When I was young I loved playing with paper dolls. As I grew older, into my teens, I particularly loved those fashion paper dolls, where you had a variety of outfits to put on the model. I loved playing with clothes and colors and style. But I never really thought abut majoring in Home Economics, or becoming a buyer or designer or in any way having a career in fashion. I liked plain paper dolls and the fancy exotic and historical ones. I loved the ideas of mixing up styles. But none of this played out really in my actual clothing. I wore a Milwaukee brace from the age of 10 to 15. My mom hated making my clothes and found fitting over the brace difficult. In retrospect that could have played into why I was not encouraged to sew. Paper dolls were a way to explore ideas I couldn’t explore in real life. I thought I didn’t have any style and never would. The girl my parents always compared me to, wished I would be like, had style but I did not. Everyone told me so — my parents, my godfather — everyone who mattered to that younger me. But I don’t know where that came from: out of fear, or pity, or somewhere else. I absorbed those words, but they may also have fueled my fascinations, Dressing paper dolls opened up worlds that were not my world. Now of course I know that everyone has style in the broader sense, style is part of who we are, the way we present our external selves to the world. Even the rejection of Style, the specific version of style in the narrow sense, is itself a form of style. Every choice we make, every choice we refuse to make is a part of the style in which we present ourselves to the world.
I still like playing with paper dolls, but my “paper doll” play in adulthood runs more into making collages from pictures cut out of magazines and catalogs. When I was a child, I also loved poring over my mother’s Harpers Bazaar magazines. I loved the pattern catalogs when we went to Hancocks fabrics even though I wasn’t the one sewing, and often my choices of fabric or pattern were not the ones I ended up wearing. Even more, I loved my mom’s Japanese sewing magazines, Soen and Dressmaking. Soen seemed more exotic and fascinating to me. When I went away to college, fashion magazines offered an occasional escape from studies. Once, after a Saturday spent in NYC, I bought a copy of the French fashion magazine L’Officiel to peruse on the train back to Poughkeepsie. There was a photo shoot featuring models wearing ethereal evening dresses by Yves Saint Laurent paired with thick-soled basic canvas espadrilles, not the pretty lace up ones, but the thick fishermen-style ones. It blew my mind. I had never seen anything like that in West Texas. I started cutting out pictures. Eventually I started pasting the pictures onto pages and creating notebooks, although truthfully I didn’t really do that until much later, after I taught myself to sew, after I was married.
Those notebooks filled with pictures of clothes and clothing details have resided on my shelves, mostly untouched, for some years now. But recently I unpacked a box labeled “miscellaneous patterns” and found a stash of photo clippings mixed with knitting pattern leaflets and patterns cut from magazines. I started looking at my collages, my “paper dolls”, and I realized there was a distinct style and continuity to my choices over the years. Of course, there were a few things here and there that I could look at today and wonder what I had been thinking, but I could cover those little glitches up with new photos. I’ve never been one who wants all of one designer, or one year, or one age or style, bundled together. I started playing with pictures again. And I wondered why I had stopped.
I started sorting through the various files on my computer, because I haven’t really read fashion magazines much in years, but I have occasionally saved screenshots or made Pinterest boards. Unfortunately I never look at those pictures once I’ve clipped them. I am apparently a glue and paper girl. Still. The idea that I could print out those clipped images and paste them into books further expanded my brain. I looked at my fabric collection differently. I started sewing again.
The photos of collages above are mostly old, more than 12 years old, many of the photos may be 20 or 30 years old. My early explorations were probably not all that adventurous, shaped by very twentieth century ideals of style and elegance. But I still find them inspiring. There are lots of pages of women in suits. I still like suits even though I don’t really wear them, and since menopause I still run hot. The hardest part of retirement was not having a reason to wear suits anymore. But there are also pictures of women whose style I admired, women who pushed boundaries, who mixed things up, who knew themselves. I’m not sure I did, know myself that is. But collaging is one part of the process, and I suspect knowing oneself is a lifetime journey.
And part of that journey is that I clip ideas from a much wider range of sources now than I did. I am inspired by a wider range of cultures and styles. I am inspired by younger women, women who may wear things that I love on them but may or may not ever wear myself. I like the idea that fashion and style is not a narrow line. I say this even as I occasionally despair that quality and style and wearable elegance seems to be fading away. Fashion, in the big sense, seems to appeal less. I clip pictures of things I could probably easily buy. But it’s not about buying or consuming. Perusing my notebooks makes me think about what I have and what I want to wear and why I want to wear it. I’ve always been a person who thinks too much, who lives perhaps too much in her head. But I can’t really dismiss that part of myself she is very much a part of what has made me the woman I am today.
Even though I haven’t bought fashion magazines, or actually been all that inspired by high fashion in some time, I felt inspired to go out and buy a fashion magazine. I wanted one of the semiannual issues that focus on the collections, and I found this Vogue France Collections Fall 2025/2026 at my local Barnes and Noble.
It was disappointing. I suppose I should have suspected that from the cover. There are maybe three things I would clip from the whole issue. Everything seems based on shock value or on the instant photographable moment, not beautiful things that could fit into a life, any life. I don’t know if my issue is with the designers and the industry as a whole, or with the editors at Vogue France. In some sense it doesn’t matter. And the absence of Vogue in my life doesn’t mean there aren’t things that inspire me. Unfortunately most of those things are no longer at the high end of the market. Fashion seems to have changed but we still need to wear clothes. From my perspective, too many choices that aren’t really choices at all, poorly made clothes of cheap fabrics that fall apart and don’t last. I want to wear only what feels right for me, and to wear it for years. That is true if I am looking at a tee or a cocktail dress. For me, looking at pictures helps focus me, inspire me to pull together the things that make me happy. It slows the constant buzz of too much that seemingly swirls through the air, the electronic and social media backlog that is both annoyingly distracting and yet can also be far too narrow and confining.
This picture is from a sewing pattern company, Sew Liberated, one of the models for the Arthur Pants. I like this pattern; I like this shape’ and I love this photo of this model. She looks happy, comfortable, and, to my eye, quite stylish. I think the pants are very flattering in a modern way, a way that embraces the idea that we all come in different shapes and have different ideas of style, and look good in our own bodies, our own thoughts, our own choices. This photo is going in one of my collages and I will probably also eventually make a pair of these pants. I don’t have any patterns for barrel legged pants, although I have long loved them. I had barrel legged, elastic waisted gardening pants in the late 1980’s and early 1990s. The legs were cut much like this and I adored them. They were worn to shreds and the company I purchased them from went out of business. There truly is nothing new in the world, but there are tweaks and differences that make something feel more “now” and less dated.
But this photo also reminds me that this is something my younger self, inculcated into a very restrictive and narrow-minded ideal of what was and was not attractive, would never have worn. Today this photo inspires me, and it also shores me up, helps me fight my own demons, demons that stem from those brace-wearing years of over half a century ago. This summer I am moving better than I have in years and yet at the same time that 13 year old girl who didn’t fit the mold feels dangerously close.
Playing collages has also helped focus on some things I don’t understand about judgements and stye and fashion. My questions are not about why we care, or even why we make judgements, because the inclination to judge, to separate ourselves into groups of “like me” and “not like me” is probably to some extent hardwired for survival. Instead I fret over is why we make judgements on such frivolous, silly, and culturally narrow bases in a world that is far broader and filled with more knowledge, ideas and experiences than ever before. I feel thrilled and inspired by so many options that were not available to me when I was a girl. We open windows onto worlds and then we slam them shut. I do worry.
Will my collages make any difference? No. Will they help me refine my own understanding of the world and my own place in it? Absolutely. It is a small thing. And yet it is generally by the small things that are lives are lived. We simply need to seize our own happiness.