerous. One blog comment quoted Jay-Z&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;Run This Town&amp;quot;: &amp;quot;Black cards, black cars/ All black everything/ And our girls are blackbirds/ Ridin&amp;#039; with they Dillingers.&amp;quot; I wonder: Who&amp;#039;s the man you&amp;#039;re meeting at whatever event you&amp;#039;re headed to? I also wonder: Why on earth would you be dressed that way in the daylight, on University Place? New York Girl, On Saturday, you were at the Union Square Greenmarket in beat-up motorcycle boots and a man&amp;#039;s button-down, your yoga mat strapped across your back, produce-laden canvas totes dangling from each shoulder. You turned, and I spotted the baby in a carrier across your front. You, of the midnight movies and the size 26 extralong J Brands (if I had to guess), have a baby? Of course you do. While you were sniffing the hydroponically grown, pesticide-free, on-the-vine tomatoes, the baby, in its Breton stripe top and hand-crocheted gray leggings, kicked off a tiny sheepskin bootie. Before you could notice, I scooped it up and popped it in one of your totes. New York Girl,  Let&amp;#039;s face it. Sometimes living here is not just a hassle but a hellish, colossal inconvenience. Today, after a particularly malodorous $22 cab ride through Midtown, a 55-minute wait for brunch, and an abusive exchange with a waitress, my visiting Vermonter in-laws shook their heads and sighed: &amp;quot;I just don&amp;#039;t know how you do it.&amp;quot; (Read: &amp;quot;Why would anyone choose to live in a place like this? What are you, nuts?&amp;quot;) For a moment I had no explanation. But then you traipsed by our sidewalk caf\u00E9, gesticulating as you chatted on your iPhone, your cape flapping majestically in the breeze, and even they had to pause and take note. It would never occur to these crunchy, intellectual northerners to try to dissect your look, to analyze its individual components\u2014its instinctual proportionality, for one: the scraped-up topknot of hair, the voluminous outer\u00ADwear, the denim-clad pipe-cleaner legs, the chunky-heel boots\u2014all of it adding up to a free lesson in fashion geometry for anyone paying keen enough attention. No, all of that was lost on them. But you were not, New York Girl. They knew you when they saw you. And sometimes, briefly, in posing that eternal New York question\u2014why bother putting up with it all?\u2014you are answer enough.\u2014Maggie Bullock "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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