Love, Loss, and What I Wore

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In 1995, 60-year-old Ilene “Gingy” Beckerman wrote and illustrated a slim autobiography called Love, Loss, and What I Wore, a scrapbook she assembled for her family so they’d understand she “had a life” before she became a mother of five. Then a friend secretly mailed pages to publishers, and you know what happened next. I think probably every woman has owned a copy of Love, Loss, and What I Wore or has at least read a copy while perched on a divan inside Anthropologie or splayed on prickly Barnes & Noble carpet at some point over the last 14 years. It makes clear what so many women’s magazines leave out—and what so many memoirs and autobiographies omit, too: what clothes mean to women going about the mundane business of day-to-day living.

Nora Ephron was instantly smitten by the book when she read it in manuscript form. Then, a few years ago, she and her sister Delia began collaborating on a stage adaptation of Gingy’s story, which begins in 1930s New York. To mark the occasion, I met Nora and Delia Ephron for lunch to talk about—what else?—clothes. Of course, Nora talked about her black turtleneck sweaters. You can eavesdrop here. Meanwhile, DoubleX contributors got busy jotting down their own What I Wores, and you can read the collection below. Please, feel free to add your own in the comments section.
—Erika Kawalek

The first time I picked out my own outfit was in 1986, when I was 2 years old. The occasion was my successful completion of potty-training, and I went alone with my mother to a fancy children’s clothing boutique in the suburbs of Cleveland. My siblings and I had a Gerber-baby look—all rosy skin and blue eyes—when we were young, and my mother liked to dress us in the sort of classical children’s ensembles of the American century (eyelet lace, soft florals, sailor dresses, fisherman sandals) that completed the effect. The boutique was full of such offerings, but so was my closet—hand-me-downs from my two older sisters, mostly. As my mother tells it—for this is one of those select “when you were little” stories that’s made it into family lore—I made a beeline for the only black dress in the store. And insisted on having it. My bemused mother, who’d never bought “dour” black for a child before, tells me that the effect against my red hair was striking, and that I looked oddly chic for a little kid. Remember, this was long before the days of Suri Cruise and the rest of the fashionable celebrity toddler army. She bought it for me, along with the matching beret. I strutted around all year in my little black dress, which, every time I put it on, made my mother jokingly refer to me as her little New Yorker.

I’m not quite sure in what offhand remarks and by what infinitesimal degrees we form our identity, but recently, I hung up a new black dress, a birthday present from my mother, alongside a dozen others in my tiny New York closet.
—Noreen Malone

I was almost 3 on that Sunday morning, dressed at my insistence in the exact same outfit I had worn for days, maybe weeks, by then: a T-shirt and a perfect pair of red-striped seersucker shorts, overalls-style with a zipper up the front. Suddenly I was informed it was time to change my clothes. It had something to do with my big fat baby sister. (She was, I know now, being baptized in the church across the street.) I evidently balked; this, I don’t remember. Time, I guess, was short, and so I got left behind in my beloved shorts. Did anyone stay to guard me? Surely, but I don’t remember that either. All that sticks with me is standing at the third-floor window of our Brooklyn, N.Y., house, in the sunlight, craning to see some familiar figures on the sidewalk below. The panic—along with the red stripes and the zipper—is seared into my memory.
—Ann Hulbert