Fashion
Maureen’s Watch
I’ve just seen Kirsten Dunst in the movie “Wimbledon” where she wears a watch with a leather strap that winds around the wrist twice. I’ve been paying attention to watches lately, looking for just that style, on TV, in catalogues, even a Swatch Shop in Las Vegas. This is the first time I’ve seen it in the year and a half I’ve been looking. Now that Kirsten has introduced them, I’m sure we will be seeing them everywhere.
When Maureen came home from a student tour of Europe summer before last she was wearing just such a watch. They had visited Switzerland where she did not buy a watch, so of course hers quit just as they were leaving. In Amsterdam Maureen found a Swatch Shop and remedied the error by acquiring a Swiss watch. A watch with a black suede band with rhinestones running down the center, that wrapped around the wrist twice. It was the only one left of that style in the store. It was the one thing she bought for herself on the trip. I thought it was fabulous and wanted to see how long it would take for the double strap watchband to reach America. Apparently, 18 months.
It’s not the first time Maureen has been ahead of fashion. When she was just a girl, she already had an instinctive sense of style, wearing bold blocks of color. She loved an orange fleece vest that she wore everyday with everything. The next season the fleece vest in strong colors was in every show window, on every young back. She still uses her eye for color and the talent of adapting it in imaginative ways. Recently she acquired a vintage tropical floral and pineapple printed tablecloth in blue and gold, the school colors, and made it into a flaring skirt. She was a vision in it on school pride day.
She reminds me of Sue, who also manufactures clothes and teddy bears out of ancient tablecloths and finds style before it’s time. We worked together on a line of jewelry, developing long beaded necklaces with eclectic blends of color; strands of tiny seed beads interspersed with a variety of larger sizes. The next year we were seeing the same style worn by the anchor woman on the evening news.
When she was in high school Sue started creating her own fashion. She would see exactly what to do with an item, as it hung seemingly bland and dull on the store rack. Once she took a plain beige striped shirt that looked like absolutely nothing, but she had noticed there was a white collar band and backing on the cuffs. She reversed the cuffs and removed the beige collar altogether and had a striking shirt with those touches of white. Shopping for her school clothes was always an adventure. Her style developed into elegant gypsy in college with many swirling flowered skirts. She has never lost that bohemian aire.
Now David was a different matter, he cared nothing for clothes. On one school clothes shopping trip he had to be coerced to stop buying books and condescended to buy one pair of black jeans and a T shirt. But at one time he and his friends created a fashion craze. The boys were shopping for clothes before their senior class sneak to Disneyland, and stopped by the work clothes department at JC Penney. They spotted the white painter’s hats and bought them for themselves and a couple of friends. Five cute boys wearing white hats swept through Disneyland on Senior Week-end, being asked at every turn where they got their hats. JC Penney must have done a booming business in painter’s hats in southern California. Soon after they got home one of the boys saw those white hats on young heads, scattered among a Los Angeles crowd shown on TV.
Jim always had a great sense of style. He was our sophisticate in a 3 piece suit. When the kids were taking jobs as soon as they were old enough at Kalaloch Lodge, washing dishes working up to cooking, Jim went from a short stint at dishes straight to waiting tables in his suit with a snowy towel over his arm. His persona included a cherished scar through his right eyebrow, a true badge of courage. On Jim’s first job, when we lived at the Hoh, he was making hay for a pioneer farmer, Charles Lewis, when he wounded himself while trying to cut a chunk of electric wire with his knife for a jerry rig repair in the ancient cedar barn. By the time I came by to replenish the ice chest in the rustic cabin he was bunking in, the cut was probably too old for the stitches he refused to consider. The impending scar was already a badge of honor in his mind. Actually he deserved it just for sticking it out with the irascible Charles Lewis. Still farming in his 80s, Charles was a hard task master who spoke in terms long out of use. He demanded immediate response when requesting a tool or farm implement by an undistinguishable name used in the last century, or he ranted and yelled until he got it. Jim’s well earned scar lent distinction to his aloof unsmiling graduation pictures a few years later.
Don’s needs were simple, a stocking hat. Even in the steamy Okefenokee Swamp, there was Don in his wool stocking hat. He was our outdoorsman, and always dressed the part, jeans, suspenders and plaid shirts for any occasion. Don was born that way. When he was in first grade he wrote; “I like Daniel Boone. I want to be him. I like his clothes.”
I’ve just seen Kirsten Dunst in the movie “Wimbledon” where she wears a watch with a leather strap that winds around the wrist twice. I’ve been paying attention to watches lately, looking for just that style, on TV, in catalogues, even a Swatch Shop in Las Vegas. This is the first time I’ve seen it in the year and a half I’ve been looking. Now that Kirsten has introduced them, I’m sure we will be seeing them everywhere.
When Maureen came home from a student tour of Europe summer before last she was wearing just such a watch. They had visited Switzerland where she did not buy a watch, so of course hers quit just as they were leaving. In Amsterdam Maureen found a Swatch Shop and remedied the error by acquiring a Swiss watch. A watch with a black suede band with rhinestones running down the center, that wrapped around the wrist twice. It was the only one left of that style in the store. It was the one thing she bought for herself on the trip. I thought it was fabulous and wanted to see how long it would take for the double strap watchband to reach America. Apparently, 18 months.
It’s not the first time Maureen has been ahead of fashion. When she was just a girl, she already had an instinctive sense of style, wearing bold blocks of color. She loved an orange fleece vest that she wore everyday with everything. The next season the fleece vest in strong colors was in every show window, on every young back. She still uses her eye for color and the talent of adapting it in imaginative ways. Recently she acquired a vintage tropical floral and pineapple printed tablecloth in blue and gold, the school colors, and made it into a flaring skirt. She was a vision in it on school pride day.
She reminds me of Sue, who also manufactures clothes and teddy bears out of ancient tablecloths and finds style before it’s time. We worked together on a line of jewelry, developing long beaded necklaces with eclectic blends of color; strands of tiny seed beads interspersed with a variety of larger sizes. The next year we were seeing the same style worn by the anchor woman on the evening news.
When she was in high school Sue started creating her own fashion. She would see exactly what to do with an item, as it hung seemingly bland and dull on the store rack. Once she took a plain beige striped shirt that looked like absolutely nothing, but she had noticed there was a white collar band and backing on the cuffs. She reversed the cuffs and removed the beige collar altogether and had a striking shirt with those touches of white. Shopping for her school clothes was always an adventure. Her style developed into elegant gypsy in college with many swirling flowered skirts. She has never lost that bohemian aire.
Now David was a different matter, he cared nothing for clothes. On one school clothes shopping trip he had to be coerced to stop buying books and condescended to buy one pair of black jeans and a T shirt. But at one time he and his friends created a fashion craze. The boys were shopping for clothes before their senior class sneak to Disneyland, and stopped by the work clothes department at JC Penney. They spotted the white painter’s hats and bought them for themselves and a couple of friends. Five cute boys wearing white hats swept through Disneyland on Senior Week-end, being asked at every turn where they got their hats. JC Penney must have done a booming business in painter’s hats in southern California. Soon after they got home one of the boys saw those white hats on young heads, scattered among a Los Angeles crowd shown on TV.
Jim always had a great sense of style. He was our sophisticate in a 3 piece suit. When the kids were taking jobs as soon as they were old enough at Kalaloch Lodge, washing dishes working up to cooking, Jim went from a short stint at dishes straight to waiting tables in his suit with a snowy towel over his arm. His persona included a cherished scar through his right eyebrow, a true badge of courage. On Jim’s first job, when we lived at the Hoh, he was making hay for a pioneer farmer, Charles Lewis, when he wounded himself while trying to cut a chunk of electric wire with his knife for a jerry rig repair in the ancient cedar barn. By the time I came by to replenish the ice chest in the rustic cabin he was bunking in, the cut was probably too old for the stitches he refused to consider. The impending scar was already a badge of honor in his mind. Actually he deserved it just for sticking it out with the irascible Charles Lewis. Still farming in his 80s, Charles was a hard task master who spoke in terms long out of use. He demanded immediate response when requesting a tool or farm implement by an undistinguishable name used in the last century, or he ranted and yelled until he got it. Jim’s well earned scar lent distinction to his aloof unsmiling graduation pictures a few years later.
Don’s needs were simple, a stocking hat. Even in the steamy Okefenokee Swamp, there was Don in his wool stocking hat. He was our outdoorsman, and always dressed the part, jeans, suspenders and plaid shirts for any occasion. Don was born that way. When he was in first grade he wrote; “I like Daniel Boone. I want to be him. I like his clothes.”