Always Pack a Party Dress: And Other Lessons Learned From a (Half) Life in Fashion

by Amanda Brooks

  The drastic pixie cut I endured at age twenty-two.

  I quickly figured out that I would have to reinvent my whole look to go along with my new haircut. Earrings of any kind would not work, but it was imperative that I wear mascara every day. My tomboy clothes were suddenly too masculine without the contrast of my long, wavy hair, but overtly feminine clothes just made me look like a girl who chopped off her hair. Luckily, I was headed off to Europe for two months on a graduation trip from my parents, which would buy me time to figure out my new look and let my hair grow in a bit before debuting myself as a job candidate in the real world.

  It would end up being another two years before I really felt like myself, yet again. The irony is, I look back now at the pictures from those years and think I looked pretty cute.

  I’m sure most women can relate to going for a dramatic new haircut and being horrified with the result. I wonder, why do we do this? Are we looking for a new identity? Or to shake ourselves out of a rut? Is it boredom? What is it?

  I think I found the answer, at least for myself, the third time I cut my hair short. My hair had now been back to my signature long, messy, boho waves for more than a decade, during which I had stuck with the same hairdresser—a former assistant of Orlando Pita’s named Ricky Pannell who had an adorable salon called Snip N Sip in the West Village. The salon was filled with kitschy beauty-salon-related memorabilia from flea markets and featured an old soda fountain surrounded by glass jars of candy and chocolates. Ricky charged $95 for a haircut, a relative bargain by New York standards. Also, he had high-fashion experience and taste, but his belief was in giving women classic, easy, low-maintenance haircuts and saving the fashion statements for the styling. Perfect for me. Shortly after having my first haircut with him I was asked by Harper’s Bazaar to be featured in a story called “The Best Tressed List.” I was incredibly flattered, and even more excited when I learned the photographer was Francesco Scavullo, one of my photography heroes. The result was the closest I will ever look to a Cosmopolitan cover girl (not that it’s exactly a look I aspire to). I had a slightly flirty look on my face, and I have to say my hair—having had a lot of effort put into making it looking “effortlessly” wavy—looked damn good. I credited Ricky with my haircut, and thus began the endless stream of women marching to Ricky’s salon to get the same look. I was even in the salon on a few occasions when these women came in. Ricky, of course, was delighted (he never charged me for a haircut again), but he always laughed when women came in with my photo, and said, “What they really want is not your haircut, it’s your hair!”

  About five years ago, I grew restless again. There was about a year of temptation to make a change before I was ready to actually do it. And then there was the question of who would do it. Ricky had always said to me, “If you ever want to do something radical, like cut bangs, please don’t ask me to do it. I hate feeling responsible for girls freaking out when they make a big change.”

  I came to the conclusion that if I was going to cut some serious inches off my hair, I had to be in willing hands. As I hadn’t paid for a haircut in more than a decade, I told myself that a splurge would be justified. I did my research among friends and chose a guy—let’s call him “Courtney”—for my hair makeover. He cut hair in his home, not some generic salon, and I trusted the girls who recommended him.

  Courtney was smart about easing me into shorter hair. He said we would start non-radically and just take a few inches off, and then, when I was ready, I was welcome to come back any time—a day, a week, a month later to go further. It took two visits over a couple of weeks to get it to the right length, but when it was finished I was over the moon. It had the appearance of being a bob, but he thinned it enough so that my thick hair didn’t resemble a broom, and it was slightly shorter in the back than in the front, giving it the tiniest bit of an edge. I loved it. And so did everyone else—the feedback from my friends was unanimously positive.

  But three months later, the cut was grown out—it had lost its shape and was hitting my shoulders, thus losing a bit of its chic. I was used to cutting my hair twice a year, max, so I therefore thought if I cut it shorter, it would last for longer.

  Therein lies the mistake. The same style didn’t work so well shorter, and it just wasn’t the same shape as the first time. I went back twice, trying to find the bliss my first haircut resulted in. It wasn’t to be found. All my subsequent visits did was make my hair even shorter, until finally my bob was up to my ears. My hair was too thick for this, no matter how much it was thinned. The long-feared dread planted itself in my chest, and I got that terrible feeling of regret. If only I could rewind life an hour back, I could stop myself from trying to fix it again and just grow it out. I just found it terribly hard to accept that the same person couldn’t give me the same haircut twice. Or that if you spent enough money on a haircut, it couldn’t possibly go wrong!

  The wisdom in bad haircuts finally came to me from (who else?) Diane von Furstenberg. Sporting my newly shorn ’do, I walked into her office. She looked up, paused, gave me a sympathetic look, and said, “What happened, darling?” Before I could answer, she started to giggle. It was a loving giggle, but she was laughing at me nonetheless. I just sat down, shook my head from side to side, and looked at her, feeling pathetic that I was so upset about a silly haircut. Or maybe I felt pathetic that I was finding myself in this place, yet again. Before I could respond, she said, “Don’t worry. All women need a good dose of humility from time to time. Few things are as effective as a bad haircut.”

  That was it. I got it after that. Whether intentional or not, deserved or not, the universe delivered me bad haircuts from time to time to keep me humble. It didn’t make the process any less painful, but it did help me to accept it.

  How is my hair now? I’ve kept it at shoulder length. My long hair now seems too much like “the old me” and a bit too bohemian. Keeping it shorter is for sure more maintenance—frequent cuts, some styling required—but it suits the more classic American, Lauren Hutton–ish look I’m going for these days.

  • • •

  All this haircut humility became small potatoes in the summer of 2010 when I noticed a bump on my nose. It’s most likely a pimple, I thought. I picked at it a few times to no avail. Then I squeezed it with tweezers, which only made it redder. And yet when I finally had the good sense to leave it alone, it just got bigger. And bigger. Within ten days, I had convinced myself that I had grown a wart on my nose, just like a witch! It made sense—I had been treating some warts on my son’s knee, and I must have gotten some of the virus on my hands and then touched my nose. How embarrassing. What a pain! How was the doctor going to get rid of the wart on my nose without leaving—gasp!—a scar? I made an emergency appointment with my dermatologist. I suspected he would probably send me to someone else as he often did with any nonmedical issues I had. Dr. Prioleau is a cancer specialist, not a person who takes away unwanted bumps. Because my mom has, thanks to Dr. Prioleau, survived melanoma three times, I have been to see him every six months since I was a teenager to ensure I am not following in her path. So I walked into his office, slightly sheepish at the notion of bothering him with something so mundane as a wart, and sat myself down on the examining table.

  “Do I have a wart on my nose??” I asked in a slightly high-pitched tone.

  “Let me take a look.”

  I think he already knew but wanted to look at the bump magnified before making any pronouncements.

  “No, it’s not a wart. I’m pretty sure it’s a squamous cell carcinoma.”

  Carcinoma was the only word I heard before I started wishing I had a wart on my nose. It turns out that the kind of skin cancer I had was not as bad as melanoma, but worse than basal cell, the most common and benign form. He scraped the bump off my nose with a scalpel and said I would have to come back in a week for more extensive Mohs surgery. He would cut a bit deeper into the place where the bump had be
en and test the flesh to make sure there was no cancer in it. If there was, he’d go even deeper until the boundaries were all clear. If not, I’d be all set. Then he would send me four blocks uptown to see the plastic surgeon who would close the wound. I asked as many questions as I could think of and relaxed when Dr. Prioleau assured me that if I did the complete treatment, this bump on my nose wouldn’t shave even a day off my life.

  “Whatever it takes,” was my response.

  So now I had a Band-Aid on my nose—quite a noticeable one—and that following weekend we were due to attend my husband’s ex-wife’s wedding. Talk about humility! She and I had become friends, good friends, actually, but I couldn’t help but think I was having to pay some karmic debt by going to her wedding with a bandage across the middle of my face. My embarrassment was even more heightened by the fact that the wedding was taking place at Anna Wintour’s house and would be photographed for Vogue. But what was there to do? I put on my prettiest Thakoon floral dress, made damn sure I was having a good hair day, found the smallest round Band-Aid to cover up the hole in my nose, and went along to the wedding. Needless to say, my picture didn’t make it into Vogue that time.

  My surgery was scheduled for July 1. Coco would be off at summer camp by then, and Christopher had gone to England for a couple of weeks. It would just be Zach and me at home. It didn’t occur to me that I might want my husband around for this ordeal.

  I can’t say whether I didn’t understand the magnitude of what I was about to endure or whether I was in denial. Whatever the case, worry started to creep in as soon as Dr. Prioleau entered the operating room.

  “You must be really brave,” he said upon entering.

  “Why?”

  “Because you’re very calm, and it’s rare that a patient doesn’t call me many times before having surgery on their face.”

  “Well, what choice do I have? There is cancer on my face and we need to get rid of it.”

  “Yes, exactly, but most patients aren’t that rational. They beg and bargain for an alternative, but this is the best and safest way to make sure all the cancer is gone.”

  I didn’t see the point in begging or bargaining, but the conversation did suggest that maybe I was in for more than I expected.

  “I’m going to remove as little of your nose as I possibly can, okay?”

  “Okay.” Fuck.

  Obviously, the most painful part of the surgery was the large syringe of local anesthetic being injected into the tip of my nose. It hurt so much that my eyes welled up, but I was able to blink away the tears.

  Dr. Prioleau did his work with the scalpel, wrapped my face in gauze to keep the wound from bleeding, and then disappeared for a half hour to test the flesh for cancer. I just lay there wondering what the hell I was in for.

  “All clean,” he announced when he reentered the room. “The thing with these kind of cancers is that eighty percent of the time, the biopsy removes all of the cancer, but we have to cut in deeper just to be sure.”

  Great, so I would have been just fine with the bump removed flush from my nose, but just to be sure it was necessary to dig in deeper. That thought has stayed with me.

  “So you have about a one-centimeter-diameter hole on the right side of your nose. It’s about the size of your pupil.”

  That was the precise moment when I realized why he’d been surprised that I was so calm about this whole event. A fucking hole in my nose the size of my pupil??? God, I wished it had been a wart.

  “I’m going to put in three or four stitches. See what the plastic surgeon says, but you may be able to get away with just that.”

  I left Dr. Prioleau’s office and got into a cab.

  My heart hurts even now just writing about this. I remember realizing the gravity of what was going on and how I was going to have to adjust to a new me. Back then, in that moment, I didn’t know if I was ever going to look the same again. I gave myself a few minutes to mourn my nose. The thing is—and this may sound vain, but I’m sure everyone can relate to having a favorite feature—I really loved my nose. Kevyn Aucoin, the famous makeup artist, once told me that I had a perfect nose—the right size, shape, and proportion to my face. He even took a picture of it once, so he could show it to friends who were getting nose jobs!

  I also felt very alone in that moment. I don’t regret having been alone. I’m sure I would have been so much less brave if my husband had been there. And if my mother or sisters had been there, then I would have had to deal with their reactions to my face-changing, life-altering moment as well as my own. I wouldn’t have blamed them—how could they not have felt my pain? But I didn’t want to have to reassure them as well as myself.

  I pulled myself together when I got out of the cab and went into the discreet side door to the left of a big, fancy, canopied entrance on Park Avenue. There were two other women in the waiting room. With two giant Band-Aids placed across the bridge of my nose, I’m sure they thought I was there for a nose job checkup. Oh, who cares? I thought.

  I was called into a small examining room before we went into the main operating room. Dr. LaTrenta removed the Band-Aids, winced slightly, and told me that I was beautiful and that I would continue to be beautiful. I don’t know if this made me feel better or worse. I had gotten over myself—for just a minute—and didn’t really want to think about beauty. I was trying to focus on what my mother told me and always, always emphasized—that health is everything in life. Despite being a stunning woman herself, my mom almost never talked about beauty with my sister or me when we were growing up. She didn’t comment much on our looks or judge the way we dressed ourselves, but she always encouraged us to take good care of ourselves—to see the very best doctors and to eat and exercise in a way that made us feel good. Never had I felt more grateful for this perspective. I was a mother of two young children and the wife of a man who I adored. What did my nose matter if I had my health? If I had the ability to live a full life with the people I loved most in the world?

  Still in the small room, Dr. LaTrenta told me we had a decision to make. He could either use fewer stitches, resulting in a smaller scar but in a different-shaped nose or he could use more stitches, resulting in a bigger scar, but maintaining the shape of my original nose. For option two, he would have to slice a vertical line up the bridge of my nose and then pull down the loose skin to cover the hole—it’s called flap surgery and it’s been proven very successful because skin can stretch quite far when pulled vertically. I went for the flap surgery—I preferred to have a bigger scar than to change the actual landscape of my face. He agreed.

  On the operating table, I fell back into the feelings of fear and loneliness. Feeling safe behind the gauze covering my eyes, tears fell freely down my cheeks. I took slow, deep breaths and tried to orient myself to my new reality, not even knowing exactly what it would be. It was still entirely possible that I wouldn’t ever look the same again, that I wouldn’t look like me.

  I left Dr. LaTrenta’s office with twenty stitches in my nose and some serious painkillers. I got in a cab, called my husband, and sobbed into the phone all the way home. At no point had I seen a mirror since the whole day began. This was not a mistake. Dr. LaTrenta suggested I not look at my nose for a whole week, but I knew I wouldn’t have the discipline to do that. When I walked into the house, I made the miscalculation of taking off the Band-Aid for my little sister and my son, Zach, before I even looked at it myself. I guess I was eager to finally share with someone the anxiety and heartache of what I had been through that day. I could see the shock and sadness on their faces before they even knew what to say. Then, my sweet, lovely Zach walked over to me with such a sincere and sympathetic look, put the palm of his hand on my cheek, and said, “Don’t worry, Mommy. You’re still beautiful and you still look like my mommy.” Not able to stop the flow of tears, I kissed him, walked into my bedroom, and shut the door. I sobbed some more. Then I went into the bathro
om where the mirrors were.

  The line of stitches looked like an upside-down question mark with the circular part on the tip and the long line going up the right side. My nose was unrecognizable. It was red and quite swollen. I tried to remember that Dr. LaTrenta had promised the shape of my nose would eventually return.

  I rang my close friend and former life coach Regena, who was meant to be my date for the Lady Gaga concert that night. She now lived in my building, and our relationship had evolved from student and teacher into friends. If anyone could empower me in that moment, I knew she could. She came up, checked me out, and said, “Wow, sister, you’ve had some day. What time are we going out?”

  My eyes widened at the thought. But when I looked at her, she nodded, as if to say “You better believe we’re going out.” So out we went an hour later, with two large Band-Aids horizontally covering my nose. I saw someone I knew at the restaurant we went to but managed to avoid eye contact. And I saw two friends at the concert, one who recognized me and expressed obvious concern and the other who didn’t seem to register that it was me behind the bandages, and I didn’t care to point it out. Regena and I had a fun night. Because of the painkillers I was a step removed from my new reality and the distraction of Lady Gaga’s performance helped me not to focus on it too much.