The What-to-Wear Nightmare : In Corduroy When Everyone Else Is in Chiffon, She’s Out of the Fashion Loop

IN NEW YORK,where I grew up, I knew what to wear. I learned the rules at my mother’s knee which was almost always covered by a very sheer nylon stocking. My mother had natural fashion instincts, honed by years of working in garment district offices. It was the ‘50s and there were a lot of rules, but she had years to explain and enforce them: Black was always smart but not to be worn to weddings. White was all right between Memorial Day and Labor Day but not encouraged (bone or beige were “smarter”). Each season and each hour of the day or night had its appropriate fabrics. Buttonholes should be hand-bound, hems and lining hand-tailored. Fluff, clutter and bright colors were to be avoided. So were fads, which in a month would be a “Ford,” the worst solecism in my mother’s fashion book. “Forget about those bright fall colors,” she advised every August. “By November, every smart woman will be wearing black.”

I rebelled, of course. My first spring after college, I used a chunk of my own paycheck to buy a machine-tailored mint-green coat. My mother turned out to be right. The green didn’t work often enough, and the coat lost its shape. I slid back into her rules, as if they were a bowl of warm oatmeal--the color a good spring coat ought to be.

But then life changed in incalculable ways. The fashion industry was turned inside out by the youth culture of the ‘60s. My mother died. And I moved to California, where there are no rules, no seasons and hardly any coats. Cast adrift, I found that I was often wearing the wrong thing.

At first, I blamed my husband. In our first years here, invitations came through him. “The Atwells asked us to come over on Saturday night,” he would announce, utterly oblivious to the important question of how dressy the evening would be. Filtered through my husband, “come over” sounded like slacks and a sweater. To the Atwells, I learned, it meant a formal dinner for 12, a hairbreadth below black tie.

More often, I was wrong in the other direction, failing for years to catch on to California casual. When I knew it was a dinner party, I would get into one of the little black dresses my mother swore would always be perfect--except at weddings. But in Southern California, everyone else comes to dinner in loose cotton things, a category of clothes I have since learned is called “weekend wear.” (Weekend wear is a literal term. People put the stuff on to do the marketing on Saturday morning and stay in it until they go to bed on Sunday night, no matter what activities intervene.)

My husband’s view, of course, is that it doesn’t matter. He knows what he’ll wear--his blue blazer. That’s what he always wears, sometimes with a tie, sometimes without, usually with the tie in his pocket. “Just wear what you want to,” he’ll say. “Be yourself.” But every women knows that awful sinking feeling of walking into a room and knowing she’s gotten it wrong.

Most think it’s worse to have overdressed. It makes you seem stuffy, like someone who tries too hard, and maybe has time on her hands. But being underdressed is almost as humiliating. You feel clunky and boorish with all that chiffon swirling airily around your cord blazer.

But what I wonder each time is how the others got it right. There may be no rules--at least none that I can figure out after 20 years here--but there seems to be a silent network, an invisible sorority that passes the word. I see women having lunch in subtle variations of the same outfit. Maybe they telephoned each other in the morning. But then, on an otherwise ordinary day in February, every woman on the street is wearing pale-ivory hose, as if they were all anticipating spring together. I am still in opaque black. Is there some telephone tree that I’m not on? A loop I’m out of?

It seems childish for grown women with important things on their minds to call each other and ask, “What are you wearing?” But I have started doing it, hoping that, if at least two of us make the same mistake, we can commiserate over the appetizers. The most futile move is to call the person who invited you. She will lie because she doesn’t want you to go to any trouble. “It’s a Sunday afternoon in the Valley,” said a good friend who had sold me tickets to a fund-raiser. “People will practically come in their pajamas.” Yeah, sure, as we say in New York. But the pajamas were Ungaro and Armani and under a lot of jewelry. I was in brown slacks.

But the worst event for the out-of-the-loop dresser is a California wedding. The phrase is almost oxymoronic. Weddings--to say nothing of marriages--are too conventional, too etiquette-bound for hang-loose Californians. That’s why so many people here get married on horseback or catamarans. There is no point in asking anyone what to wear. No one knows, and everyone will wear what she pleases. Weddings are elaborate festivals of self-expression. There will be women in taffeta poufs and gold lame drape, movie stars in bag lady dresses, close relatives of the bride in denim jumpsuits. And almost always, somebody will wear sneakers. Since there is no prevailing look, I inevitably end up (a) feeling that I could have saved money by wearing something I already had, or (b) regretting that I didn’t buy something dressier.

So I have turned certain knowledgeable friends into fashion advisers, mother-substitutes perhaps. Gwen is social and always perfectly turned out, as the magazines say. She knows what’s in style each season before the clothes are out of the cartons at Neiman’s. And she has my mother’s sense of appropriateness, updated for the ‘80s. (Patent leather, for instance, is now a year-round shoe.)

What she lacks is any sense of middle-class economics. When I mention that I need a winter coat for a week in New York, she brightly suggests mink. “There are times when nothing else will do,” she explains. When I needed clothes for a book-promotion tour a few years ago, Gwen scouted the stores and recommended five outfits by a designer whose low-priced line started in four figures, American money.

My friend Nancy is a more practical adviser. She dresses well, too, and since she used to work in the fashion trade, I believe she has a finger on the pulse of the invisible network. But sometimes, my advisers--who have never met--disagree, especially when I am trying to get pulled together for a California wedding. “Dyed-to-match shoes,” says Nancy. “Only black, gold or silver for evening,” says Gwen. Confused, I wander into shopping malls and pour my troubles out to salesclerks and other strangers. In this state, I will ask for fashion advice from women with their blouses buttoned lopsided and young girls with hair in primary colors.

So last week, I went to the local branch of Loehmann’s, the store at which my mother trained me, and I sidled up to a smartly dressed middle-aged woman with a New York accent. “I need something to wear to a wedding,” I muttered.

“Black,” she said. “I had five weddings last summer, and I wore black to every one. It looks stunning and no one notices if you wear it again.” This woman is close to my age, despite her resemblance to my mother.

“Black?” I said. “I thought you weren’t supposed to wear black to weddings.”

She waved this away with a confident hand. “That went out years ago.”

I nodded in amazement. How did she know that? Who called her?