Somewhere around the age of 21, I stopped wearing stockings. I had left college early to work in New York City in late October. There, closing in on winter, some of the women around me were still walking around with bare legs. Despite inclement weather, they even wore sandals. I now see that this may have been a way to tacitly broadcast their privilege. Still, I held onto this, but also circumvented the strange rule by starting to collect a kind of hosiery that was neither an opaque tight nor a shiny nylon. I’d seen these black stockings laced with embroidered dots worn by French women throughout my childhood — I moved back to the U.S. in my freshman year of high school. They also appear, for example, in François Truffaut’s Mississippi Mermaid. There’s Catherine Deneuve smoking in a black bodysuit with said stockings. These pois — French for “little pea” — tights became my go-to, and I’ve been stockpiling them ever since. Funnily enough, I like wearing them most in spring, when the...
I began dreaming about owning cashmere pants in 2017, after a frequent-traveler friend bragged about hers — they allowed her, she said, to step off the plane feeling polished. I wanted them desperately (glamorous pajamas! Cashmere, but pants!), but couldn’t justify the purchase: On Shopbop, they started at $400. Even Everlane’s $140 version felt too steep for fancy PJs. A year passed, and I confessed my still-very-much-alive dream of owning a pair to a friend, who told me that they’d just noticed an on-sale pair at a store called Pas Mal in Greenpoint. She pulled them up online, and I was surprised to find they looked more or less like regular work pants: dark gray, culotte-shaped, with a seam down the front. Plus, the model wearing them was wearing boots and a sweater, not a holey T-shirt and socks. The idea that I could wear them to work pushed me over the edge: I ordered them. And when they arrived, I found they were everything I’d dreamed of: elegant, warm (but not too warm), t...