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

by Amanda Brooks

  I looked at Ikram, and I saw possibility. If I were to ever go to a month of fashion shows again in the future, I would have to be my own boss, and I would have to include my family in some way. Not that I would tow them all along with me—my husband would never agree to that, anyway. But I would go for less time, maybe fly home in between the weeks of shows, something like that. And it wasn’t just about taking better care of my family. I would have to take better care of myself.

  The third fashion week I spent in Paris during my time at Barneys wasn’t much more successful, on a personal level, than the first or the second. I had already made my decision to resign from Barneys, so I knew it was to be the final marathon. I had had a second steroid injection in my spine to ensure that my back wouldn’t fail me again. There was a sense of lightness about me, knowing I had chosen my family, my sanity, and my health over this job. When my kids would call asking when I was coming home, I could reassure them that this was to be the last time. But it was a whammy of a trip. I had already flown to Rome and Milan to do the pre-fall buys in January. I was meant to go on from there to Florence to work on Barneys’ private label but was thwarted by a blizzard. So I would now have to add Florence—a third leg—onto my Milan and Paris fashion month trip.

  I was also planning to hand in my resignation at the end of my five days in Milan. This notion gave me a lot of anxiety. There was a knot in my stomach for weeks. It was painful to face the reality that this “dream job” wasn’t for me. I could see clearly how everything I had done in my career over the past eighteen years had led me to the point, and it appeared I wasn’t up for it. Had I peaked too late? Too early? After working for myself, as my own boss, for a number of years, was it too hard to go back to reporting to someone else? Was I just not a corporate girl? Was I over fashion? I considered all of these questions, but at the time I didn’t have any answers. I just knew what I had to do.

  Resigning went fine. Moving to England (I’ll get to that in the next chapter) was a great explanation—for my bosses, for my colleagues, for the fashion press. It stopped everyone from looking for more meaningful answers. But when I arrived in Paris, I was in the elevator with my boss, and after looking in the mirror, I said to her, “God, I look really tired.”

  “Actually,” she replied with concern, “you look drawn.”

  I never weigh myself, having struggled, albeit briefly, with an eating disorder in college. Wanting to lose just a few pounds, I went on the Atkins diet. After a few false starts, I got the hang of it and became perhaps too good at it. Having reached my goal weight, I thought, That was easy, and kept going for a few more. I also took on more and more exercise. In short time, I weighed 106 pounds, which on a 5 foot 9 inch frame is not funny. It would take me a year of therapy and a nutritionist to understand that “too much discipline is actually a lack of discipline,” as my shrink told me.

  It took me a minute to understand what my boss was alluding to, but when I looked in the mirror back in my bedroom, my face did look thin. I walked into the bathroom and stepped on the scale. I am normally 122 pounds. Over the past fifteen years, my weight has never fluctuated more than a couple of pounds more or less than that (other than during my two pregnancies).

  Now, on the scale in Paris, it took me a minute to translate the kilograms to pounds in my head. The number didn’t seem right, so I got out my iPhone and used the calculator. Over and over, it told me my weight was 110 pounds. Shit. How did that happen?

  I thought back over the past few months. If anything, I’d been eating less healthily than I normally do because I’d been traveling so much, and in Europe no less. Pasta and panini in Italy, baguettes and foie gras in France. I couldn’t figure out how it was possible that I could have lost so much weight without knowing it, without trying. I would go to my doctor for a full checkup when I got home and get a clean bill of health. No thyroid issue, no cancer eating up my insides, as I had feared in my most paranoid moments. In the end, I put my weight loss down to sheer adrenaline.

  The final week in Paris was not too bad. My bosses knew I was leaving, but no one else did, apart from my husband. I enjoyed my duties more—the shows, the showrooms, the meetings—knowing that I had taken control of my life and had made an empowered, exciting decision about starting over. As scary as it was, I just knew—in my mind, body, and heart—that I was doing the right thing. The job was amazing in so many regards, but it cost me too much, as evidenced by the despair of my children and the despair of my body. Had it been ten years earlier or ten years later, it might have been the perfect place for me. But it wasn’t at that moment. And I had to accept that. It was hard to do, but when I did, I was free.

  The Edge Bag, my latest Céline purchase.

  STYLE INFLUENCE

  CÉLINE

  WHEN I was writing I Love Your Style, I knew I had to include minimalism as one of the defining styles of our time. This was a real challenge for me—my associations with minimalism were focused on conceptual minimalism: nineties Helmut Lang, Issey Miyake, Jil Sander—an aesthetic that I didn’t personally relate to and that no longer seemed entirely relevant. I did a lot of research on minimalist art, music, film, and fashion to better understand the concept and the ideas behind it. What I realized was that minimalism was really just about simplicity and discipline, and that those principles could be applied to nearly any style of dressing.

  Inspired by this new perspective, I started to dress in a more refined way—less jewelry, fewer layers, better quality, and more thoughtful design. It was right at this moment that Phoebe Philo started designing Céline, and that very first collection expressed, in a far more articulate way, the idea of less conceptual clothes worn in a very pared-down, timeless way. I have been a devoted disciple of Céline ever since. I can’t afford that much of it, but the few pieces I do have are already among the greatest hits in my closet. Her collections have become increasingly conceptual; frankly, I just ignore that part and wait to see the more wearable and everyday items that hit the store shelves. Don’t get me wrong—I am always inspired by her vision and by the risks she takes in pushing fashion forward, but as it relates to my life, she is the high priestess of great-quality, beautifully designed, wearable basics.

  Wearing a Céline runway look for a Harper’s Bazaar photo shoot, 2013.

  FASHION LESSON NO. 12

  WHAT WAS I THINKING?

  RECENTLY I have developed a little ritual that I follow when shopping for new clothes or getting dressed. I ask myself—how would I look if I wore this in one year? Five years? Ten years? It’s not always easy to come up with an answer, and even when I do, it’s not always right. Still, my little rule helps me rein myself in and favor more chic, classic looks over trendy ones.

  If I look back at pictures of myself in my twenties and early thirties, I can’t help but ask myself, sometimes even out loud, “How could you have thought that looked good?” I’m sure many women, even stylish women, have similar feelings about their sartorial past. In fact, fashion icon Chloë Sevigny once said, “In any given month, I look back at what I was wearing the previous month and ask myself, ‘What was I thinking?’” But then there are girls like Sofia Coppola, who has looked damn good consistently since her teens. Both girls have different styles, but they are both equally stylish. Sofia’s look, though, is more timeless, and that is what I am going for these days.

  Of course, I don’t regret my ghosts of fashion moments past, as it has been those trial-and-error occasions that helped me learn my own style in the first place. But now that I have a stronger and more disciplined sense of fashion self, I’d rather invest and wear what I know will work in the long term.

  This picture makes me happy. I’m with my dog, Ginger, in my favorite Proenza Schouler dress, and I’m in front of the building where I live in NYC. The whole thing reminds me of the freedom and the renewed happiness I felt when I decided to leave my job.

  SOMETIMES YOU JUST HAVE TO STAR
T FROM SCRATCH

  THE REALIZATION that I would not last at Barneys as long as I’d hoped to came in waves, complete with high and low tides. But there were two moments, two catalysts that helped me see what my future would be if I decided to leave. The first was a lecture that Siddhartha Mukherjee gave at our kids’ school about his Pulitzer-winning book The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer. When addressing why he wrote the book, he started by referring to a review of Henry Miller’s book Tropic of Cancer by George Orwell, in which Orwell accused Miller of “living inside the belly of the whale,” using the classic Bible story of Jonah and the whale as a metaphor for having a sheltered, narrow existence. Siddhartha related to this as he spent most of his time as a cancer researcher inside a small, dark laboratory in the bowels of a hospital. In writing his book, he wanted to bring the conversation of cancer “outside the belly of the whale,” i.e., into the public domain. I was intrigued by this comparison, but I related to it in the opposite way. I felt that my twenty years in fashion had been spent so publicly, surrounded by people and opinions and collaborators, and I realized what I craved at that moment was some time for quiet reflection and introspection. I felt the desire to retreat, to simplify, to spend some time with myself. After seeing Siddhartha’s lecture, I kept telling myself, silently, over and over, like a mantra, I want to go inside the belly of the whale.

  The other moment happened before I went to work at Barneys, but it resonated with me during those painful few months when I tried to figure out how leaving Barneys could be an empowered move instead of a defeated one. First, I had seen a story about model Stella Tennant’s house in Scotland in Vogue. It’s a dream house by most anyone’s standards—it’s in beautiful countryside, it’s big but not massive, and it’s decorated in a romantic and cozy way. But most appealing and seductive was this idea that she could live there with her husband and her children for everyday life and then jet off to Paris to walk in the Chanel show or fly to New York to make an appearance at the Met Ball. I loved the idea that she could have this quiet, civilized, peaceful life but with occasional doses of glamour and excitement. Then I actually saw Stella at a cocktail party. As we’d met a few times before and have some friends in common, we eventually gravitated toward each other, and I had the chance to ask her about her family life in rural Scotland. Her telling of the quieter pace, the joy of the outdoors, the simplicity of their days, and the thrill of the occasional trip to the city all confirmed what it was I was craving. Further fueled by the example of her well-balanced life, I promised myself I would live like this one day—I just didn’t know when. The moment would come sooner than I expected.

  • • •

  When I married a Brit, people always asked me if moving to England was in our near, middle, or distant future. Christopher’s family farm is in North Oxfordshire, seven hundred acres stretching across the most beautiful part of the Cotswolds with nineteenth-century stone buildings that have hand-riven slate tiles on the roofs. Christopher’s grandfather had bought the farm after the Second World War, and both he and Christopher’s father became gentlemen farmers. He and his two siblings had each been given a home on the farm, and Christopher had created a perfect country cottage. But my reply was always the same: “I don’t have to think about it because Christopher never would.” He’d made it very clear to me when we first started dating that he was a converted New Yorker through and through. This panicked me a bit because I wasn’t sure about New York City at that time.

  Years later, after Christopher and I had gotten married, moved to a loft on Chrystie Street (that Christopher had bought way before Whole Foods, the Box, or Freemans had made the area trendy), and my career had taken off, I remember thinking to myself that finally I, too, couldn’t imagine living anywhere but New York City.

  But in September 2009, Christopher and I were sitting around the dinner table with our friends Hugo, Elliot, and Miranda when the conversation turned to the ongoing recession. It was something Hugo (who is English) said to Christopher and Miranda (also English) that caught my attention. “Well, we all came to New York to build businesses and to be successful, and if there is not much success to be had at the moment, maybe it’s time we go back to the wonderful quality of life we had in England. Maybe it’s time to enjoy the success we’ve had so far and stop trying to get more.” To my amazement, Christopher replied, “Maybe you’re right.”

  I spent hours thinking in bed that night, Is this my chance to try living outside of New York? New experiences have always energized me, and as happy as I was in our home city, I felt a longing to know what else was out there, to look at life from another perspective. Would Christopher really consider moving to England? At that point, I’d learned to really love it. It felt like my homeland. Everything there felt familiar to me—Christopher’s mother had the same china pattern that my mother had chosen for the house we grew up in. They sang the same hymns in church. The reserved politeness was already something I was used to, having grown up around people with similar qualities. And I had eventually come to love the farm.

  The first few summers I had visited the farm, I was lost there. Christopher was back and forth between houses, but the one we spent the most time in was the house he and his ex-wife had lived in. They converted it from a cart shed into a cottage, made a beautiful garden, and did the house up in romantic English countryside style. The whole thing was lovely, but it felt too connected to the past for me to really enjoy. Also, Christopher spent his days as a farmer would—trimming hedges, on a tractor, digging trenches, mowing long expanses of grass, and chainsawing fir trees he didn’t like. I resolved to teach myself to cook, which was fun, but also quite lonely when done on my own. It didn’t get any better when Coco was first born. We brought her there for the month of August when she was just three weeks old. I had no idea what I was doing as a new mom, and I struggled to accept the fact that Christopher found it so easy to spend much of the day outside doing farm chores while I felt trapped in newborn world. From his perspective, that was all he knew. The men worked outside on the farm and the woman took care of all matters relating to the house and the household. We’d hang out in the morning and the evening, but the rest of the day was business as usual. My solution was to have constant houseguests to keep me company, but that strategy became exhausting in a different way.

  As Coco got a little bigger, it became apparent that she was in love with horses. That was when everything changed for me at the farm. On our summer visits we’d spend hours, days, weeks grooming the ponies and taking them out for rides. When she was napping I would pull weeds up from the garden and then make a delicious family supper. Having Coco gave me a partner in crime and got me outside doing fun activities that I wouldn’t have had the courage or motivation to do on my own. When my son, Zach, came along, the farm was the only place where it felt easy to have two young kids. They were free to roam outside, far away from city streets and cars. We ate healthily, slept well, and had both time to go on adventures and time to be bored. Who has time to get bored in New York City? When Zach was five, he said to me, “Mommy. I love England.”

  “Why do you love England?” I asked.

  “Because it’s the only place where I feel free,” he responded sincerely.

  Our farm cottage in Oxfordshire, England.

  This feeling of blissful family happiness increased every time we returned to England. Friends would come visit and tell us we were crazy not to live there, and we’d cry each time we left. But were we ready to move to England full time? As the 2009 dinner conversation continued, we decided that no, we weren’t ready. I think we were both worried that if we went, we’d never come back. It might feel great for a few years, but then what would we do for the rest of our lives?

  • • •

  My conversation with Christopher about moving to England came up again over Christmas break in 2011. In contemplating my next move after Barneys, I realized that for the first time in seven y
ears, I would have no obligations to anyone—employees, clients, payroll—other than myself. I also had no idea what I wanted to do next in my career. I’d been on a whirlwind of accepting opportunities and experiences that came my way, but I hadn’t really been in the driver’s seat. I hadn’t been planning my future as much as just saying yes to other people’s vision of what my future could be. I felt that I could go on like this indefinitely, just responding to what was put in front of me, but ultimately it wasn’t satisfying enough. I missed being creative. I missed expressing my own ideas about fashion and style. I missed writing my book and my blog. I felt like I was living only within small parts of myself and ignoring the rest.

  I was in the bath one night, at home on Chrystie Street, and I realized that if I really had any intention of living outside of New York City, for even just a short while, the time was now. My kids were at the right age, and though my husband had obligations in New York, they were nothing that couldn’t be taken care of with an occasional visit.

  Minutes later, Christopher came into the bathroom while I was brushing my teeth. I put the brush down, swished some water around in my mouth, and said, “Sweetheart, I keep having this fantasy of us living in England. Just for a year. We could go when the kids get out of school, spend the summer getting settled in, and then stay for the kids’ school year. I could write my next book, and you could really focus on your painting.”