When I arrived at Vogue magazine in 1998, I stepped into a shiny-bright, kitten-soft world of Marc Jacobs “Mouse shoes,” Manolo Blahnik kitten heels, swinging panels of glass-flat Bergdorf-blond hair, and, above and beyond all other class and style signifiers, the pashmina. New York was purring and wrapped in fur. The prewar radiators in fashion editors’ Manhattan apartments hissed and growled most agreeably. The soft, softer, softest pashmina, made from the rare fibers of a Himalayan mountain goat’s belly, woven with silk, carried you from winter into spring in all the colors of the dying millennium: candy-floss pink, cloud white, apple green, slate gray, Chanel Le Vernis “Vamp” burgundy.
“A favorite accessory worn by the fashion flock at the recent spring shows was the muffler or long scarf wrapped several times around the throat,” reported The New York Times in November of 1998, noting prices between $175 and $450 per shawl. The internet money was flowing into the city and magazine editors prowled the night in the backseats of black town cars, swaddled up to their chins in cashmere like the naughty kitten in Beatrix Potter’s “The Tale of Samuel Whiskers, or The Roly-Poly Pudding,” meowing, mischievous, lapping cream with our paws.
It was on Newtown Lane, not Madison Avenue, as a matter of fact, that I first heard the word “pashmina” myself. It was in the Calypso St. Barth store, where we went in those years to buy bustle skirts in gemlike textured silk that tied at the back and Indian-cotton T-shirts to be worn with rose quartz or turquoise bead bracelets. The shawls were laid out on a center console display case in the middle of the boutique and I was standing beside this display, looking down, when a young woman of my acquaintance — I want to say this may have been my old classmate Whitney’s older sister, Paige St. John? — approached and exclaimed the new word for all to hear: “Pashmina!” She was savvy to the password and I was not yet.
Some wore the pashmina around the shoulders, shawl fashion, but in fashion the pashmina was throttled around the throat in, typically, one of two ways. You doubled the scarf lengthwise to create a loop at the fold end, slung it behind your neck, and pulled the loose ends through the loop. Or, better, you held one end in one hand and used the other hand to twist it one time around your neck — a circling motion above your head like a halo — and then tied the ends into a loose knot over your breastbone. Basic.
The pashmina, with its many petal colors like varieties of April flowers, was the late-20th-century version of the Tulip Mania of the Dutch golden age.
The devaluation of the pashmina, the bursting of the bubblegum-pink pashmina bubble, came after the turn of the great millennium, in sync with the bursting of the dot-com bubble. Pashminas became too common, too cheap, available on every street corner. Fashion was shrugging off the pashmina by the summer of 2000, but the rank and file of ordinary stylish women held onto them for years afterward, even after the Twin Towers came thundering down.
In terms of fashion history — and writing as someone who used to be paid a dot-com-boom salary to tell a million Vogue readers what to think about fashion history, which is to say, writing as an editorial elephant with a long memory — I would like to posit now that the pashmina, as a luxury status symbol, was the link that connected the monochrome minimalism of the mid-1990s to the unabashed, unapologetic, logo-wild label-hounding designer-name grotesquery of the end of the century, when fashion exploded like a piñata in confetti colors, gilt embellishments, trinkets, tassels, and charms.
Are you old enough to recall the simple, spaghetti-strap silk slip dresses (white or gray) worn by Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, or Gwyneth Paltrow as she arrived on the arm of Brad Pitt to the premiere of “The Pallbearer” in 1996? Do you recall the narrow car coats (definitely black) worn over black flares circa 1997? Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy and Gwyneth Paltrow could have, and I am sure did, wear pashminas with those 1990s-defining minimalist looks; the arrival of this cashmere-and-silk muffler from Kashmir was a bellwether of an incoming storm of status symbols. A couple years later, when the minimalism of Antwerp and Manhattan gave way — as it inevitably would, in the tick-tock, times-up, metronome cadence of fashion — to a Gilded Age rage and clamor for any item ostentatiously bearing a designer name, the pashmina was still worn, light and gossamer enough to be stuffed inside the Dior saddle bag with its swinging, jingling, key-chain charms, the Fendi FF Baguette bag, the Gucci Horsebit double-G.
Oh, yes, children, gather ‘round. I was an eyewitness at the global epicenter of fashion commerce, number 4 Times Square, when the Vuitton Monogram bag emerged from the fashion closet for the first time with the word “Paris” spray-painted on it by Stephen Sprouse in neon-orange, neon-pink, and neon-green. What did I do? I rode downtown to Chinatown on the R train after work, bought a fake Monogram bag in the gloaming of a knockoff stall near Canal Street, got some neon spray paint at the hardware store, and D.I.Y.-ed myself a sensational fake at home in my apartment.
Did strangers gasp and stage-whisper praise when I carried my fake Sprouse Vuitton onto the R train the next morning, heading back to the office? Yes, they did, children, they did. (And I was not too proud to tell these strangers, “It’s fake! I painted it myself!” I was, after all, raised on punk rock, like Stephen Sprouse.)
I’m glad I did all that. It was a stupid time, purely materialistic and quite mean, but it was a distinct moment in history to have participated in. It was occasionally fun to have ridden a white horse of the apocalypse among the pashmina raiders of New York, dismounting for eyelash-dyeing appointments and drinks with publicists at Bemelmans Bar. Vogue in those days was headquartered on the 13th floor of the then-new, now-sold-off Condé Nast office tower that opened in Times Square — glass and steel and butterscotch leather banquettes in the corporate canteen — almost precisely as the clock struck midnight on the new millennium. It floated at the intersection of 42nd Street and Broadway like a soap bubble.
I was reminded of the distance we have traveled — New York has traveled, America, women, fashion, commerce, the internet — since the pashmina years by a Christmas gift from a friend in December. She’s a reader of this column and she gave me a pale-blue cashmere scarf, very long and very delicious. I have been wearing it every day and flew into a bit of a panic just this past Sunday night when I realized I’d left my new favorite cashmere scarf at the house of another friend on Two Holes of Water Road after a dinner of Thai fish stew and Georgian khachapuri. There’s something to be said for a cashmere shawl, fashion or no fashion. Fashion be damned.