It’s easy to get wrapped up in winter fashion
A good, woolly scarf is one of my favorite things to wear. I have a drawer full of winter scarves that are useless for more than half the year, but now I can break them out again. My scarves are like old friends whom I haven’t seen in awhile: I had almost forgotten them, but upon sight, it is as though we had never been apart. My scarves are bulky, knitted, solid-colored. Some are store-bought; others have been handmade by talented friends and family members. Some have fringe on the ends.
A few feel almost scratchy on the skin. One is especially soft, but deposits fuzz everywhere. All of my scarves are treasured possessions. I never outgrow them. I never give them away with old clothes, because they never go out of style. Most importantly, they never lose their toasty snugness. I have a couple of airy, silken summer scarves, one a gift all the way from France, but I can never manage to wear them successfully. They seem too glamorous for me.
Or maybe it’s because the heyday of the elegant scarf predates my formative years: By the time I was choosing my own clothes, the filmy, accessorizing scarf was a thing of the past. When I was in college, the wife of an English lit professor tried to reach out to the female students by holding a girls’ get-together, which turned out to be an informal scarf-wearing seminar.
She served us cookies and showed us how to fold scarves, how to tie scarves in cunning ways, how to roll their flimsy delicacy into the shape of a rose around the neck. We responded, I’m afraid, with derision. It was the 1970s, the dawn of feminism, when we discarded pretense and held feminine wiles in contempt. Who wore scarves anymore? Who did she think we were, Grace Kelly? We wanted to look like Grace Slick: We were after hippie chic.