What I was wearing...when I met his parents.

… was white. Everything white, everything new. 

And I wasn’t a white kind of girl. 

I wore black. Black jeans, tees, boots and sweaters. It was my default mode.

When I had to bring things up a notch, formalize my appearance for client meetings or family dinners, I pulled on a black leather skirt and the fake pearls I found at a flea market. Popular culture might have called my style edgy and on trend but popular culture would have been wrong because it, how I dressed, was less a style than a statement of indolence. I was lazy. It was as simple as that. 

Black was so easy. Everything matched. Dirt didn’t show. It got you into all the clubs and kept you under the radar on the subway late at night.

White was hard work. Finding it, keeping it clean, trying not to feel like a novice nun when you wore it. White made your teeth look dingy and your butt large. 

That I even considered it suggested a degree of commitment on my part, even though we’d been seeing each other less than a month. I had to assume he felt the same because here he was, British and undemonstrative, already introducing me to his family. 

That I’d even considered wearing white suggested a degree of commitment to the man I was seeing, the man who was bringing me home to meet his parents. I had to assume he felt the same because although we’d been dating less than a month, and although he was an undemonstrative Brit, here he was introducing me to his family. 

His parents were temporarily in America for his father’s work, living in a house on Long Island that overlooked the sound.  Obviously they too were British. His father was originally from Scotland but at that point I wasn’t attuned to the distinctions, didn’t know because I’d never thought about it, that although people from Scotland, England and bits of Ireland were British, only the English were, well, English.  Wales was in there somewhere as well, but who in America thinks about Wales?  Of course, I wasn’t thinking about any of this at the time, only that I was about to meet the parents, and that it had to mean something. 

I went to my client Inez for advice. Inez was the creative director at an agency that gave me a lot of work. She was elegant and smart and scary, an Anna Wintour type and she understood the etiquette of clothing: the nuances of hem length, the language of shoes, when and how to wear a hat. She would have been very successful in Japanese court circles during the middle age when you had to decode someone’s status by the width of a sleeve. 

I went and stood in front of her shiny, oversized desk. ‘We’re spending the weekend with his parents,’ I told her. ‘It’s a first meet.’

She nodded. ‘Two words,’ she said. ‘Wear white.’

She sent me to a venerable department store in midtown. There, I purchased a baggy white sweater, loose white pedal pushers, a white blouse with a Peter Pan collar and white lace up Keds. Then I made my way to the lingerie department and chose a starched white nightie, a pair of white cotton panties and a somber white bra. 

I was kitted out like an Amish bride. That’s how far gone I was.