“She abandoned anything that she found to be a compromise or ‘a bore.'”

I’m sitting here drinking in these Bonnie Cashin colors. Do you know her name? I didn’t, but as I browsed the spring 2016 publishing catalogs for something to review, I found myself drawn to a new Rizzoli book about her, Bonnie Cashin: Chic is Where You Find It. It’s making for such rousing reading; her life as an artist and a clothing designer was uniquely self-directed and totally fabulous. And just look at these clothes (from the Met’s Online Collection):

Tangerines and limes, orange and raspberry sorbet. The colors are all so delicious. I’m dying to show you the photos of her apartment at the United Nations Plaza—Cashin made her living spaces look as lively as the clothes she designed—but I’d better not, since the book isn’t out until April. Here, why don’t I do what the kids do nowadays and make one of those palettes you see on Pinterest. The colors she keeps coming back to are these:

Couldn’t you just eat them? It’s all lumps of snow and winter gray skies where I live, and I feel greedy for this kind of visual vitality.

Cashin died in 2000, at the age of 93 (or thereabouts; she was a bit vague on the subject of her true age), and this book is the result of a collaboration between the designer and author Stephanie Lake that took place over the last three years of Cashin’s life. Rizzoli’s books are always sensitively made, but this one is unique because it appears to have grown naturally out of a real closeness between the two. Lake, a jewelry designer, writes that she discovered Cashin while doing research for Sotheby’s, and she was simultaneously impressed by the degree of the older designer’s influence and puzzled to see how little has been written about her. She set out to make a proper record of Cashin’s legacy, and her initial attempts at conducting formal interviews quickly became informal conversations and then a sincere friendship. Lake is now the caretaker of Cashin’s enormous archive; the book contains dozens of photos, sketches, and other ephemera from the designer’s long life.

On top of being sassy and funny, Cashin was a serious artist and a big reader. Lake quotes her making reference to all kinds of influences, and I’m drinking these in too. Like the paintings of Sonia Delaunay—

and the Vogue covers Cashin painted for her own amusement when she was first becoming interested in fashion design, after the style of Eduardo Garcia Benito—

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(I love reading about artists from back in the day, incidentally. They all got started so young. Cashin oversaw a team of dressmakers while she was still in high school, and she didn’t bother with college but went right to work. The illustrator Eduardo Garcia Benito, I just read on Wikipedia, began working as an artist at the age of 12. Who knows if that’s even true, and who cares? According to Lake’s book Cashin started lying about her age when she was only 25, possibly to make her precocious talent seem even more impressive. It’s a reminder to me to continually create and recreate myself—and to people younger than myself, it should be a reminder that you don’t need school or any other authority to bestow fabulosity on you. Jobs, maybe, yeah, but not fabulosity. That’s all you.)

Cashin may have been an unusual woman, but she had a typical woman-artist’s story in one way, at least: Her tremendous influence has been largely overlooked and not properly documented. Though she was a hugely successful, both commercially and critically, on her own steam and worked with dozens of prominent houses as well—she was Coach’s founding handbag designer!—Bonnie Cashin is not exactly a household name. According to Lake, Cashin virtually invented layering, both as a dressing concept and a fashion term. Same with the word hardware, as it refers to closures on garments and bags. If you’re interested in clothing in the slightest, you can’t tell me you haven’t used those words recently and often. Oh, and lest you think people aren’t still wearing her designs, here’s a colorful screenshot of a “Bonnie Cashin” term search I did on etsy just now:

So snazzy! I’m off to the library for a reading tonight, and I was planning to wear my trusty black jeans and a new dipped-hem camel colored sweater that I’ve been favoring lately, but I think I’ve got to take a cue from Bonnie and add a magenta scarf at least.

xx Katie