fashion

I hadn’t realized how useful clothes can be in understanding a life until I talked to Sarah Byrd, a fashion historian in New York. Her contention is that fashion is the most important part of everyone's history. While I don’t go quite that far, Sarah helped me look at - quite literally - the women I am writing about it a new way. Sarah and I met in a Chinese restaurant on 8th Avenue and went through a folder of photographs I’d brought of Valerie Eliot. My curiosity about fashion [...]