Nostalgia: Costumes for the Revolution, was originally published in the October 2008 issue of Vogue.
It has been edited and reformatted.
The summer of 1968 began at dawn on June 5, in my grandmothers living room.
Caterine Milinaire, photographed for “Vogue’s Own Boutique,” at Woburn Abbey in Bedfordshire, England, wearing a gold embroidered vest from The Apple and gold-trimmed blue satin pants from Quorum.
Andy Warhol had been shot two days before.
I awoke to see my grandmother turning on the TV.
And hes alive, hes going to be OK.
They shot another one!
Senator Robert Kennedy was shot last night in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel.
It was an unbearably strange year.
Percussive, angry, out of control.
Martin Luther King had been shot in April.
In May, student riots brought France to a halt for weeks.
I was nineteen and held on to glamour as a talisman against the dark.
The Vietnam War was intractable, the violence terrifying.
The only way through had to do with style, elan, panache.
I wasnt tall, and I didnt look like a dolly bird, but I knew how to dress.
I had a dab way with velvets from the Portobello Road.
I rode up from New York with Penelope Tree in something called a Larchmont Limousine.
She had been discovered.
Her boyfriend was David Bailey, the coolest photographer in the world.
Penelope Tree is with the costume thing.
I had not danced enou h or drunk enough.
There was Caterine Milinaire, whose mother, a producer, had been my parents first friend in Paris.
I had known her since I was four and she was ten; Caterine was my glamorous role model.
I had the same shirt.
I was almost her.
Through someone at BritishVOGUEI was introduced to an editor atGlamourwho liked me.
It seemed safer to forgo that explosive glory to play with clothes and live life as a charaderie.
New York summer heat was a shock.
On the first morning, I walked to work, done up for the Kings Road.
They gave me a desk anyway, and a rotary phone with big square Lucite extension buttons on it.
The floor outside the elevator was black inlaid with gold brass stars.
The technical smell of copier fluid pervaded the hallways.
We were enjoined to think of Peoria.
The only signs of revolution were clothes from faraway cultures: charaderies.
A messenger named Calvin proudly displayed his heritage by wearing a shirt made out of a dashiki.
TheVOGUEgirls, one floor above, had less Peoria to worry about.
They carried baskets from Africa; their necks were hung with talismans from Morocco and Turkey.
In a closed circle of perfection, they ended up in VOGUEs Own Boutique.
It was 98 degrees.
TheVOGUEgirls wore bright Jack Rogers Navajo thong sandals without hose.
Their costumes made them free.
I reviewed Tom WolfesElectric Kool-Aid Acid TestforGlamourand prayed he would read my heartfelt rave.
I watched televisiongreen scenes of carnage from Vietnam, and then I turned toLaugh-In.
The summer of 1968 ended between August 21 and August 28 in the living room of my uncles apartment.
Russian tanks rolled into Prague as the Soviets crushed Alexander Dubceks Prague Spring revolution.
If we stepped in, would that be World War III?
Three days later the Democratic Convention began in Chicago: Eugene McCarthy versus Hubert Humphrey.
If the Democrats won, the Vietnam War would end.
But the convention quickly degraded into nights of riots, the rioters crushed by Mayor Daleys cops.
And that fall, Richard Nixon was elected.
In protest, I wore only red, every shade of red, all together.
