The Measure of a Woman
Maybe it wasn’t just exhaustion that made post-Christmas shopping such a bust (by my standards anyway). Maybe it was because I had been spoiled by the made-to-measure tailoring I had done in Vietnam. Imagine this: Walk into a tailor’s shop with a picture of a blouse clipped from a Barneys catalog, get measured every which way with swift, surgical precision, and four days (for a rush order — and when she said 5 o’clock, she meant 5 o’clock, not one minute earlier, as the seamstresses were busy snipping stray threads and sewing on buttons down to the wire) and oh, about $4 later, you’ve got an exact replica of said blouse in your exact size.
It’s the next best thing to haute couture (one day… some day!), give or take a few zeroes in the price tag, and without the repeated blush-inducing standing-in-your-undies-in- front-of-a-cast-of-thousands episodes.
I didn’t go on the trip with the intention of getting a whole new wardrobe (and that, come to think of it, would take a whole lot more excess baggage charges than I already had to pay). But I did stock up on a lot of staples — cuffed wool trousers, silk blouses, even a light tweed 1950s style suit (torn from the pages of Vogue). I mean, that suit wasn’t even necessarily on my shopping list for spring, but hey, for thirty bucks, why the heck not? Forget, if you please, the 24 hours of travel time each way and the thousands of dollars in air fare and hotels. Not counting that, what a bargain!
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