Sunday Sentence (and a Brief Reminder)
In which I participate in David Abrams’s “Sunday Sentence” project, sharing the best sentence I’ve read during the past week, “out of context and without commentary.”
If you were from a striving, suburban family — one many degrees of separation removed from anyone like Gloria Vanderbilt — then you could not easily shake the belief that popularity, or even just acceptance, was a dream to be forfeited unless you wore tightfitting denim with someone else’s name on the back.
Source: Ginia Bellafante, “Before Trump and the Kardashians, Gloria Vanderbilt Invented the Personal Brand” (The New York Times)
Reminder: I’ll be away for a bit this week—please anticipate the return of blog posts on FRIDAY. Have a good week!
I’ve been a suburbanite all my life. Barring military uniforms and a few sports-team & movie T-shirts, the last outside trade-marked clothing I wore said “Lee’s,” in genuine leather, nearly sixty years ago.
This post brought to mind a song line from ten or more years ago. It went something like:
…and now its come to pass,
That you’ve got the wrong name on your ***.”
Interesting! I had only recently moved to the suburbs when Gloria Vanderbilt’s clothing brand began appearing–and I succumbed! This piece resonated in that sense.
I love this because it reminds me of how when I grew up so upset that my mother would not buy me designer jeans. I was middle class but attended school with many rich upper class students and wanted to fit it so badly. I’m now grateful my mother didn’t buy those jeans; it taught me what was truly important – popularity isn’t about what you wear. I wasn’t popular then, but now I’ve become a much happier person from the friends I made in college, which was from a degree of popularity because people liked me for my opinionated, free spirit personality.
Thanks for sharing!