I have discovered something unexpected.

My whole life, whenever I've worn "fancy" stuff, I've felt...awkward. Like a little girl playing dress-up in her mom's closet. What I mean by "fancy" is mostly things like…I don't know, skirt suits. Tailored pieces. But I also mean those sort of elegantly minimalist outfits that I absolutely love on other people, but that never look quite right on me.

And I figured it out:

There are some pieces in your closet that you just don't get rid of, ever. No matter what. Because it's less about what they look like than about their history. The story they tell.

When Francesca and I lived together in Los Angeles, we had this very nice side-benefit that comes from living with a girl who's more or less your size, but has kind of different taste in clothing: if I had an item of clothing that was great but not something I wore for one reason or another, I just handed it over to her. And vice versa.

There was this one piece in particular that Francesca owned - a teeny-tiny vintage Blumarine minidress - that she never really wore, and that I ended up borrowing practically every single time we went out. To the bar down the street with flats and a jean jacket, out to dinner with a big scarf, out dancing all by itself (with gold heels, of course). I'm not usually big on borrowing clothing from people just because…you know, it's theirs, and clothing can feel very proprietary, very personal. It's not necessarily something that everyone is comfortable loaning out. Back then, though, we traded our stuff - all of it, really - back and forth in a way that I'd always dreamed of doing with a sister; my closet was essentially hers, and vice versa.