Above: DKNY Fall 2015, image found here.
Three years before her death , Pat [Patricia Highsmith] was still thinking about clothes. IN an article about Venice written for The Oldie in July of 1992, she lingered lovingly over the wares of her favourite Venetian “haberdashery,” where she liked to buy shirts of unusual colors that were still hanging in her wardrobe: a yellow shirt (yellow, the color of warning signs, was Pat’s favourite hue) and a porter’s yellow and black striped jacket with yellow metal buttons which, Pat reported with satisfaction of someone who has spent her money wisely, “has worn like iron.”
Pat’s own clothing always had a ritually gendered aspect–and left open the question of gender, too. But her most consistent gift to the women she cared about (including her mother and her editor at Henemann in London, Janice Robertson) couldn’t have been more feminine: she liked to present them with handbags. Pat gave Janice Robertson a Hermès bag when Robertson left Heinemann in 1972–and, says Janice Robertson, Pat was the only author to remember her with a going-away gift [...]
During different periods in her life, Pat’s costumes really were costumes: composed expressions of the gender wards she waged within herself and represented in her dress. Her boy’s shirts, men’s trousers, collegiate loafers, tailored jackets, smart vests00as well as the little beaded necklaces and bracelets, the jaunty ascots, the occasional skirt, and the light lipsticks she sometimes applied–kept her suspended between the possibilities she’d acknowledged so “brilliantly” at the age of twelve: “I am a walking perpetual example of….a boy in a girl’s body.” At twenty-seven, she was phrasing her dilemma a little more philosophically: “The most beautiful word is ‘transcend.’ By all the laws that are Platonic, I am a man and love women.”
- from The Talented Miss Highsmith by Joan Schenkar
Above: Karen Walker Fall 2015, image found here.
Above: Sally LaPointe Fall 2015. Image found here.
Above: Sally LaPointe Fall 2015, image found here.
Above: Marissa Webb Fall 2015, image found here. 
Above: Marissa Webb Fall 2015, image found here.