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"If only my photographic memory extended beyond my wardrobe, I&amp;#x27;d be a bloody NASA engineer by now. I can recall with frightening detail every outfit I wore on the first day of school for some 17 years, every party dress that&amp;#x27;s ever had to be retired thanks to an over-exuberance while popping a bottle of Veuve Clicquot, and each velvet confection my mother tortured me with on the High Holy Days in my grammar school years. And if the new off-Broadway play Love, Loss, and What I Wore is any indication, I&amp;#x27;m not alone. Sisters Nora and Delia Ephron (who you may recognize from writing, producing, and directing a few little projects like, oh, Sleepless in Seattle, You&amp;#x27;ve Got Mail, Bewitched, Julie and Julia, and When Harry Met Sally) have just taken the best-selling book Love, Loss, and What I Wore to the off-Broadway stage, enlisting a slew of boldface names like Rosie O&amp;#x27;Donnell, Rhea Perlman, and Kristin Chenoweth to act out a series of vignettes and monologues all centered around--you guessed it--a woman&amp;#x27;s wardrobe. The play, which opened October 1 and will run until March 2010, takes an intimate look at the memories and mishaps our clothes can provide us with. Slaves to Fashion caught up with Nora and Delia to chat about their latest project. STF: What made you want to adapt Ilene Beckerman&amp;#x27;s book into a play? NE: I read the book -- which is the story of one woman&amp;#x27;s life, told through her clothes -- and I immediately wanted to call Ilene Beckerman (whom I didn&amp;#x27;t know) and tell her about the terrible dress I wore to my third wedding and the horrible embarrassment of not knowing, in the sixth grade, which shoes to wear, etc. I said to Delia, if we turn this into a play about women and their lives and their clothes, maybe we can make the audience react in the same magical way they do to the book. So we sent out a questionnaire to about 100 friends. We asked about their clothes, but they wrote back about their mothers, their sisters, their boyfriends, their husbands. Clothes are loaded with memory. STF: Is the book something you shared, as sisters, and really related to? What made you decide to do this project together? DE: I had to wear her prom dress. A hand me down. And we had matching outfits as kids, little midriff tops and velvet dresses with lace collars, and of course we had the same mother (except that we didn&amp;#x27;t because no one really has the same mother even in the same family). With clothes, mothers are important. What they let us wear and didn&amp;#x27;t, shopping (which our mother hated to do). In defining oneself from childhood, clothes figure big. Mainly though, we wanted to work on this together because we both loved the book and the subject -- memories of clothes are so emotionally powerful. STF: Why do you think women associate special occasions so closely with clothes? DE: We all want to look great. Clothes are the first thing we think of when we create an identity: Who am I? Who am I tonight? NE: Who would I like to be? Can I achieve a transformation just by changing what I&amp;#x27;m wearing? By the way, the answer to that question is perhaps you can, although probably not. DE: And clothes have special power. I&amp;#x27;ll always remember the raspberry colored v-necked silk sweater I was wearing on my husband and my first date. If I hadn&amp;#x27;t been wearing that sweater that night, would any of it have happened? I think of that top and the whole night comes back to me. STF: What is the first memorable outfit each of you wore? Do you remember how it made you feel? NE: I had a great little dress with a jacket I bought at I. Magnin in Beverly Hills before I went to college. It was a kind of tweedy knit and very slender and short, and I felt smart in it, in both a fashionable and an intellectual way. DE: I had a dream coat. Nora took me to Saks to buy it when I came east to go to college. It was a black tweed princess style coat with a red lining. Everyone else at college wore shapeless camel colored polo coats, at least that&amp;#x27;s my memory, and I had this Audrey Hepburn thing. I felt not like Audrey Hepburn -- who could? -- but veering that direction. Sign up for Glamour.com&amp;amp;#8217;s Style Tips of the Week and Beauty Tip of the Day newsletters! STF: Anything in your closets you&amp;amp;#8217;re holding on to purely for posterity? Why are you so attached to that particular item? NE: Yes. My first Armani. It&amp;#x27;s a long black silk jersey dress and it&amp;#x27;s gorgeous, but it&amp;#x27;s got shoulder pads. But I just can&amp;#x27;t bear to give it up. DE: A black and white chiffon dress from the 1920s. I keep thinking I&amp;#x27;m going to give it to my nieces. I&amp;#x27;ve been thinking that for years. STF: Does looking good become more important or less important as we age? NE: More. Of course it does, because looking good is so easy when you&amp;#x27;re young. For openers, you&amp;#x27;re young, and that looks good. DE: For sure. STF: What are each of your personal favorite pieces/moments from the play? Any outfit or occasion that particularly struck a nerve or you really related to? NE: I hate my purse, so I love that piece [called &amp;quot;I hate my purse&amp;quot;] even if I did write it. DE: I suppose I love &amp;quot;Thin&amp;quot; because it&amp;#x27;s my story, about the girl, me, I left behind thank goodness, and about finding love. And I love &amp;quot;I Hate My Purse&amp;quot; because I hate my purse too, it&amp;#x27;s so totally Nora, it&amp;#x27;s so brilliant and funny, and by now I know it by heart because it just gets stuck in your head like a great song. Tickets to Love, Loss, and What I Wore ($75.00) are available via Telecharge.com (212-239-6200) and in-person at the Westside Theatre Box Office (407 West 43rd Street). Tell me, dolls...have any of you read Love, Loss, and What I Wore yet? Are you anxious to see the stage adaptation? Do you have strong memories and associations with things you&amp;#x27;ve worn over the years? Anything you&amp;#x27;ve been hanging onto for ages because of its sentimental value? And are you as big a fan of Nora and Delia&amp;#x27;s work as I am? Discuss! More Ways to Get Glamour You could win $50,000 just for registering or logging in to Glamour.com! Add Glamour to your iGoogle homepage Follow Slaves to Fashion on Twitter! Photos: Carol Rosegg"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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