The other night I dreamed that I was flipping through a magazine and came across a feature in which teen celebrities explained the difference between fashion and style. I don’t think I’ve ever had a dream about a magazine story before and I figured I should take it seriously.  I googled “fashion vs style” and got 195,000,000 hits, so maybe everyone’s having the same dream.

[Pause while I listen to “Talkin’ World War III Blues.”]

The difference between fashion and style basically comes down to this: fashion is current, popular, commercial, created for consumption rather than by consumers, while style is concocted by the wearer or user. Fashion may be inspired by individual or “street” style but it’s essentially a top-down business. It may be based on long-established design ideas (the ballgown, the sports jacket), but its key feature is newness. You have to buy fashion but, as people always say, you can’t buy style.

Style itself may be harder to explain. There’s personal style—your special, quirky mode of self-presentation—and there’s being stylish, which is like being fashionable but not so trendy. And then there’s style as in “she’s really got style”—a kind of ineffable rightness that not only rises above fashion but suggests that you alone know the secret about how clothes and hair and all the rest should really be done. That’s the kind you can’t buy.

The closest I’ve ever come to being fashionable was the period between 8th grade, when mini-skirts and fishnets were the things to wear (I remember a skirt that was light blue with lots of little flowers in colors like yellow, orange, and lime green and it will surprise no one that I had fishnets to match), and the jeans and Indian shirts of the late ’60s and early ’70s.  After that, I went my own way—not for any particular reason, and certainly not to be anti-fashion, but just because.

Looking back, I can see that I was developing a personal style—specifically, a commitment to having a personal style—but it took me years to recognize that. It’s difficult to talk about one’s own style without sounding boastful or self-important, but the fact is that I made different choices than most of my friends. I liked the weird detail—yellow Mary Quant nail polish—and the idea that it could be fun, or at least interesting, to get dressed in the morning. While most of my friends chose some version of academic drag, I’d buy a skirt with a lot of colors in it (the fabric below is from one of them) and then half a dozen tops and sweaters, scarves and tights to go with it. I wore eye makeup when all my women friends had given it up for political or counter-cultural reasons. And I had long discussions with other feminists about why I was so interested in all of this.

Feminist analyses of fashion and style and self-presentation have moved beyond simplistic critiques to much more serious explorations of why these things can be so damned appealing and it’s been years since anyone tried to pick a fight with me about shopping. I’m not the first—or even the thousandth—to point out the paradox of creating an original style from mass produced clothes and accessories. But I will say that after many decades, it’s still fun to try.

First of all, how did it get to be August already?

Second, and more directly style-related: I was cleaning out some file cabinets last weekend and pulled out the (literally) thousands of pieces I produced when I wrote for a weekly paper in the 1980s and ’90s. Most of it’s ephemeral—reviews of tv shows not even their creators remember—but there were also columns about fashion and culture that I could have written this year. (Except for the part where they reference “Felicity,” but you can see that on Hulu Plus if you want to catch up.)

Click on the image below and read what I thought about style and aging in 1998.

My outfit today includes a pair of Cynthia Ashby pants and a Boden cardigan. I got the pants at one of Cynthia’s studio sales, where you can pick up pieces that are one-of-a-kind, or imperfect, or from seasons past, and I often buy stuff on which the dye didn’t come out exactly right. In this case, the color was a tiny bit uneven and faded a little more than I’d expected but I love these pants and I wear them all the time in the summer.

I bought the cardigan because I had another one that I just adored, in a beautiful light greeny yellow that I wore so much I tore a hole in the elbow. The sweater’s cable pattern made it too much trouble to fix and the website didn’t have the color anymore so I couldn’t replace it. Instead, I ordered it in a color called something like “dusty rose”–not a shade I really wanted, but there you go. After wearing it only rarely for a few years, I decided to dye it some shade of green so it would actually replace my beloved one.

Of course, olive dye on a dusty rose fabric doesn’t produce anything that remotely resembles green, so back in the drawer it went, brought out once or twice when I really, really needed a lightweight cotton cardigan. Until one day I saw the light. Or I saw it in the right light. Or something.

Anyway, another Match or Clash lesson: Be prepared for serendipity.

About a year ago my friend Linda and I agreed to be at an event to promote a grantmaking group we’re in. In return for sitting behind a table right near the bar and smiling at people for a few hours, we’d get a donation from the organizer and maybe drum up some interest from a few attendees. We’d gone to a similar event in October and had a lot of fun despite sitting much farther from the bar, so this didn’t sound like a bad way to spend an evening.

As the day got closer, though, the prospect grew less and less appealing. First, I had to miss a performance by some friends that I’d really wanted to see; second, the event ran from 9 pm to 4:30 am, so there was the whole staying-awake thing. But the biggest problem was the fact that it was the annual White Party, which meant I had to wear, well, white. All white.

Now, white is a perfectly nice color on the right person, but that person is not me. I do have white linen pants but I almost never wear light colors next to my face, and on the rare occasions when I do, it’s usually something pink. White looked bad enough when my hair was dark but the grayer I get, the more washed out I look in it, and not even bright red lipstick and black-framed glasses really compensate. So it was no surprise that when I went through my closet and dresser I found nothing that would pass muster with the host.

I figured I’d just head over to Marshall’s and get a tank top that I could toss the next day, but first I sorted through a pile of old t-shirts, where I found a few that were primarily white: one from a conference, another from a cable TV show called “Three Guys Talk Hockey” (long story), and one that looked like it had come from an airline, maybe in a goodie bag or perhaps from that time my bags got lost coming back from somewhere. Unlike the other two, which seemed to be gigantic, the airline shirt fit like something a person might wear out in public and it looked as good with the linen pants as anything I was likely to buy, so I put it on, along with a printed shawl that I could drape over my shoulders or wind around my neck to break up the monotony.

As predicted, we had fun people watching, drinking, and admiring the truly amazing footwear. The shoes were so wonderful that after a couple of hours Linda started jumping up from behind our table and asking if she could take pictures:

The place we were sitting was relatively dark and with all of those fabulous shoes, no one was really paying attention to what I was wearing—which was a good thing, because at about midnight I brushed my hand across part of my shirt and suddenly realized from the odd texture that I’d worn it to paint my living room. And about an hour after that I remembered that I actually own a black and white sleeveless top that would have been perfect—and that I’d have been happy to wear—if I’d only thought of it at, say, 8 pm.

There’s a lesson of some kind here, although I’m not sure what it is. Keep better track of where I’ve put my clothes? Check everything for paint stains? Always sit in a dark corner so it doesn’t matter what I’m wearing?

Or maybe it’s as simple as this: keep a few pieces of clothing you hate, just in case, and never wear them unless you have to.

There are lots of ways to mark when you become a collector rather than someone who just has a big pile of stuff. I’ve got boxes and boxes of scarves and shawls, for instance: long and short ones, silk, cotton, linen, rayon, solid and patterned, artist made and mass produced, ones I bought online and on vacation, new and old and even really old (from my maternal grandfather, who died in 1929). But I don’t collect scarves or shawls. I just like them and can’t seem to stop buying more, no matter how often I tell myself I shouldn’t, and there’s no particular reason I buy one and not another beyond liking it better.

Collecting, though, is deliberate. You become a collector when you define the limits of what you’re accumulating and start looking for it on purpose: I’ll have this but not that and I won’t let chance determine whether I find it.

Lots of collectors are completists, trying to amass every single version of whatever it is they’re amassing, but I’m not. I have no idea how many styles of purses were produced by the companies I collect and I really don’t want to know. Or rather, I don’t need to know because I already know enough: There are lots of them out there, enough to keep me busy for a long time, and probably a lot more than I could ever use, display, or store.

I often say that one of the great things about collecting vintage purses is that it keeps me from buying new purses. The downside, of course, is that I can’t buy new purses. What I can do, though, is start new mini-collections, like the Delill fruit change purses. For a long time I limited myself to things like that—extensions of my existing collections. Then one day I ran across something that struck my fancy in a completely different way. Soon I started buying these:

These are all Margaret Smith bags—”Margaret Smith Gardiner Maine,” as the labels always say. Starting in the 1940s, Margaret Smith produced purses and beach bags, along with clothes we’d start calling preppy a few decades later. The bags are almost always fabric, usually cotton, and often lack the cardboard liners that make purses stiff, so they’re a lot floppier than leather bags. And because they’re fabric, the handles tend to get dirty, where leather ones tend to crack. But the fabrics are what attracted me in the first place and what makes me buy one rather than another:

Sometimes pretty is enough.

The real secret to having 140-plus purses is to spend as little as possible on each one. I never pay more than $25 and I often find beautiful bags in excellent condition for less than $10. I buy most of them on ebay, occasionally on etsy, and I figure it’s a small enough amount that if I end up with something awful, or seriously damaged, I haven’t lost much. Besides, you can hardly buy anything in a store that you’d be willing to carry for $25 so I come out ahead no matter what.

I always say I collect two kinds of purses, but it’s really more like five. The first is Bienen-Davis, made roughly from the 1930s to the ’60s and known for their beautiful hardware. This one, with a cherub clasp, is typical:And so is this one, with the bar handle:
Although a few shoulder bags show up in the ’60s, these are real lady purses, the kind you hold by the handle or slip over your wrist:In fact, that’s one of the reasons I started using them: I was tired of having something hanging off my shoulder all the time. And yes, I use many of the purses I collect. Some are too precious or impractical, but I love collecting things that are beautiful, interesting and useful all at the same time.

I also collect Delill box purses, which were popular in the 1960s and are shaped like little steamer trunks:
They’re covered with faux leather, fabric, raffia, plastic–even cork!–and come in a zillion colors and patterns. Delill produced a wide variety of styles (see below for my inability to resist some of the other ones) and I like these not only for their novelty, but because they’re hard-sided, just like a real trunk, and hold a huge amount of stuff: I can put everything that fits in a Bienen-Davis bag AND most of my lunch in one.

I have a few mini-collections of other Delill styles: clutches, sometimes in the same pattern as a box purse:
And sometimes not:
Then there are the dozen or so fruit-themed change purses. Delill made many styles of change purses, along with eyeglass cases and even belts, but I love the fruit:
I also have a group of brown Delill bags with various kinds of beading that’s almost become an official collection. Several are satin clutches but here’s the latest, in velvet, which I bought just last week:
Yup, can’t stop buying them, and that’s how I know I’m a real collector.

Next: The collection I started after I promised myself I’d never start another one.

An FB post from a couple of weeks back:

Pinkish brown linen Cynthia pants with black trim, brown silk shirt, brown socks, eggplant Trippen maryjanes, red/brown hand-dyed silk Cynthia scarf.

This year, people who read my Facebook posts see lists like this every day. I don’t usually include the links or mention the brand or designer of every item, but if you took notes you’d be able to figure out another part of the Match or Clash formula: that “high-low” thing style mavens, models and actresses in their 20s are always getting credit for inventing.

Of course, I invented the high-low mash-up long before those maven-model-actresses were born. Me and 1000s of other people who don’t dress in head-to-toe Single Designer but can sometimes afford to splurge. Like nearly everyone, I’ve always had to juggle style and money—or rather, overpriced “fashion” and my actual budget—and my favorite combination has always been expensive shoes with cheap tank tops. After all, a tank top’s basically a tank top but you can spot the difference between cheap shoes and expensive ones a mile away.

Right now my typical outfit is something by Chicago designer Cynthia Ashby or from the Swedish Gudrun Sjodren catalog, with a J Crew t-shirt or a cheap Uniqlo top as needed, plus these great gladiator sandals I ordered from Trippen as a birthday present for myself a couple of years ago. There are a million variations—a Uniqlo dress with an artist-made scarf, a pricey dress with an ancient cardigan—but the principle’s the same. It may look to some people like I don’t understand that those shoes are way too fancy for that t-shirt, but that’s kind of the point.

In the ’70s and ’80s, when I taught literature and women’s studies to undergraduates, I used to practice what I called “dressing to confuse.” Instead of the fairly consistent self-presentation the academic world generally expects, or the androgynous/hippie outfits lots of other feminist teachers favored, I’d wear a dress and girly shoes one day and jeans and a t-shirt the next.  If you’ve ever had students fill out evaluations, and especially if you’re a woman, you know that how you look is a point of fascination to them (“Why does she wear black all the time?”), so some of this was a deliberate attempt to undermine whatever conclusions they thought they could draw from my appearance.

But it also suits my temperament, which is why I still do it. Today, though, I’d probably call it something more like “dressing to show you I don’t care what you think.”