Burda Style For people who sew

“Man, that girl is ten miles of bad road!”

A ridiculous confession: I’ve always wanted someone to say that about me. I’ve always wanted to be described as ten miles of bad road. Fasten your seatbelt, guy, drop some lead on the gas and get ready to rumble. This chick was built for speed. And so on. It’s a ridiculous confession because I am not, realistically, the kind of girl anyone would describe as ten miles of bad road, or even two miles of bad road. Maybe a quarter-mile, but “that girl is a quarter-mile of bad road” doesn’t have the same sexy ring; it’s more like saying, “Watch out! Speed bumps!” Still a good idea to buckle up, but no man’s gunning the engine.

The number one thing I love about New York: I don’t have to drive anywhere.

The number one thing I miss, living in New York: Driving.

Not always; not every day. I certainly don’t relish the idea of fighting the traffic around here, braking my way crosstown then circling the block 17 or 18 times before I find a parking space, halfway back the way I came. I’ve rented cars in New York; I know the score. But then a certain heat comes whispering through the air, not warmth yet, but its harbinger, and the familiar, pedal-to-the-metal urge comes over me. Spring fever. Wanderlust. The need for speed, after months of cooped-up winter. It’s so American, that feeling, the burn to get up and go, head West, put some miles between you and your history.

As a trend-watcher, I feel it’s my duty to blow the whistle on criminal style. Technicolor denim is on the right side of the fashion law, though I’m sitting the trend out in deference to the axiom that any fad you wore the first time, you sit out when it comes again. Like a cop at a broken stop light, however, I’d like to halt fashion traffic for a moment, and point out where history tells us this particular fad is headed. When I was ten, my babysitter had a pair of pink jeans she liked to wear on Friday and Saturday nights, when she was going out later.

Everything I know about rave can pretty much be summed up by three things: The movie 24 Hour Party People, glowsticks, and the Pulp song “Sorted for E’s & Wizz.” The few raves I went to weren’t really raves, at least not in the view of a girl sorted for neither e’s nor wizz. The first one I attended set the tone: A few people dancing in a pasture to bad four-on-the-floor techno you could barely hear, as disinterested dealers elbowed through the crowd trying to make eye contact with buyers. I remember one girl throwing up on some weeds near the blanket my friends had laid out; I remember another one, shirtless, sitting in the dirt staring at her hands. People passed 40s around and, yes, there were glowsticks. You have to handicap for the fact that this was Central Florida, but even so the whole event had the aura of late-era desperation to it, revelers trying hard to live the dream before it died. About a month later, I asked my mom, in so many words, whether I could go to a rave the following weekend. That’s how little the rave scene impressed me: I didn’t feel compelled to lie to my parents about it.

We have entered the age of simultaneity. Once upon a time, not too long ago, in fact, retro looks had their day in the sun and then faded again, replaced by the next old idea newly exhumed from the thrift shops. No more: Looks for spring and fall range across a vast spectrum of inspiration, with the ‘20s, the ‘30s, the ‘40s, the ‘60s, the ‘70s, and pretty much every formerly degraded look from the ‘80s represented, somewhere. The really postmodern thing is go time-traveling in your closet, mixing and matching among the epochs. Straight-up homage would be so…predictable.

I am the queen of stupid injuries. Other people lay themselves up tackling black diamond ski trails, or training for marathons, or going to surf camp in Costa Rica. Aside from a recurring case of wrist tendonitis due to whacking the ball too hard at tennis, all my serious injuries are ones I have to lie about later. Some highlights:

Let me be clear on this, right up front: Breakin’ is an awful movie. The script is feloniously bad: There are plot holes you could drive an aircraft carrier through, the dialogue is like nails on a chalkboard, and despite some hamfisted attempts at sketching depths, the characters are so cartoonish they make Bugs Bunny seem nuanced in comparison. The directing is worse; the acting, worst of all. But the dancing! Watching Breakin’ again recently, I found myself transported back to a time when hip-hop was new, when graffiti art and beatboxing and scratching DJs and sneaker freakism all felt revolutionary and exciting, dispatch from the cultural underground. How far we’ve come.

STEP TO IT

Here, in a nutshell, is the history of my career as a dancer. When I was four, I told my mom I wanted to be a ballerina. She signed me up for a class, bought me a leotard, a pair of Capezios, and a pink tutu. Returning to the studio after the very first class, the instructor informed her that I was a mite “energetic” for ballet, i.e., that I’d flipped the bird to the barre and had spent the previous hour twirling around the room to my own whimsical choreo. Mom rescued her deposit at the studio by enrolling me in baton twirling, and the pink tutu went on to fame, in our house, as the centerpiece of a chase game called “The Lady with the Pink Hair!!!”

The fall shows boasted more than a few tips of the mortarboard to academic dress: Tweeds and plaid, car coats, preppy jackets and Fair Isle sweaters. But one of the best tricks stolen from the ivory tower came in the form of the Oxford. The adapted brogue made an appearance at several shows, with two of the strongest versions showing up on the Marc Jacobs and Philip Lim runways. At Marc, the Oxford came out with a squared-off toe, a tall stack heel, and a zippered instep; the look was downtown bookish. Lim’s Oxford was sexier, black, olive and camel-colored suede slingbacks perched on a sharp stilettos, with some patent leather shine for added tone-on-tone impact. They’re too cool for school.

I make it a rule not to read “it” books. You know the kind of books I mean: The Corrections, Everything is Illuminated, that Marisha Pessl book, “Calamity Physics” or whatever. I’m not saying these books are bad. I’m not saying they’re good. I’m saying I haven’t read them. And yet: Due to the inundation of book reviews, author interviews and gossipy items about new townhouses and film options, and also due to the everywhere, empty, cocktail party jowling about these novels, I could probably give you a pretty accurate plot synopsis of each of them. If absolutely necessary, I could it while drunk, as part of some pretentiously malfeasant cop’s roadside sobriety test. “Walk the line,” I imagine him saying, “and tell me what happens in Ecuador.” “In Indecision?” I reply, slurring a little on the double “in.” “Of course in Indecision!” he answers, giving me a tap with his nightstick. Then he twirls his mustache.

“Intellectual fashion” used to strike me as an oxymoron. Fashion was something for girls who spent an hour feathering their bangs in the morning. Intellect was possessed by women who had better things to do with their time. I’ve been reeducated, of course: Elsa Schiaparelli was as Dada as Breton and Man Ray; Geoffrey Beene was a mathematician, playing elegant games with the geometry of cut. More recently, designers

About a month ago, well into the winter blahs, my best friend convinced me that what I really needed to do to shake up my hermit routine was, no, not a vacation, no, not a winning lottery stub, and no, not a haircut, which is what I’d been promoting as my ticket to happiness. What I needed was a detox. She’d do it with me! It’d be great! Like rehab, only different! The detox concept was reasonable, in theory: We’d melt away the winter weight and sweep out the mental cobwebs, all in one ten-day fell swoop. And so, dutifully, I followed her to the organic store and stocked up on lemons, maple syrup and cayenne pepper. We were planning to fast. Or, OK, she was planning to fast, and I was testing the waters of the idea of fasting, a concept that did not, frankly, hold much appeal. I invest a lot of psychological significance in my ability to eat a chocolate chip cookie when I feel like eating one; I often wonder how people with gluten allergies navigate a world without baked goods.

There are scenes, and then there are scenes. What CBGBs was to punk rock, the Algonquin Round Table symbolizes to modern American journalism. Night after night, The New Yorker’s original leading lights gathered there, trading boozy bon mots and poison barbs across the table as they plotted the agenda for urbane conversation in the Prohibition era. There’s not a writer I know who hasn’t at some point wished to have been alive to make that party. Dorothy Parker was the sharpest wit of the bunch, an acidic advance of the Carrie Bradshaw type, perpetually single, perpetually out, perpetually enmeshed in dubious affairs and perpetually turned-out in Poiret-age get-ups that look oh-so of-the-moment right now.

LIT GIRL

Growing up in Florida, there were only two things to do when it rained all weekend: Read a book, or go the mall with Ashley. The mall usually involved Kim and Carrie, too, and then some lounging over smoothies at the food court, and inevitably, the whole point of the mall, a visit to Contempo. Contempo was the place you’d go for, say, a pair of lace-trimmed denim shorty-shorts, and the matching vest, or for a floral baby doll made from fabric slick as an oil spill. I was not a Contempo girl. My tastes in high school were cautious and tomboyish; very Gap, in other words. But Ashley and Carrie and Kim lived for Contempo, and so off we’d go, me idling by the racks as my three live-fast friends plunged into the dressing rooms. I think my antipathy towards H&M was seeded in those rainy Contempo days: Here we go again, cheap, on-fad, disposable. Anyway. As noted, the other option was reading, and reading back then felt something like the opposite of Contempo. I’d curl up with whatever book had struck my fancy that day, and spend the afternoon in moody seduction, the seduction of the reader by the read. There was nothing trendy about it. It was pure.