ABSTRACT
In an issue of Vogue magazine a few years back, fashion writer Joan Juliet Buck described her former schoolmate Jane, whose “retro heroine look” made her stand out from the rest of Buck’s London classmates in the 1960s. It wasn’t just that Jane could wear vintage hats from the 1920s and 30s with a unique fl air, or that she knew all the latest makeup tips from Paris. Describing “Jane’s pale, pale hands clutching her coat closed at the throat, her Gitanes, her foreign lovers, her reliance on the Café Flore and red wine,” Buck recalls Jane as a woman of “tragic glamour . . . like a Jean Rhys heroine.” Buck goes on to wax nostalgic about the way that Jane wore her hats, and how eventually big fashion names caught on: “Whether it was Jane infl uencing people with her look or evidence of a need to connect with tragedy to attain the full force of fashion I don’t know. But it worked, and then it vanished.”1
