The first clothes I ever loved were made for me by my mother. Jumpers, tunics, spin-out skirts that went horizontal when I twirled; much as I resented standing still for measurements in her room filled with patterns and fabrics, I gloried in having a personal couturier. If I wanted butterflies on everything one year, I had them. Life was good.

Time goes on, however, and by age eight I had laid down the law to my callous-fingered mom: Store-bought clothes only. The racks gleamed with a new kind of glamour, the glamour of the popular girls at school, Aimee, Somer, Ryan, Piper. I wanted what they had: Brand names. Like every fashion victim, young or old, I was convinced that by copying their outfits, I could capture some of my idols’ elusive magic, too.

But time goes on, and on. I have come back around to the handmade: In this era of the mass-produced, it was what we make ourselves that feels modern to me. Aenne Burda understood that kind of modernity: When she offered sewing patterns to readers of her groundbreaking fashion magazine, she did more than make designer looks accessible; she made them adaptable, too. It was that act of invention that makes fashion style, and every time I reshuffle the deck of my closet and deal myself a new look, rehab old tee-shirts with a razor and some stencils, or customize my thrift-store finds, I honor the Burda legacy. Sure, I have still got some brand-name jeans. Sure, I still take fashion inspiration from an icon or two. But I have learned to love the me in my clothes, the figurative butterflies I continue to stitch onto all my favorite outfits. Some things you never really leave behind.

And so, in honor of the BurdaStyle launch, this week I will be celebrating a few other things I have never really left behind people, places, styles and stuff that have informed my style since way-back, and that I still think are pretty awesome. Stay tuned.

I think I was five. I know it was Sunday, because Sunday night was Muppet night, a big event in my house. It could have been a re-run, but for me, seeing Deborah Harry sing her Blondie hit One Way Or Another to a troupe of Muppet monsters was the beginning of something original: Cool. Cool is not a concept that comes quick to a kid; it is too abstract, too subjective and ephemeral, and up to that moment I had no idea that something so obscurely alluring existed in my cozy world. I didn’t have a name for it then, and even now, I find cool a hard thing to define. Maybe it was the slinky way she moved, or maybe it was the insouciant way she wore her slinky clothes. Maybe, perhaps, I discovered cool in her combination of silliness and self-possession: Look up her appearances on the freaky early 80s series TV Party, and she exudes nothing but grace, even when surrounded by a supporting cast more outré than Muppets, and even when she is delivering a lesson on the proper way to pogo. I caught that episode on DVD recently, and was dumbstruck by Debbie all over again. Whatever cool is, she will always personify it for me. And I still wish my hair looked like that.

Once upon a time in my life, a manicure was a half-hour procedure that involved about ten minutes of coloring my fingernails with waterproof marker, and another twenty sitting a time out for getting red streaks all over the kitchen table. I always went for red, and I generally still do, even now that my DIY days are long gone. But what I have longed for all these years is a nail polish color that goes on the way that marker used to: Sheer and not-quite-red. Rescue Beauty finally delivered the goods, with its Chinoise polish. One coats ‘nostalgia-inducing; two coats’ sexy gleam will remind you that you are all grown up now. Be as bad as you want: No time outs.

Even as a child, I had a strong sense of personal style. There was the Wonder Woman year, for example, and the year of purple, and – triumph de la mode – the year I wore matching plaid skirt and vest sets. Do not ask. I have no idea.

And then there were the years of jumpers. For a long time now, I have looked at those old photos and envied myself, because the jumper is perfect clothes. All-in-one like a dress but made for activity, the jumper was just waiting for an urbane update.

Apparently, I am not the only person who thought so, because the jumper is having a fashion moment. And no one is doing the look better than Brooklyn designer Samantha Pleet. One part punk, one part gamine, Pleet’s jumpers are her trademark – and they have helped earn the designer’s brand-new line shelf space in some of the U.S.’s chicest boutiques, such as L.A.’s Satine and New York City’s I Heart.

“I like to think of my clothes as costumes for life,” explains Pleet. “This collection was inspired by my travels through Europe,” she goes on. “It brought be back to my love of fairy tales ⎯ medieval forests, castles, all that stuff I loved when I was young."

According to Pleet, her favorite piece in the debut collection is a jumper inspired by Bavarian lederhosen, done in basic black and slicked-out for city life."

“I always loved playing dress-up as a kid,” Pleet recalls. “And I still do.”

Gated neighborhoods. Prefab houses. Minivans and manicured lawns. Think you know all about the suburbs? Think again. Indie rockers Cold War Kids hail from that ur-suburbia, the SoCal Valley, but the jolting barroom dirges on debut LP Robbers & Cowards make a persuasive case that the suburbs are the new bohemia. Songs such as “Hang Me Up To Dry” are gritty like the city, mean and pretty, and the perfect soundtrack to an alcoholiday with the fam. You can go home again. You know why? Because you never left.

Playlist’s Best of the Rest:

1. PONG. Screw the new Sony Playstation, version whatever. Video games reached their apotheosis with this Atari debut. Hypnotically simple, this digital version of table tennis is as addictive now as it was when you first played it.
   
2. JOHN CUSACK. This guy is at his best when he is subdivision slumming. Better Off Dead and Say Anything are the early career classics; Netflix Grosse Point Blank and make it a three-fer.
3. “DON’T STOP BELIEVING.” Ah, Journey. Has ever a band been so postmodern? Unabashedly cheesy, boasting some of the most cringe-inducing lyrics and undeservedly anthemic choruses ever written, it is hard to say whether you enjoy Journey so much as you enjoy your enjoyment of them. Or as much as you enjoy your enjoyment of them as a junior in high school.

All-black for Sienna. Mary-Kate’s been working a vintage white-framed pair. Sofia’s been wearing Marc Jacobs’ homage pair. Unofficially, the Wayfarer is back ⎯ and in the nearly 50 years since Audrey Hepburn made them glamorous in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, the sunglasses have not lost their j’en sais quoi. As of this month, you can make the return of the Ray-Ban Wayfarer official. The brand toasted the re-launch of the original rock ‘n roll sunglasses with an appropriately rock ‘n roll fete at New York City’s Irving Plaza. Partiers such as Mischa Barton, Jimmy Fallon and Molly Sims took in a concert set by Eagles of Death Metal, perused a wall of photographs by legendary lensman Mick Rock, all featuring famous faces in the famous frames, and walked out with pairs of Wayfarers to call their own. Get ready to see them everywhere.

Once upon a time, powdering one’s nose meant putting powder on your nose, not into it. But don’t blame cocaine for the decline of an idiom. Long before Steve Rubell opened the doors to Studio 54, suntans and skincare had joined forces to render the noble face powder all but obsolete. The tan changed the paradigm of chic: Back when a sun-kissed face bespoke a day toiling in the fields, alabaster skin was the ideal. Not so much anymore, now that plebes work in cubicles while the rich jetset to St. Barts. We all aspire to that “healthy glow,” and to wit, improvements in skincare have made powder inessential. Once women are armed with cleansers, toners, exfoliaters, moisturizers, masks, peels, dermabrasions, and so on, there’s no blemish left for them to cover over. (In theory, at least.) What good is powder? Well, a fine translucent powder sets makeup to perfection, mattes a shiny complexion, and does not a thing else. It’s no multi-tasking, scientifically substantiated miracle worker, no lipstick that whitens your teeth, no hair-glossing serum that donates 10% of profits to indigenous rain forest tribes and aromatherapeutically boosts your pheremones. Powder is perfectly frivolous and Paul & Joe’s is most perfectly frivolous powder of all. With its pale pink, recherché case and cotton candy powder pouf, the Paul & Joe powder less makeup than objét, especially given that you probably have no need for it. It is, in other words, a luxury.

WASP style usually brings up a raft of Preppy Handbook connotations: Seersucker jackets and madras plaid shorts, striped ties and polo shirts with turned-up collars. Lyell designer Emma Fletcher, however, harks back to an earlier era of Seven Sisters and the Ivy League. Headquartered out of her eponymous shop in New York’s Nolita district, Australian native Fletcher makes clothes that wouldn’t look out of place in a movie adaptation of Catcher in the Rye. Tweed jackets, velvet shrugs, bias-cut dresses, tie-neck blouses and other bookish basics are modernized here and given an old-fashioned flourish therea nip to the pattern to update the silhouette, smocking and covered buttons for genuine vintage finish.

“I really like when things feel antique,” Fletcher notes, “which is funny, because I was never that into vintage until I opened the shop.”

Since opening that shop three years ago, Fletcher has watched Lyell grow into one of New York City’s most in-demand brands. Now carried at Barneys and boutiques nationwide, the line thrives on word-of-mouth alone. But if fans can’t stop talking about Lyell, the clothes themselves evoke the elegance described by Coco Chanel, that which speaks with “a thousand whispered gestures.”

“I do design for myself, mainly,” Fletcher acknowledges. “But I think most people who like Lyell are looking for the same thing in clothes that I am. Pieces,” she continues, “that are simple but distinctive.”

PLAYLIST ETIQUETTE

In her instantly seminal book The Year of Magical Thinking, author Joan Didion relates her attempts, after the death of her husband, to “go to the literature” on grief. She found nothing much that was helpful, except from an unlikely source: Etiquette, by Emily Post. Though Etiquette has been updated over the years, it was Post’s 1922 original that Didion hailed as a masterpiece of matter-of-factness, and that manual has now been re-issued. Read Post not for her advice on debutantes, engaging though it is, but for her surprisingly modern dispensations on nothing less than the meaning of life: “If your community is to give you admiration and honor, it is merely necessary to be admirable and honorable,” reads one sample entry. “The more you put in, the more will be paid out to you. It is too trite to put on paper! But it is astonishing, isn’t it, how many people who are depositing nothing whatever, expect to be paid in admiration and respect?” Isn’t it, though?

Playlist’s Best of the Rest:

1. METROPOLITAN. Released in 1990, Metropolitan is in some ways a relic of its time, a time when indie movies had bad production values, no stars, crackling wit and unpredictable, arrhythmic heart. Writer/director Whit Stillman anatomizes the Xmas break hijinks, such as they are, of the privileged kids of the Upper East Side, and though you might not believe you could love a movie whose plot hinges on the International Debutante Ball, believe me: You will.
2. NAN KEMPNER: The late Mrs. Thomas L. Kempner was the ultimate lady-who-lunched, a staple of the benefit gala, the couture presentations, and the best-dressed list, and the woman once described by Vanity Fair as “the world’s most famous clotheshorse.” Through March 4th, you can peek inside the Kempner closet at the Metropolitan Museum in New York.
3. TENNIS: With the Australian Open concluded, two things are apparent: 1) Now that Roger Federer is on the courts, tennis can once again claim to be the classiest game going, and 2) Grand Slam season has officially begun. You’ve got exactly four months to work on your game before the pros hit Roland Garros.

If ever an accessory screamed un-hip, it was the boat shoe. Too functional to be campy, like a monocle, too staid for rappers and too provincially American to get swept up in fashion’s perpetual obsession with anoraks and sailor stripes, the humble boat shoe just couldn’t catch a break. They scream clam bakes, Kennebunkport and Yankee Republicanism; the icon of the boat shoe is, yikes, former President George Herbert Walker Bush. But the tide for the boat shoe has turned, as fashion tides inevitably must: Marc by Marc Jacobs recently gave the classic a satin update (dubious), L.A.’s Keep Company cross-bred it with Vans and manufactured the hybrid cruelty-free in Brazil, and now France’s taste-making boutique A.P.C. is doing a traditional men’s version for summer. Take the bait, but take it straight: Sperry’s is the old-money original, and dockside or not, it’s pair you want to be wearing all spring long.