Fashion Was in My DNA, Wasn't It?

Following in my mother’s footsteps when the shoes no longer fit.

The author’s mother outside of her West Hartford store, Artichoke.

My mother liked to say that I grew up in retail. I was 5 when she left her high school English teacher job to open a trendy woman's fashion boutique in our WASPY Connecticut suburb. In the land of Peck ‘n Peck monogrammed sweaters and Pappagallo Bermuda Bags (also monogrammed), Artichoke stood as a beacon to the hip, independent women of West Hartford.

Opened in the era of free love and Woodstock, it featured racks of denim maxi skirts, Twiggy-style mini dresses, and Native American jewelry hanging on a wall made of cork. A 6-foot-tall beauty with black hair and red lips, my mother employed her most stylish friends (who often began life as her customers), ran a yearly Godfather sale (“Make me an offer I can’t refuse”), and referred to her markdown rack as “The Unloved Ones” (spelled out in pink felt letters glued onto a green felt banner). As her objectively less glamorous daughter, uncomfortable in my own body and forever trying to force my curly hair into a Farrah Fawcett flip, my mother's store was a lesson in the good life: cool friends, enviable wardrobe, and the idea that a woman could be the boss of her own empire.

My father was a successful optometrist, but it was soon clear to me that it was my mother's bacon we were all enjoying. "I'll write it off," was her mantra, whether on buying trips to Europe or Fashion Week in Manhattan (and accompanying stay at the Essex House). By the time I was 13, I had been to the garment district enough times with my mother to know the razzle dazzle of the showroom—the heaping plates of Danish set out for us, the models who stood around in their bras and panties should my mother want to see the drape of a dress, the fast-talking sales reps with their Sassoon haircuts and arsenals of bracelets.

On some level, even when I flirted with becoming a celebrity divorce attorney (I was a bit of a starfucker and knew from People magazine that movie stars were always divorcing), I had always assumed that Artichoke was my birthright. Once my mother decided to retire, the narrative went, she'd hand the keys over to me. My younger brother David, who thought his Pittsburgh Steelers sweatshirt was the height of fashion, clearly had no claim to the throne.

My father was a successful optometrist, but it was soon clear to me that it was my mother's bacon we were all enjoying. "I'll write it off," was her mantra, whether on buying trips to Europe or Fashion Week in Manhattan (and accompanying stay at the Essex House).

My mother’s narrative was a bit different. When I was a freshman in college, I told her that I saw myself moving back home after college and taking over her store. She shut me down pretty quickly. I was used to things coming pretty easily to me—from good grades to a full wardrobe, gratis— courtesy of Artichoke. “You think I’m just going to give you my store?” I remember her saying. “No way.”

First, she told me, I'd need to go through a retail-training program and learn all about staffing and merchandising and open-to-buy until I had enough experience to move back home from wherever I might land after college and take over her boutique. 

It felt both inevitable and honorable to follow in her footsteps. We were opposites in so many ways—her taking center stage, me content to hide in the wings—yet bonded by our shared history of gabardine, cruisewear, and countless evenings when we'd sit side-by-side on the couch, poring over fashion magazines, saying things like, "It looks as if shoulder pads are making a comeback" or "That green would look great with your eyes." As long as I stuck to the plan and apprenticed myself to the Guild of Fine Apparel, it seemed my mother and I would always be together, Artichoke & Daughter. A predestination willed by God and my mother.

Over Christmas break of my senior year in college in 1987, I met with a panel of recruiters for the Bloomingdale’s Executive Training Program, where, if hired, I'd begin my own executive career as an assistant department manager. Naturally, when I sat down for a formal interview a few months later, I was certain my fashion knowhow would carry me past the rest of the chumps vying for the job. As a trainee extraordinaire, I saw myself assigned to the couture department, quilted head to toe in Chanel. Clearly, I was too good for Housewares, located in the Siberia of the 8th floor, or, God forbid, the Luggage department, situated so close to the Lexington Avenue subway entrance, it was practically on the platform.

When I was a freshman in college, I told her that I saw myself moving back home after college and taking over her store. She shut me down pretty quickly. I was used to things coming pretty easily to me—from good grades to a full wardrobe, gratis— courtesy of Artichoke. “You think I’m just going to give you my store?” I remember her saying. “No way.”

My actual assignment was somewhere in the middle, on the store's fourth floor in a department with the urgent name of Bloomingdale's NOW! The department featured ready-to-wear designers I would come to know well over my first year on the job: Tahari, Ellen Tracy, Adrienne Vitadini, Spitalnick, and, in the far-left corner, just before the door leading to our massive stock room: the sale room, a roil of pushy customers waving price-tag-less merchandise in front of my face and demanding answers. There is nothing scarier than an office worker on a lunchbreak with a pair of mismarked discount Tahari trousers standing in her way.  I learned all I needed to know about New Yorkers by working in that sale room. 

The author’s “B” pin from her time working at Bloomingdale’s.

But what I remember most about my time in the training program was our divisional manager, a towering force of hair and heels I’ll call Mrs. Gold. She ruled the fourth floor with a clipboard in hand, making notes, I imagined, on which employee forgot to wear her B pin, who had neglected to bring a rolling rack down to the storage room, or if our dotty saleslady showed up to work again with bright blue eyebrows, confusing her teal eyeliner for her brow pencil. Mrs. Gold’s eyes (made larger by her huge eyeglasses, huger than anything Iris Apfel ever wore), saw all affronts to her kingdom.

What her job actually encompassed was a mystery to me but the sound of Mrs. Gold's heels making their rounds along the travertine floors signaled a cartoonish attempt to look busy, straightening and buttoning everything in sight. Even those who held their own bits of power scattered to the nearest clothing rack, taking a sudden interest in cashmere twinsets. My direct manager, a perpetually sweaty creep who mistakenly thought he was a real catch, would turn into a stuttering mess whenever she approached. Jim was tall but Mrs. Gold was taller and so much surer of herself. She reminded me of my mother—in height and in command—so much so that I wanted Mrs. Gold to see me as her protege.  "You know something?" I'd fantasize her saying, "You remind me a lot of myself when I was younger."

First, she told me, I'd need to go through a retail-training program and learn all about staffing and merchandising and open-to-buy until I had enough experience to move back home from New York City and take over her boutique. It felt both inevitable and honorable to follow in her footsteps.

After a few months on the job, it became obvious that Mrs. Gold saw me as just another pair of legs in black DKNY opaque tights. The only time I remember her speaking directly to me was when she caught me repairing a run in my stocking with a few strokes of Chanel clear nail polish. "Should you be doing that?" she barked before click-clacking off.

I suffered other letdowns too. Even though I could see the land of Chanel and Ungaro from where I stood in ready-to-wear, I soon caught on that I'd never make it across the bridge. Those girls in their kick pleat skirts and Ralph Lauren riding boots were an exclusive sorority, one I'd never break into, no matter how many pairs of designer tights I bought. Besides, ever since moving to Manhattan, my closet was a sea of black, the verboten color of my youth. (Only “fast” girls wore black, according to my mother.) I traded my own riding boots for Doc Martins, let my naturally curly hair run wild instead of tucking it back in a prim headband, and swapped my Bonnie Bell Lipsmackers for an unscented tube of YSL in brickhouse red.

And that was okay with me. Just like I had abandoned my dreams of becoming a celebrity divorce attorney, I realized that retail called to me even less. I was tired of working weekends and holidays, and my long hours messed up any chance I had of ever meeting my nine-to-fiver friends at South Street Seaport for happy hour.

After a year of pushing around rolling racks and yelling at my salespeople for not wearing their B pins, I turned in my own and left retail for good. It was a decision that surprised no one, least of all my mother, who knew all along that I was never coming back home. My mother knew long before it ever dawned on me that I wasn’t cut out for the business. That I wasn’t tough enough to handle the machismo of Seventh Avenue. Didn’t care enough about the drape of a dress. That my world was an interior one, filled with words and images and concepts best expressed on paper and not on my body.

As I continued on with a career in advertising and then in journalism, moving further away from home to Washington, DC, I came to understand that my mother was never going to give up her place behind the sales counter. I can still see her handwriting on the postcard she created for Artichoke’s 40^th anniversary. Above a line drawing of a bra made out of two artichokes, appeared the headline, “Thanks for your support.” She and I had worked together on the mailing; I had created the copy.

What I remember most about my time in the training program was our divisional manager, a towering force of hair and heels I’ll call Mrs. Gold. She ruled the fourth floor with a clipboard in hand, making notes, I imagined, on which employee forgot to wear her B pin, who had neglected to bring a rolling rack down to the storage room, or if our dotty saleslady showed up to work again with bright blue eyebrows, confusing her teal eyeliner for her brow pencil.

But then, in a future none of us had predicted, my mother had to leave her beloved Artichoke behind. Diagnosed in her early 60s with a rare form of dementia, she sat strapped to a wheelchair for the last two years of her life, robbed of language and, even more sinister to me, her ability to dress herself. Gone was her beloved black Armani suit, replaced by a series of matching sweats; her hair undyed and braided off to one side, a simple solution by her aides but clearly doing no favors for my mother. If she had come to her right mind for even one second, she would have screamed bloody murder and reached for her tube of Revlon's Love That Red.

My father had to sell the store when her dementia got so bad that she couldn’t remember how to write her name on an order form or whether she had paid her employees. Before she handed the keys to her manager—who would eventually run the business into the ground—she still liked to stand behind the counter. I never saw her as happy as when she was in her store, helping her regular customers, answering the phone in singsong, “Artichoke.” When I let myself, I can still hear her.

Nearly ten years after her passing, I still reached for the phone to tell her about the Alexander McQueen corset belt I scored for $5 or the great Bottega Veneta bag I found at a local thrift shop. In the land of K Street attorneys and government contractors, I missed talking shop.

In 2016, just a few years after my mother’s death, I heard through a friend that Mrs. Gold was still with Bloomingdales, still on the fourth floor, and still, I imagined, terrorizing her underlings. It awakened in me a longing to revisit my old stomping grounds. As a new mother, I was wistful for those days on the fourth floor and Mrs. Gold, the last doyenne of her kind, was calling me home. In advance of a trip to NYC, I tracked down her work number and, to her audible bafflement, asked her to meet with me.

Mrs. Gold, I learned, was now head of the personal shopping department called At Your Service.  A study in soft-focus mauve and desert tones, it’s the kind of sartorial still life where structured leather bags sit behind glass like precious tropical fish and stilettos rest on the lacquered coffee table as if the owners have gone off to dance in another department. The whole place gave off the vibe of what a personal shopping department might look like if a set designer from Dynasty were in charge of things.

Cathy Alter, second from right in red top, back in her Bloomingdale's days.

After a while, I heard a familiar clopping and in walked Mrs. Gold, looking exactly as I remembered: heels with a nude stocking, black suit with a scarf draped dramatically around her shoulders. And those same trademark glasses!

So much had changed over the years—marriages, births, deaths—but somehow, she had not.

"I remember you," she said, looking me up and down. "Of course, I do."

In the ensuing years, she must have met a thousand girls like me, dressed in silky power suits and beginner’s pumps, escaping our small lives for a front row seat in something way more glamorous and grownup.

I asked her if we could walk the floor together and reminisce. Is this what I wanted? I’m not sure. I’m not sure what I wanted from her, other than for her to spark something in me. Something that would help me recapture that time in my life when I was young and limitless and truly on my own for the first time. When my mother was still alive and the most pressing decisions in our shared lives had more to do with what we put on our backs than what was happening inside our bodies. Only now, after surviving the tough losses and crushing disappointments that go along with making it this far in life, I know that cultivating the layers beneath our clothing is really, truly, the only way to soldier through what’s ahead of us.

After a year of pushing around rolling racks and yelling at my salespeople for not wearing their B pins, I turned in my own and left retail for good. It was a decision that surprised no one, least of all my mother, who knew all along that I was never coming back home. My mother knew long before it ever dawned on me that I wasn’t cut out for the business.

Like a prehistoric insect trapped in amber, Mrs. Gold represented a past, all shoulder pads and stirrup pants, nights at the Limelight and days spent with all those other young trainees and career salespeople who, in the aggregate, taught me how to find my voice in that back salesroom long before I ever learned how to reclaim it on the page.

For those brief fifteen minutes, the absolute most she could squeeze into her calendar, time looped backward to 1987. As long as Mrs. Gold and I were together, strolling the same floors I had walked countless times before, my plans for the life I was expecting were still intact. A life where a mother and daughter lived happily ever after behind the counter of the Artichoke, laid out before me as beautifully as a Chanel tweed suit.

Life, of course, did not go that way. Does it ever?

Toward the end of our time together, I asked Mrs. Gold for a photo, a way, I suppose to preserve another time in amber. In it, we are side-by-side, closer than I ever stood to her when I was 21. I don't remember doing it at the time, but I notice that I have a scarf thrown around my neck, just like Mrs. Gold. We almost look like mother and daughter.

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