There’s this picture of my mother before she was my mother. It was taken in her bedroom in the Bronx, which had the same avocado green brocade wallpaper from every After School Special scene where some girl dies from smoking or drinking or playing hardcore music.
In the photo, my mother wears faded, wide-leg jeans and the type of patchwork American flag T-shirt that could get you suspended from homeroom in the L.B.J. era for being “subversive” or get you photographed for Seventeen for being “artsy,” usually on the same day. Her brown hair and brown eyes are shiny; her expression has a whiff of “Are you kidding me right now?” with top notes of, “Okay, fine, yes, hello.”
People love to ask fashion writers about their style heroes. The current acceptable list includes Chloe Sevigny, Laila Gohar, Paloma Elsesser, and maybe an “I really know my shit” curveball like the sharp-seamed film director Janicza Bravo or the girl-world photographer Petra Collins. But if we’re being honest, my style template is my non-mom mom.
I own a giant stack of soft wide-leg denim from AG Jeans and PacSun and Pistola. I keep a cupboard stacked with vintage graphic tees from tiny thrift stores in North Carolina and Boston. I do this because I somehow believe that wearing these things, over and over, will make me understand who my mother was before “mom.” It is the version of her that I will never know, an endless scroll of “before” that seems to go like this:
Before diapers and juice boxes and placing my sticky hand over hers so I could “write a book” and “draw a heart” without being able to grip a pen. Before homework and school plays and college essays. Before having two very challenging kids — three, if you count my dad — became a marathon of endless sacrifices that made The Giving Tree look like a rom-com. Before she made five-hour slogs into Manhattan while working two full-time jobs so I could audition for movies, never once saying, “You are a strange little 11-year-old with the face of a troll doll, and this will never happen for you.” Before halting the vicious clashes between teen me and my adult dad, sighing with weary disappointment about the family she refused to abandon, even though at times, she probably should have. Before she sat awake in the hospital at 4 a.m. after I came home from my senior prom with mono and a 104-degree fever. (To cheer me up, she said, “At least you look like Edie Sedgwick with a ballgown and a needle in your arm.”) Before I sat awake in her bedroom while she recovered from an emergency operation, and she slaughtered me at Scrabble despite being half-zonked from pain meds. Before I told her I was so depressed I was ready to die and she couldn’t stop me, and she yelled, “If you kill yourself, I will murder you!” and we both laughed until we couldn’t breathe. Before she told me that my dad really was dying while we wept at an ice cream shack in New Hampshire. Before she stocked the fridge with champagne during the early days of COVID and said, “Well, at least the apocalypse means we can hang out for a bit.” Before ditching a planned vacation to crash on my sofa during the worst breakup of my life. Before laughing whenever I apologized for being such a bad kid and a complicated daughter and a terrible loser. Before telling me that if that were true, she never would have given me the garage door code to her new house. “It’s a pity code,” I growled the last time I saw her, but she reminded me that she will never feel pity for me because I am a natural blonde.
The “before” of this photograph is stark. My mother is so relaxed that her face is nearly blank. Her torso is upright and straight, unmarked by two grueling childbirths, one almost fatal. Her hair is long and undyed and swishy; she hasn’t yet seen the inside of a luxury salon or a rural gun range or a master’s degree classroom or a Pompeii ruin or a Veteran’s Affairs office or a morgue. Instead, she looks like the health food store version of Cher. She is my mom but she is not my mom. I do not know this woman. I never will, and it breaks my heart.
Today, this photo would be part of an ERL lookbook or an Olivia Rodrigo album zine shot by Sofia Coppola’s other daughter. But back in the early 1970s, this Instax snap wasn’t a Pinterest goal. It was just proof that you hung out with your friends on the weekends. Today, it’s proof of something else: that before she was my mom, the person in this photo belonged only to herself, and that self was cooler and prettier than I’ll ever be.
Gwyneth Paltrow recently told me some stuff for my other life at ELLE. She acknowledged with wry amazement that her Y2K fashion looks are currently being copied on Pinterest and Instagram. “When I was in my 20s, I wanted to wear what my mom wore in like the 1960s,” she conceded. (Paltrow’s own 21-year-old daughter, Apple Martin, wore the movie star’s 1996 Calvin Klein dress on the red carpet last month.) “It’s all so cyclical. Everyone wants what they didn’t get to wear.” Or, really, what they didn’t get to be. Apple never knew the Shakespeare / Ripley / Sliding Doors versions of her mom, no matter how many times she can stream those movies on Netflix. Wearing something can feel a little bit like understanding someone. And understanding someone can feel a lot like love.
I saw this on a recent hike up six flights of rickety Chinatown stairs. I was climbing to a loft party with friends my own age. Some high school kids were just ahead on the way to a friend’s apartment, wearing the same things my clique wore in high school: Hello Kitty varsity jackets, beat-to-hell YSL bags from someone’s grandma in Boca Raton, pointy black shoes with chunky buckles, mismatched earrings that could be from Old Céline but are really $6.99 on Etsy. Meanwhile, I was wearing near-dead bellbottoms from Alice & Olivia and a vintage Grateful Dead tee under an ancient Chloé blazer with cowboy boots.
“My mom has that outfit,” one girl said under her breath as I brushed past.
“Yeah, your kid will have yours,” I called back from the fourth floor. Her friends burst into giggles, but one of them nudged her. “So real,” she said.
It really is.
