The Power of Beauty: Our Looks, Our Lives by Nancy Friday

Author:Nancy Friday [Friday, Nancy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780795335204
Publisher: RosettaBooks
Published: 2014-02-07T00:00:00+00:00

Jax Pants and the Twist

I’d arrived in New York looking and dressing pretty much as I had throughout college, where my luck had changed. I was seen differently in the North. Perhaps it was that the men were taller, or were looking for someone with a quality I possessed that was as yet unknown to me. I’ve never understood why, at our first college mixer with Harvard men, the handsomest fellow in the room cut a path through the crowd to me. There I stood, smiling that phony smile I’d learned to replace the natural grin, expecting the worst. He was a hero, a star athlete, and I became his maiden, wore his enormous maroon crew sweater with the big “H.”

To my surprise, I was light-years ahead of him in the sexual dance, meaning prolonged hours of kissing and fondling, and was also used to fending off the Southern boys raised to go as far as they could with a girl. This prince, however, had been raised in a cold climate, and strangely enough, it was disappointing to find myself more heated than the man. It was as though we danced to a different beat. Though he begged for marriage by our second year together, I had lost interest. I’d found that there was more to a man than a pretty face.

In him I discovered I had the power to attract men. Perhaps I also learned from what he lacked, that I should/could display my own preference. In any case, I began to look for sheaths rather than full skirts. I would have blushed had you said that I wanted to be noticed, for it wasn’t thought out; only in hindsight do I recognize where my life as an exhibitionist began. Virgin that I was, and would remain for several years, I nonetheless wanted to wear my true colors.

The girls I knew in New York had inherited our mothers’ philosophy on dress; we all wore Nice Girl clothes and sensible shoes that quietly signaled one’s station in life. There was a respect for “good clothes” that one was expected to wear for at least a few years; winter wardrobes were stored with the dry cleaner and brought out the following year with an addition or two. That was how I had grown up. When a box arrived from my great aunt Mildred containing elegant dresses and suits from Hattie Carnegie that were barely worn and beautifully kept, my mother was thrilled. Dior’s famous New Look may have made international news in 1951, but the vast majority of Charleston women in “our class” dressed sensibly.

When I got my first paychecks I wandered through Saks and Bergdorf Goodman looking for something that was Me, but when the polite saleswoman approached, I had no words to describe what I wanted, who Me was. Then I discovered Jax, just off Fifth Avenue on Fifty-seventh Street. Jax explained why the Nice Girl dresses at Bergdorf’s didn’t satisfy. So unschooled was I in fashion that I

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