Finally! You Can Now Shop the Who What Wear Target Collection

After months of anticipation and sneak peeks, the day has finally arrived: Our Target collection is here!

Now available online and in stores, the collection is chock-full of wardrobe building blocks like striped T-shirts, feminine blouses, perfect trousers, and more. Mixed in with the classic staples are on-trend pieces like a lace-up tee and skirts in bright, bold patterns. In other words, there's something in this collection for everyone. The best part: The items come in sizes 2 to 26 and all ring in at under $50. So what are you waiting for? Get shopping!

Scroll down to shop some of our favorites from the Who What Wear collection at Target! 

Autumn Doerr, Lynn Malchow

Autumn Doerr and Lynn Malchow were married Jan. 29 at the Clara Shortridge Foltz Criminal Justice Center in Los Angeles. Roberto Longoria, a judge on the Superior Court of Los Angeles County, officiated in his chambers at the courthouse.

Ms. Doerr (left), 52, is a television producer in Los Angeles on "Late Nite Chef Fight," a weekly cooking competition between two Las Vegas chefs on the FYI cable network. She graduated from Mills College.

She is a daughter of Suzanne T. Doerr and a stepdaughter of Anthony Geraci of Pacifica, Calif.

Ms. Malchow, 64, owns Great Writes in Pasadena, which provides brief-writing services to lawyers and law firms in California. She graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, and received a law degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

She is a daughter of the late Rita M. Malchow and the late Donald A. Malchow, who lived in Oshkosh, Wis.

The couple, who met in August 1989 at a San Francisco law firm, became reacquainted in 1998 when Ms. Doerr, who then lived in Oakland, visited Ms. Malchow in Pasadena.

Kendall Jenner Wore a $70 Dress on Her Trip to Spain

Let's just say we're getting both style envy and wanderlust with this one. Kendall Jenner jetted off to Spain recently and took to the streets of Barcelona wearing a lovely off-the-shoulder mustard-colored dress and lace-up heels. The best part? The flirty frock comes at an unbeatable price tag so you can get the look for your next vacation.

Keep scrolling to shop the look!

Command Z/Jessica Bennett: She? Ze? They? What’s In a Gender Pronoun

Photo Credit Mikey Burton

WASHINGTON — What happens when 334 linguists, lexicographers, grammarians and etymologists gather in a stuffy lecture hall on a Friday night to debate the lexical trends of the year?

They become the unlikely heroes of the new gender revolution.

That's what happened here earlier this month anyway, at a downtown Marriott, where members of the 127-year-old American Dialect Society anointed "they," the singular, gender-neutral pronoun, the 2015 Word of the Year. As in: "They and I went to the store," where they is used for a person who does not identify as male or female, or they is a filler pronoun in a situation where a person's gender identity is unknown.

"Function words don't get enough love," a man argued from the floor. (Function words, I would later learn, are words that have little lexical meaning but serve to connect other words — or "the basic building blocks in language," according to Ben Zimmer, the event's M.C.)

"We need to accept 'they,' and we need to do it now," shouted another linguist, hidden behind the crowds.

Continue reading the main story

"As a gender neutral pronoun, 'they' has been useful for a long time," said Anne Curzan, an English professor at the University of Michigan. ( "They" can be found in the works of literary greats like Chaucer and Jane Austen.) "But I think we've seen a lot of attention this year to people who are identifying out of the gender binary."

Gender binary: That's the idea that there are two distinct genders, one male and one female, with nothing in between.

But to Ms. Curzan's point: Indeed. If we've learned anything over the last year, from vocal transgender spokespeople like Caitlin Jenner and Laverne Cox; from on-screen depictions like "Transparent," the Emmy-winning Amazon series about a family patriarch who comes out as transgender; or even from Miley Cyrus — who has said she identifies as "pansexual," or sexually fluid — it's that both sexuality (whom you go to bed with) and gender (who you go to bed as) are much more … flexible.

"I think we, and particularly young people, increasingly view gender not as a given, but as a choice, not as a distinction between male and female, but as a spectrum, regardless of w hat's 'down there,'" said Julie Mencher, a psychotherapist in Northampton, Mass., who conducts school workshops on how to support transgender students. "Many claim that gender doesn't even exist."

Photo "Transparent" has helped illustrate the topic of language in relation to sexuality and gender. Credit Jennifer Clasen/Amazon Studios

It does exist when it comes to language, though. He, she, hers, his, male, female — there's not much in between. And so has emerged a new vocabulary, of sorts: an attempt to solve the challenge of talking about someone who identifies as neither male nor female (and, inevitably, the linguistic confusion that comes along with it).

These days, on college campuses, stating a gender pronoun has become practically as routine as listing a major. "So it's like: 'Hi, I'm Evie. My pronouns are she/her/hers. My major is X,'" said Evie Zavidow, a junior at Barnard.

"Ze" is a pronoun of choice for the student newspaper at Wesleyan, while "E" is one of the categories offered to new students registering at Harvard.

At American University, there is "ey," one of a number of pronoun options published in a guide for students (along with information about how to ask which one to use).

There's also "hir," "xe" and "hen," which has been adopted by Sweden (a j oining of the masculine han and the feminine hon); "ve," and "ne," and "per," for person, "thon," (a blend of "that" and "one"); and the honorific "Mx." (pronounced "mix") — an alternative to Ms. and Mr. that was recently added to the Oxford English Dictionary. (The "x" in Mx. is meant to represent an unknown, similar to the use of x in algebraic equations.)

Those are just the pronouns, of course.

To use them, you need to have at least some knowledge of the identities to which they correspond — beginning with an understanding of the word "identity," along with its sister verb, "identify" (as in: "I identify as female" or "I identify a s mixed-race").

"Identity" was honored last month in another "word of the year" contest, this one by Dictionary.com — a choice, said Jane Solomon, a senior editor, to reflect the public's "increasing awareness" of new gender expressions (as well as an increase in lookups for their definitions).

Among the additional words and terms the dictionary was updating for the year ahead: "code-switching," or modifying of one's behavior to adapt to different sociocultural norms; "sapiosexual," for a person who finds intelligence the most sexually attractive feature; and "gender expression," or an expression of one's gender identity.

"It's like the hyper-individuation of identity," said Micah Fitzerman-Blue, a writer and producer on "Transparent," who calls himself cisgender ("cis" for short), meaning he identifies with the sex (male) he was assigned at birth (or A.A.B.). "Is there such a thing as too many pronouns? Possibly. But who am I to pick and choose? Language has a way of sorting this stuff out."

Does it, though?

In the second-to-last episode of last season's "Transparent," there was a blip of a scene that perhaps crystallized this moment in time: Ali, played by Gaby Hoffmann, stood in front of a bulletin board in the gender studies department of a university campus, waiting to spe ak with a professor. Tacked to the wall was a flier illustrated with a pair of boxing gloves. "Gender Pronoun Showdown!" it declared.

It was prescient.

Facebook now offers 50 different gender identity options for new users, including gender fluid (with a gender identity that is shifting), bigender (a person who identifies as having two distinct genders) and agender (a person without an identifying gender). There are day cares that proudly tout their gender-neutral pronoun policies — so kids don't feel boxed in — and college professors who are skewered on the Internet for messing them up.

In New York City, new clarifications to the city's human rights guidelines make clear that the intentional misidentification of a person's preferred name, pronoun or title is violation of the city's anti-discrimination law.

Misgendering "isn't just a style error," Caitlin Dewey of The Washington Post wrote to describe a Twitter account she created following Ms. Jenner's coming out, to "politely" correct for pronoun misuse. "It's a stubborn, longtime hurdle to transgender acceptance and equality, a fundamental refusal to afford those people even basic grammatical dignity." (The Post, Ms. Dewey's employer, recently announced the term "they" would be included in its stylebook.)

And yet the learning curve remains.

I discovered recently that "trans*," with an asterisk, is now used as an umbrella term for non-cisgender identities — simpler than listing them all (but still considered respectful). On a recent radio segment, I found out that a newer term for "cisgender" is "chromosomal," as in "chromosomal female," which denotes a person who identifies with the sex (female) she was assigned at birth. (Another way of saying that a person was "assigned female at birth" — which does not necessarily make her a "chromosomal female" — is A.F.A.B.).

As for the pronouns: "They" may or may not correspond with these identities — which is why it's in anybody's best interest to simply ask. But when you do, don't make the common mistake of calling it a preferred pronoun — as it is not considered to be "preferred."

"The language is evolving daily — even gender reassignment, people are now calling it gender confirmation!" Jill Soloway, the creator of "Transparent," said in a recent profile in The New Yorker, making the case for "they."

"It's not intuitive at all," her girlfriend, the lesbian poet Eileen Myles, said in the article.

That doesn't even begin to delve into the debate about the evolving use of "woman" and "vagina" — or, as some prefer to call it, "internal genitalia" — which is perhaps a linguistic (and political) world unto its own. Mills College recently changed its school chant from "Strong women! Proud women! All women! Mills women!" to "Strong, proud, all, Mills!"

Meanwhile, Mount Holyoke prompted a response from the iconic feminist playwright Eve Ensler after canceling a performance of "The Vagina Monologues" last year (because of its narrow view of gender). (At Columbia, that play has been replaced by a production called "Beyond Cis-terhood.")

Even the venerable NPR host Terry Gross has struggled with the language, repeatedly using the incorrect pronou n when interviewing Ms. Soloway last season about her transgender father, upon whom the show is based.

"I think there are a lot of people who want to do the right thing but are struggling to play catch-up with this new gender revolution," said Ms. Mencher, a former transgender specialist at Smith College, which is one of a handful of historically women's colleges to begin accepting transgender students.

"I begin all my trainings with an invitation for participants to stumble over language, to risk being politically incorrect, to bungle their pronouns — in the service of learning," Ms. Mencher said.

As for they: Lexicological change won' t happen overnight. (Just look at the adoption of Ms.) But it does have a linguistic advantage, in that it's already part of the language.

"Whether it's the feminist movement of the 1970s or expressions of non-binary gender identities today," said Mr. Zimmer of the American Dialect Society, "social changes can help power these changes."

Margot Robbie Just Showed Us the Cool-Girl Way to Style a Miniskirt

Margot Robbie just took travel style to the next level while touching down in London. The actress stepped out in a charming double-buckle miniskirt by Isabel Marant, and made it winter-ready with some spot-on styling tricks: layering knit socks over tights, and letting them peek out of a pair of cool ankle boots. Complete the look with a laid back graphic tee, classic winter coat, and chic scarf.

Keep scrolling to shop the look!

Vows: Imperfect on Paper, Harmony in Practice

They owe it all to guitar lessons. Or maybe the Fabergé Big Egg Hunt she talked him into. Or maybe just to proximity and timing.

Amanda Gwendolyn Hulsey was getting over a broken six-year relationship in 2010 when she decided to sign up for classes at the Brooklyn Guitar School in Park Slope as a way to broaden her horizons and meet new people. She quickly made friends and connected with the "guitar-school grapevine," as she called it.

It was at a school party several months later that she first met a guitar teacher (but not hers), Michelangelo Quirinale. She learned two things: They lived a block and a half apart in Brooklyn Heights, and he was at the party with his long-term girlfriend.

"I occasionally saw him around the neighborhood after that," said Ms. Hulsey, a senior producer for the Food Network series "Chopped." "I would cheerfully say hi to the cute, nice musician with the cool name, but he wasn't on my radar at all, because he was taken."

But the grapevine spilled the news when his relationship ended in 2013. At parties and at musical performances of mutual friends over the next few months, the two got to know each other better.

And on what Ms. Hulsey likes to call "a dark and stormy night" (because she was drinking a cocktail called Dark and Stormy, a mixture of rum, ginger beer and lime juice), they both stayed behind when others left after a concert at a Brooklyn music and comedy space. And they realized they had romantic feelings for each other.

The problem, as both of them (and perhaps some of their friends) saw it, was that they had almost nothing in common.

She was a television producer from Houston with a journalism degree from Northwestern University. He was a musician from New England, who had lived in Providence and Middlebury, Vt., and graduated from the Berklee College of Music in Boston. She was nine years older. She was used to getting up early for work. He wasn't.

Mr. Quirinale, 30, and now a member of Thrilldriver, a heavy metal band, said, "I had kind of always felt like she's really cool, she's beautiful, but probably we aren't into the same things."

Ms. Hulsey, 39, agreed, mostly: "If you just looked at us on paper, you wouldn't say that was a perfect fit. People would ha ve pegged us for having a good time for a while."

But nothing more.

And that's how they approached their dates, as two people just having fun, for now.

As luck would have it, in early 2014 Ms. Hulsey was in the middle of another self-improvement project. Six months before, she had promised herself to do something new every day for a year. So their first months of dating consisted of Mr. Quirinale doing new things with her.

That's how they ended up sailing around Manhattan, visiting an old skating rink in Staten Island, cuddling at a dr ive-in movie theater in Warwick, N.J., and at that giant egg hunt, which was the night Mr. Quirinale realized he might be falling in love.

"We'd only been dating about a month and a half," he said. "We walked all throughout the city. We started downtown by South Street Seaport. We made it up to Rock Center." The egg hunt, a charity event, required participants to find where nearly 300 eggs were hidden throughout the city.

"The whole time I remember Amanda going into places and saying, 'Do you guys have an egg in here?' She didn't mind being silly," Mr. Quirinale said.

He loved that she didn't care what peo ple thought. "I was thinking, 'That would be a great person to spend the rest of your life with,'" he said. "Somebody who was willing to take risks" and even "somebody who would be a great mother."

For Ms. Hulsey, their Memorial Day 2014 weekend trip to Philadelphia was a turning point. "We were sort of casually dating up to that point," she said, recalling once-a-week-or-so evenings together. "There was no pressure to define what we were."

They saw the movie "Rocky," because she never had. They ran up and down the museum steps shown in the movie. By the time they posed for a selfie inside the giant human heart exhibit at the Franklin Institute, she was thinking: "It's turned into something. This could be t he guy."

Mr. Quirinale said he was thinking that it was remarkable to spend four days of concentrated togetherness and "come out of it with no arguments and not getting on anybody's nerves."

They soon found shared passions and learned, as she said, "Our commonalities are more about our personalities."

When the couple took a Labor Day camping trip in the Adirondacks, she suggested a hike, although she wasn't sure whether he would be up for it. They ended up walking 15 miles, including Mount Marcy (at 5,300 feet), the highest point in New York State.

Ms. Hulsey, a regular bicyclist, gave him a Citi Bike pass for his birthday ("the gateway drug to bike commuting," she said with a laugh). He was soon hooked on hiking and biking.

"Now we have a lot more in common," Ms. Hulsey said. "We've kind of created those things together."

The couple say the only arguments (Mr. Quirinale prefers the term "heated debates") they've had have been over politics, and that they have now realized they are more middle-of-the-road than they had thought.

And they have learned to live with daily schedules still as different as night and day.

"During the week, when Amanda's been shooting, she gets up very early, at 6," Mr. Quirinale said. "Anything before 9 or 9:30, that's not civilized." He is still teaching guitar as well, but "even if we catch up just an hour a day," he said, that's enough.

Daily life may not always be perfect, she said, but he continues to show that "little things don't bother him."

He proved that early on when her sick cat had repeated accidents in the apartment. "He would just clean up and laugh it off," she said.

"I just really appreciated that as a quality that you'd want to try to hold on to," she added. "It can also make you, yourself, not freak out, if you're with someone who's living that philosophy."

There has never been drama, nor discord in their relationship, for which Ms. Hulsey was almost apologetic. "We keep saying, it's so easy, it's so easy," she said.

On Jan. 17, they were married before their 100 or so guests, including their parents, Mary Gwynn Hulsey and Ben Hulsey of Houston and Pamela Quirinale and Josef Quirinale of Keene, N.H. The Rev. Bobby Vagt, a Presbyterian minister, officiated at the Brooklyn Winery in Williamsburg, as the first real snow showers of the season fell outside the tall windows.

All-white flower arrangements sat on tall wine barrels, and hanging white lights reflected in the windows as Emilio Tostado, a guitar school colleague of the groom's, played.

The music continued as Ms. Hulsey, in an A-line tulle gown with beaded bodice and illusion straps, walked down the aisle to "Can't Help Falling in Love."

In their vows, she and Mr. Quirinale, with his long, curly hair pulled back for the occasion, promised to respect each other's individuality as well as making the more traditional pledges. They exited the ceremony to "I Want to Hold Your Hand."

Mr. Hulsey recalled afterward that his daughter's dream man, when she was very young, was "the typical stereotype of a Texan."

"His name was Bubba, drove a pickup, rode a horse, wore jeans, boots, cowboy hat, said 'yes, ma'am, no, ma'am.'" Mr. Hulsey said. "So if Michelangelo might not be the guy we originally would have en visioned for Amanda, he is also not the guy Amanda envisioned. He's much better and will be far more interesting to live with."

The groom and his band played Beatles, Bon Jovi, AC/DC and Journey at the reception, and Doll Parts, a Dolly Parton cover band, also entertained the guests.

During the reception, the bride, now an experienced guitar player (those lessons paid off), played a rendition of "Then He Kissed Me."

As she finished, her groom did just that.

The couple live now, with a new cat, Julio (named for a Paul Simon song), in the Brooklyn Heights apartment that Ms. Hulsey has lived in for 11 years.

And she is convinced that she met Mr. Quirinale when she did because she was making a special effort to be open to the world.

"You don't know where you'd find love," he said. "I didn't think it would be the cute blond girl from down the block."

Read more: Jessica Hershberg and Santino Fontana: A Real-Life Fairy Tale

Gabrielle Karol and Benjamin Jacobs: After Years of Breakup Regret, He Wins Back the One

The Best Container Store Finds for Your Closet

Closet expert Lili Pettit is known for transforming and organizing several celebrity wardrobes, including Jessica Alba's. Each month, we ask Pettit for her expert opinion on a new closet-related topic. Scroll down for this month's tips!

Shuffling through the endless options at The Container Store can be stressful (and time-consuming!). To ease your next purchase at TCS, we asked expert Lili Pettit for the must-have items for an organized closet.

Scroll down to shop her picks!

Fashion Review: Couture Season Ends With Valentino and Guo Pei

Photo From the spring 2016 collection at Valentino. Credit Francois Mori/Associated Press

PARIS — In a telling piece of accidental theater, as the Paris couture shows drew to a close with the debut of the Chinese designer Guo Pei, whose work went viral last year when she made the poached-egg extravaganza Rihanna wore to the Met Gala, news also broke that Chanel, one of the tent poles of the Paris couture system and a notoriously private company, was losing its chief executive.

This is normally the sort of information that would cause a ruckus in any front row, as industry watchers begin to speculate compulsively about the reason for the split and what it could mean for the brand (and who might get the job). But at Ms. Guo's show, held at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in a narrow white room with a golden palm frond framing the runway, few of the guests, many of them Ms. Guo's clients from Asia swathed in white furs and brocade gowns, blinked an eye. They were focused, rather, on what was in front of them: the melting pot of Western shapes and Eastern embroideries and mega-gowns that made up Ms. Pei's first Paris collection.

Once the most closed of all fashion systems, made by a few, for a few, couture is quietly expanding its borders. As the map of the so called 1 percent is redrawn, so, too, are the clothes shown on the runway.

Continue reading the main story Slide Show Ulyana Sergeenko: Couture

CreditRegis Colin Berthelier/Nowfashion

On Wednesday, Valentino, the last of the classic maisons on the official schedule, was sandwiched between Ms. Guo and Ulyana Sergeenko, the Russian socialite-turned-designer who has made her name by exploring the history and handicraft of her country. (She was following the conceptual shenanigans of the Dutch pair Viktor & Rolf, who this season offered a Picasso-meets-Mr. Potato Head parade of white technical piqué dresses that transfor med the wearer into a living cartoon of Cubist pottery). The diversity made for an interesting ending.

On the one hand, there was Ms. Sergeenko, referencing the fall of the Russian and Soviet empires, the early 1900s and the late 1980s, in tiered lace tea dresses with molded camisole tops (very pretty) and big-shouldered stirrup pantsuits (less so), ankle-length shirt dresses and "Like a Virgin" bustiers.

Photo From Guo Pei's debut show on the Paris couture calendar. Credit Miguel Medina/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

On the other hand, there was Ms. Guo and her phoenix-adorned tale of an "emblematic lady strolling in a Chinese royal courtyard," from a mint green miniskirt under an oversize sheer organza shirt etched with metallic stitching to dance dresses in bronze moiré or shell-pink fringed in silver, and a finale of the exaggerated entrance-makers — an abstract cheongsam with fluted sleeves to the ankles; a hoop dress in liquid steel that barely fit through the door — whose sheer size and effect have made her name, both at home and at the Met.

Continue reading the main story Slide Show Guo Pei: Couture

CreditGio Staiano/Nowfashion

And in the middle there was the incredible lightness of a Valentino show — sparked by the work of the designer Mariano Fortuny, not to mention the dancers Isadora Duncan and Martha Graham, and the French author Marcel Proust — where the designers Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pierpaolo Piccioli turned dresses into dreams on the body.

Continue reading the main story Slide Show Valentino: Couture

CreditGio Staiano/Nowfashion

Eschewing corsets and lacing and aerobic constriction (as well as shoes, and largely, but not entirely, daywear, including trousers and skirts), they hung gold-painted chiffon plissé from the shoulders, to float around the body like fog; washed and aged and hand-stenciled jewel-toned velvet tunics, tabards and gowns; and inlaid the tulle bodice of an empire-waisted white gown with hand-cut peacock feathers and flowers.

Though some of this risked tipping into costume territory, especially the stiffer patchwork brocade Fortuny gowns, the workmanship was never less than breathtaking, especially when it was less than obvious. See, for example, a sleeveless gold velvet mesh dress where the net was woven in three-dimensio ns in a single piece — no cuts or seams anywhere — and a "simple" white sleeveless gown, the neckline just deep enough to exert a magnetic pull, a strap like a scarf dipping from shoulder to the opposite arm, the hem finished in a flock of butterflies. It took 1,300 hours to make.

Photo At Valentino, this sleeveless gown with its plunging neckline and hem finished in a flock of butterflies took 1,300 hours to make. Credit Miguel Medina/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

It's easy to mistake couture for decoration; handwork for the work needed to add something atop a garment. But at its best, it begins with the essence of a weave, and it is built on the idea — as Ms. Chiuri said before the show — "of diversity, and freedom, and the chance to express yourself."

She wasn't only talking about the clothes.

7 Celebs Who Will Make You Want to Try the Dad Hat Trend

Though there's been some speculation in the fashion world as to whether normcore is on its way out, the anti-trend trend is still going strong in regard to one of its signature accessories: the dad hat.

Think your father's outfit on the way to one of his favorite baseball games. The anything but fashion-forward hat style is actually an in-vogue accessory, worn by the likes of Kendall Jenner, Gigi Hadid, and Rihanna. Distinguished by a cotton or canvas material with an overly curved brim, dad hats are naturally worn forward and look cool paired with anything from a casual ensemble to a dressed-up night-out look. Keep reading to see seven celebs who will make you want to try the trend!

On Clothing: Buffalo in the City

Photo Credit Photo illustration by Maurico Alejo

The paparazzi must be pleased with the vogue for buffalo plaid — with all the acres of fabric, deep red and black thickly crisscrossing, marking their quarry clearly. Have you recently breezed through the celebrity-photo pages? Reese Witherspoon snapped, leaving her car in a parking lot, while wearing a buffalo-plaid shirt and a smart skirt. Gwen Stefani, spotted toting her toddler to church, has bundled the boy in a logger shirt. Here we have Kylie Jenner — that ''Keeping Up With the Kardashians'' fixture — in a buffalo-plaid shirtdress of shocking blue. Pictures of the dress stimulated such demand that its manufacturer rushed it back into production.

The pattern's phenomenal popularity is a bit like that of the Kardashians themselves. Presumed at the beginning of the decade to be enjoying a passing moment in the public eye, each instead emerged as a mass-culture institution. Buffalo plaid was cool, and then it was a thing. Then it was too cool for too long and spread into a basic feature of the landscape. Now it simply is. Go to the park and witness the logger lady wearing the hunting jacket out with her lumber-bro husband in his barn coat and their little lumber-lad cherub in a trapper hat.

Continue reading the main story Slide Show An Evolving Pattern

CreditFine Art Photographic Library/Corbis

But in the course of seeming timeless, the pattern crossed its signals. Buffalo plaid, once the uncomplicated icon of woodsy masculinity, is now a bit of a camp classic. Its redefinition as something universal and unisex has the flavor of an accidental subversion.

Buffalo plaid emulates a pattern, or ''sett,'' that the Scottish Register of Tartans calls Rob Roy Macgregor. Bold and primitive, it entered the record of design in 1704 and evolved in a context where the politics of style were matters of war. The Jacobite rising of 1745 — wherein Charles Edward Stuart started a failed invasion of England in pursuit of the throne — led Britain's Parliament to ban men and boys in Scotland from wearing tartans for 36 years. In turn, Scotland attested the nobility of its plaids in songs, paintings, fraudulent documents and the Sir Walter Scott novel ''Rob Roy'' (1817), with its folk-heroic portrait of an outlaw.

There is today a small American outdoors clothier — BraeVal, based in Litchfield, Conn., up near quality pheasant hunting — whose founder claims descent from the figure who brought the Rob Roy tartan to these shores. Supposedly, that ancestor, a Montana rancher named Big Jock McCluskey, bartered with Native Americans, trading blankets and shirts for buffalo pelts. A competing origin myth holds that around 1850 a textile designer at the Woolrich mill in Pennsylvania named his Rob Roy imitation after the herd of bison he tended off the clock. Each story conjures the romance of the frontier myth, linking the name of the pattern to the majesty of a wilderness rip e for spoiling, as if to hint that its squares were manifestly destined as building blocks of Americana.

Out of one continental vision, many local traditions — the Maine Guide Shirt of L.L. Bean, the Mackinaw coats of the upper Great Lakes, the jackets of Pendleton Woolen Mills in Oregon. Buffalo plaid flourished wherever Paul Bunyan trod. In the middle of the 20th century, having conquered a segment of rural iconography, it settled down in the suburbs. It wasn't cool — it was, in its corner of the Sears catalog, the opposite of a thing — but it was a cheerful option for the rugged individualist proudly raking his Levittown lawn. One manufacturer touted buffalo plaid as the pattern of ''a truly friendly shirt,'' arresting the eye to lift a paternal wave.

In the 1980s, it matured into a style item by appealing to a taste for cultural conservatism, deploying wholesome charm to soothe consumers yearning for the stability of convention. The Gap produced buffalo-plaid shirts in the familiar intense red but also strontium yellow and saturated green and high-beam-indicator blue, any of which suited such all-American activities as attending football games, watching TV and hanging out at the mall where you bought it. But the traditional red — a scarlet sturdy as brick and bright as alarm bells — was necessary to attempt the mood of the ''prairie collections'' by Ralph Lauren, that unparalleled retailer of false nostalgia. In one ad from the 1980s, Lauren's well-scrubbed model wears a buffalo-plaid skirt that flounces at the middle of a calf clad in floral tights and a flecked sock. She has an imitation of a Norwegian sweater and a simulacrum of Scottish dancing shoes and a gentle way of excitin g fantasies of propriety and prosperity.

This regal mode of rustic preppy costume endures wherever buffalo plaid makes an appearance on a man wearing a capacious scarf as if repurposing a throw found on a sofa in his lake house. Or on a woman with the bearing of a lady returned from a pheasant hunt. By now, there is no contradiction in such elite creatures draping themselves in cloth valued as populist. Surely, the elevation of this log-cabin pattern to the manor house was a prerequisite of its phenomenal fame; I am reminded that jeans first entered the orbit of glamour by way of the dude-ranch vacation.

Suffused with fables now, including its myth as a mantle of authenticity, buffalo plaid becomes heavy with irony, and its machismo gives way to theatrical gender play.The nuances of tomboyish performance that distinguish a woman wearing a ''boyfriend flannel shirt'' from one wearing her boyfriend's flannel shirt can tend toward the meaningfully microscopic. The low-cut buffalo-print top of a waitress at Twin Peaks — a Texas-based restaurant chain that, in a typically juvenile double entendre, describes its every dining room as a ''mountain-lodge getaway'' — positions her bosom as décor and defines her cleavage as a male space. And while she may be a prop, her customers, when butched up to a brawny extreme, perhaps resemble male drag kings.

The ''lumbersexual'' is a figure bestriding recent literature from the lifestyle coverage of the Sundance Film Festival to academic papers analyzing the narrative of the zeitgeist. Considered as a consumer, his natural habitat is a men's shop decorated with elegant axes — the sort of place where a customer, proceeding to the register with his four-figure parka, evaluates impulse purchases including handmade lanyards and flask bottles of beard oil. Buffalo plaid is the linchpin of the existence of a social type. This fellow somehow remains a viable mode of masculine cool, despite having passed his rational expiration date. He is hunkering down for a while, waiting to see how things shake out with gender fluidity and patriarchal decline.

I won't begrudge him for treating his lumberjack shirt like a safety blanket. He and it are the beneficiaries of the popular turn toward heritage brands and their attendant values. Clothiers founded in the 19th century as purveyors of unpretentious dry goods are thriving by satisfying the pretenses of the 21st. The shirt offers the shelter of an anti-chic, protecting against the assault of novelty. Fashion-forward civilians keep looking backward, conservative and conservationist, not without amusing consequences, like a handmade buffalo-plaid Mason jar coozie seen on Etsy, photographed atop a coaster printed with owls, for a hat trick of twee signifiers. The pileup of preciousness neuters the pattern in much the same way that a pair of buffalo-plaid duck boots exists foremost as a camp object. Buffalo plaid can thrive under kitsch conditions — sentiment is its business — but such corniness risks wearing the security blanket threadbare.

In 1978, the Tennessee Republican Lamar Alexander walked 1,000 miles across his state to promote his gubernatorial run. He wore a buffalo-plaid shirt, a costume so successful as a populist uniform that he made it a trademark of a career that included a 1996 presidential run and a 1998 advice manual titled, ''Lamar Alexander's Little Plaid Book.'' In 2013, a young political organizer posed for an ad encouraging young adults to talk up the Affordable Care Act while home for the winter holidays. He wore buffalo-plaid pajamas, and he entered public discourse infantilized as Pajama Boy, a man-child regarded warily even by his fellow liberals because his dainty mien opened the possibility that the pj's ended in footies. Alexander, like any prospective statesman, proposed himself as a steward of tradition. Pajama Boy, like many a lousy hipster, seems a connoisseur of vintage aesthetics. Both practiced a grass-roots politics of escapism, just like all the dudes and basic biddies wearing a logger jacket to play the Republic's favorite dress-up game. The clothes make the manliness they once symbolized seem like a fabrication from whole cloth.

Chanel Couture's Front Row Was Insanely Stylish

We can only imagine what the outfit planning process would be like for attending a couture show—especially Chanel's. However, each and every season our favorite fashion insiders like Caroline de Maigret and Miroslava Duma manage to assemble head-to-toe winning looks that make their way onto street style blogs for months. Thankfully, this morning's Chanel Couture front row was no exception. Scroll down for 11 Lagerfeld-approved outfits to add to your inspiration board!

Guo Pei, Creator of Rihanna’s Met Gala Gown, Is Ready for Paris

Photo Guo Pei preparing one of her creations for her first couture show in Paris. Credit Dmitry Kostyukov for The New York Times

PARIS — Until nine months ago, Guo Pei was a Chinese haute couturier known by millions in the East yet virtually unheard-of in the West. That all changed last May when the pop star Rihanna wore one of Ms. Guo's designs to the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute gala in New York, after finding her work on the Internet. The look in question, a 55-pound canary-yellow fur-trimmed gown and cape, took seamstresses 50,000 hours and more than two years to make and landed on the cover of American Vogue — and Ms. Guo on the haute c outure schedule in Paris.

On Wednesday, the 48-year-old former children's wear designer and daughter of an army platoon leader will formally present her collection for the first time at a major fashion week.

"The Met Ball marked a new start for my business, a brand new chapter that secretly I felt had been coming for years," she said on Sunday, 5,000 miles from her Beijing headquarters in a tiny, all-white Paris showroom off the Rue St.-Honoré. "I knew there just needed to be a tipping moment to take me into a whole new world."

Photo Rihanna at the Met Gala last May, wearing an elaborate cape and gown designed by Guo Pei. Credit Josh Haner/The New York Times

In the two decades since the 1997 opening of Rose Studio, her fashion company specializing in evening wear, Ms. Guo has found fame in China by dressing actresses, folk singers and members of the political elite in her showstopping beaded and embroidered creations.

As China's economy boomed and shopping became a national pastime, her studio swelled to a current staff of 300 embroiderers and 200 designers, patternmakers and sewers. Today, the house produces more than 4,000 pieces annually, with prices that start at $5,000 and quickly tip into more eye-watering territory.

But in her Paris showroom this night, just a handful of her Chinese team members were crouched at laptops amid cramped clothing racks, storage boxes and styling boards, while a French hairdresser fussed over models being fitted with creations from her latest collection.

"The funny thing is, when I began my own house I had no idea that this type of artistry had a rich and long tradition elsewhere," she said, her Mandarin translated into English by her husband and business partner Cao Bao Jie. "This world as it existed in the West didn't exist to me. I was just doing what I liked and thought was truly beautiful."

Fashion in China then was only just beginning in the way we understand it today, she added: "Very few clients could comprehend what I was trying to show. That craftsmanship and design could add enormous value to a garment, transforming it from a piece of tailoring to a true work of art, was very hard to grasp for them."

As she gradually convinced them, her prices ballooned, as did the ambitions of her lavish designs. The elaborate excess that has become Ms. Guo's hallmark — be it vast skirt volumes, lashings of beaded semiprecious stones or rich explosions of embroidered color — marries European silks with traditional Chinese design heritage.

"I don't consider my work to be within the limits of conventional fashion, nor do I follow trends creatively or commercially," she said. "My work displays feelings and emotions that are precious enough to be handed down generation after generation, as well as the experi ence of developing gowns directly with my clients. They are reflections of myself, and of them, of the scale of my dreams and the pride I have for Chinese culture."

Ms. Guo says that looking ahead, her efforts will focus on expanding her business internationally, with a second atelier headquarters in Paris, as well as on her bridal line as the wedding market in China continues to explode. She introduced a cosmetics line in collaboration with MAC last year, and she has branched out into demicouture from a store in Shanghai.

The designer, who played down any concerns over China's recent economic slowdown and its potential impact on the couture market, emphasized how grateful she felt for the opportunity to show her creations to a new audience in the days ahea d. She was curious, she said, to hear how others interpreted her work, but was confident that her aesthetic would resonate.

"This year is my 30th year in the fashion industry," she said. "For the first 10 years I learned; for the second, I practiced, and now, during the third, I believe I am going to reap the rewards."

A Polished Day-to-Night Look Under $50

Want to know how to keep your wardrobe stocked with the freshest items without making a huge dent in your bank account? It's easy—shop our wallet-friendly ensemble each week! To make sure you're set with the coolest (and most affordable!) buys, every Monday, we're putting together an entire look for under $50. So scroll down to snag this week's convenient outfit, and make sure to come back every Monday to discover more bargain looks!

On the Runway: At the Australian Open, Setting a Different Kind of Fashion Trend

Fashion attention may be focused on Paris, where the European men's wear collections have drawn to a close and the couture began Sunday evening with Versace's parade of gym-inspired glamazons. But in a different hemisphere, an equally eye-catching show has been taking place, which is worth pausing to consider for a moment.

I am speaking, of course, of the Australian Open, the tennis tournament that kicks off the Grand Slam quartet. If the ready-to-wear calendar is divided into four seasons — spring/summer, pre -fall, autumn/winter and cruise — the Slam tournaments fulfill almost the same function for sports wear (i.e., the stuff you wear to play sports; as opposed to sportswear, the system of separates attributed to the American fashion industry). Which means the Australian Open is also the opening style salvo of the year. It sets the tone for season one.

Though this might seem irrelevant to those with their eyes trained on the couture ateliers in France, what elite athletes wear on the court has a trickle-down effect on that increasingly important clothing genre known as "athleisure," which has an impact on what everyone wears.

The sports stuff gets put into the melting pot along with the haute stuff and the street stuff, and out comes the stuff of your wardrobe. Which means that, just as what happens on the runways over the next three days of couture matters, the trends being unveiled at the Australian Open in Melbourne matter. And they are?

Color. Also, geometric prints and s ome sheer. But mostly: color. The kind of saturated, sunset color most often associated with tropical drinks, as opposed to tennis.

Serena Williams kicked the whole thing off with her neon-yellow Nike crop top and skirt, not necessarily the best look for her (she resembled a bionic parakeet), but one that gave new dimension to what is shaping up to be the shade of month, also modeled by Jelena Jankovic (a hibiscus yellow), Novak Djokovic (a sunshine-y Uniqlo shirt) and Marin Cilic (lemon Li-Ning polo).

Then there was Maria Sharapova's peach-melba Nike halter dress with sheer mesh insert in back; Kei Nishikori's Uniqlo tangerine dream; Caroline Wozniacki's sunset-toned Stella McCartney for Adidas; Ana Ivanovic's cherry/rose/coral g raphic Bauhaus-inspired Adidas; and Agnieszka Radwanska's fluoro pink Lotto number.

Hot pink also showed up on Timea Bacsinszky and Carla Suárez Navarro. As it happens, Ms. Radwanska is playing Ms. Navarro in the quarterfinals on Tuesday, which could give new meaning to the idea of a "match," so it will be interesting to see if one of them opts for a different shade.

As to why the fruity palette, well, it could have something to do with beachy Australian inspirations; an effort to celebrate color before getting locked into the all-white situation at Wimbledon; the desire to start the year with energy; or, as The Age, a Melbourne newspaper, posited, "attempting to psych-out their competitors."

Whatever the reason, however, the upside of the trend was demonstrated by Stanislas Wawrinka, with his two-tone Tequila Sunrise of a matching shirt and shorts combo, fire opal orange melting into yellow fading back into orange. It left last year's nerd-chic look in the shade. We'll toast to that.

And we'll see if any of it shows up on the catwalks.

The Kendall Jenner-Approved Trend That Has Stood the Test of Time

Kendall Jenner was seen departing Paris yesterday in a fittingly French girl in 1977-inspired outfit—a long satin duster jacket, tucked-in tee, flared jeans, round sunglasses, and suede accessories. To top the look off, Jenner tied a silk scarf around her neck—an accessory trend that's been going strong for the past few seasons. Jenner has proven herself a trendsetting celebrity, and her embracing the silk scarf trend is further proof that it's not going anywhere anytime soon. Scroll down to see Jenner's cool airport outfit and to shop some of our favorite silky scarves, perfect for tying around your neck.

Jonathan Anderson for Loewe: ‘A Purist Kind of Thing’

Photo From the Loewe ad campaign for fall 2016.

PARIS — Jonathan Anderson, a.k.a. J. W. Anderson, the reigning British designer of the year for both women's wear and men's wear, is one busy guy.

Last week, he showed his fall 2016 collection for men in London; next month, he will do the same for his women's line. And this week he was in Paris, presenting his latest Loewe men's wear collection, his fourth for the venerable Spanish luxury goods house.

Photo The Goya bag, part of the fall 2016 men's collection at Loewe.

This season's collection continues earlier themes but is more exaggerated, with oversize bags, coats and leopard-print nutria beanies dominating the looks. There is also a mix of fabrics — denim and leather; fur and shearling; hand-painted leather jackets — as well as a simple, military-inspired look in his latest bag for Loewe, the Goya.

"I was looking for a purist kind of thing," Mr. Anderson said of that olive-green leather bag during a brief interview in his office on an upper level of the Loewe store on Avenue Montaigne. "You reduce everything down. That's actually one of my favorite pieces."

In talking about how he differentiates the work he does for Loewe from that for his own label, Mr. Anderson said one crucial distinction is that the Loewe collection is being shown as the advertising campaign is introduced, and that the clothes themselves are in stores — a luxury that Loewe affords him because, he noted, it has a network of 170 retail stores worldwide.

"The idea is that you are putting it into the zeitgeist," he said. "In the end, you bypass opinion and you go straight to the consumer. You go: 'Here you go. take it or leave it.' "

Correction: January 23, 2016

A photo accompanying an earlier version of this article showed an XL tote, not the Goya bag from the Loewe fall 2016 collection.

The Founder of Instagram Had a Very Instagram-Worthy Wedding

Vogue-featured weddings are admittedly irresistible to us (see here, here, and here). The bride's dress is always incredible, the table settings are beautiful and immaculate, and the photography is top-notch. The recent Napa Valley wedding of Instagram co-founder and CEO Kevin Systrom and bride Nicole Schuetz was no exception. Schuetz donned a stunning strapless lace gown for the ceremony before changing into an equally stunning '20s-inspired Lihi Hod gown for the masquerade ball–themed reception, fitting for the Halloween date. Among the attendees for the glamorous wedding was Karlie Kloss, wearing a gorgeous pearl-lined black gown. Click below to see a glimpse of the stylish wedding, and head over to Vogue for more!

Table for Three: Alice Walker and Colm Toibin, and Their Trail of Words

Photo Colm Toibin and Alice Walker have seen their books take on new lives, either on the screen or on stage. Credit Peter Earl McCollough for The New York Times

One of the special pleasures of movies and plays based on great novels is the way they lead us back to their literary roots. Playing the images and emotions from stage or screen against the ones in our head while reading the original creates a doubled experience.

Make that a triple in the case of "The Color Purple" by Alice Walker. Ms. Walker, 71, won the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award for her novel in 1983. Two years later, the book — about the abuse and spiritual triumph of a black woman in the sharecropping American South — was adapted into a film by Steven Spielberg and featured the screen acting debuts of Whoopi Goldberg and Oprah Winfrey.

Twenty years later, the novel became a Tony Award-winning musical, which is now enjoying a Broadway revival and rapturous reviews. Ben Brantley, the chief drama critic for The New York Times, called it "miraculous" and "a glory to behold."

The acclaimed Irish writer Colm Toibin (pronounced COL-um toe-BEAN), 60, is enjoying a parallel success with his novel "Brooklyn," about a naïve Irish girl who immigrates to the United States in the 1950s. The film adaptation was released in November to stellar reviews for its moving subtlety. Last week, it received three Academy Award nominations, including one for best picture, and has returned Mr. Toibin's 2009 novel to the best-seller lists.

Photo Alice Walker wrote "The Color Purple," which won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.

'I had seven brothers and sisters, and not one of them became the person they should have been — because of poverty, because of racism, because of poor diet and drugs, because of the war.' ALICE WALKER

Credit Peter Earl McCollough for The New York Times

The writers met for lunch recently at Chez Panisse, the legendary farm-to-table restaurant run by the chef Alice Waters in Berkeley, Calif., not far from where they each wrote much of their books. Over polentina soup and fried sole (for Ms. Walker) and butter lettuce salad and tagliatelle with mushroom ragù (for Mr. Toibin), followed by a moist almond cake with Chantilly cream for dessert, the pair discussed the afterlives of their novels, giving voices to characters who haven't historically enjoyed them, and their personal quests to find a home in the world.

Philip Galanes: So were you thrilled when Hollywood came calling?

Alice Walker: Not at all! I put them off. I finally had some balance in my life.

PG: And a best seller on your hands.

AW: I'd just said to my partner and daughter, "I'm all yours." Then Steven [Spielberg] and Quincy [Jones] came to see me. I saw how patiently Steven had read the book and how it moved him. We all hope that we write for the world, not just that little corner that's like us. But for someone like Steven — so unlike me and everyone in the story — to feel what I was offering, that was unusual. And Quincy understood the culture immediately. He said, "Celie is the blues." Perfect! I felt safe in their hands.

Colm Toibin: I was at a book fair in New York, which can be oddly social. I was chatting with a dealer friend from London, and he introduced me to this woman from New Zealand who had come specifically to meet me. But she didn't know I was me until I had walked away. So she chased after me and said, "My name is Finola Dwyer." You know that moment when you look at someone and think, "I like you"?

AW: I sure do.

CT: She'd mad e [the film] "An Education" with Carey Mulligan, which I liked very much. Nick Hornby wrote the screenplay. So I asked, "If I do this, would Nick write the screenplay?" I hadn't thought of it before that minute, but I knew if Nick wrote it, it would work.

PG: You didn't want to write it yourself?

CT: Not at all. But I knew I wanted a novelist to write it.

AW: They asked me to write the screenplay for the movie. And I wrote one from my bed. I had a terrible case of Lyme disease. But I knew I wasn't well enough to work on it and go down to L.A. and raise my child and make a living, so they got someone else, who was always at my door: "Wha t does this mean? What does that mean?" But it was O.K. because it had to be.

CT: And I soon realized that nobody wanted me around. Nick was doing it. He didn't ask any questions, never even got in touch. And I thought that was perfectly reasonable.

PG: You didn't feel protective?

CT: It was the only way it could work. He took the central spine of the novel — the romantic story and the immigration, the two things that really matter — and left other things off to the side. But he wasn't trying to tell a new story. He was faithful to the book within the constraints of film.

PG: And both movies turned out so well. But let's turn to the bizarre reception for "The Color Purple" film. Amid strong reviews and box office came furious attacks — full hours on "Phil Donahue" and editorials and talk shows — about how the story of this one black woman was a broadsided attack on black men. Why, then, did you agree to the Broadway adaptation?

AW: I am remarkably stubborn. And I believe in the truth. So, once I got through the Lyme disease period, I thought adding music to the story might be good. When people are fiercely opposed to things politically, music can help reach them, soften them. This story is one that we need, as a kind of medicine. We are a sick culture, and I believe that art can help.

Photo Colm Toibin wrote "Brooklyn," which has enjoyed success as a book. The film adaptation, released last November, has drawn acclaim as well.

'I hope that when you see the young Lithuanian girl at the cash register in the supermarket looking really sad one day, you know it's for good reason: She's missing home.' COLM TOIBIN

Credit Peter Earl McCollough for The New York Times

PG: But the story is also personal. You are the eighth child of a sharecropper — not so different from your heroine.

AW: Absolutely. I came through a very difficult life for a reason. I had seven brothers and sisters, and not one of them became the person they should have been — because of poverty, because of racism, because of poor diet and drugs, because of the war. The boys went off to the Army.

PG: I remember my shock at first reading "Purple." I thought, "My God, sharecropping was just slavery, Part 2."

AW: It was slavery where you could work for many white men, instead of one, and no health benefits. At least in slavery, the owners tried to keep you healthy enough to work. But with sharecroppers, they didn't even bother. And the thing to remember is that all history is current. The last time I was in Africa, I saw a plantation overseer getting on a small plane with a bullwhip, on his way to someplace growing cotton. All these things are continuing somewhere. There is no rest.

CT: When I was writing "Brooklyn," Ireland had become very prosperous. And people were arriving there, but Ireland wasn't ready for it. Now the history is so clear that we Irish went to many countries and made ourselves at home. You'd think that when the Poles or Nigerians or Chinese arrived in Ireland, the Irish would be open with welcome. But it wasn't true.

PG: Both of you are pretty dedicated nomads.

AW: I am a devout wanderer.

PG: And so are the heroines in your novels, searching for a safe home in the world. Alice's Celie is raped and beaten down by men in positions of trust, and Colm's Eilis is torn by homesickness, always longing for the place she isn't. Is that search universal?

AW: Definitely. I sometimes think it's having grown up as the daughter of sharecroppers. That pattern of having to move from one shack to another — after the family has been exploited for its la bor. It's in the rhythm of my being. Now, I have places here and places there. I go from one to the other. I want to feel that the planet is my home, but I know there are parts of the planet where I'm really not wanted, as Colm was saying.

CT: I had to be careful not to preach about that in the book, just tell the story. But I hope that when you see the young Lithuanian girl at the cash register in the supermarket looking really sad one day, you know it's for good reason: She's missing home. I hoped the book might contribute to that public debate.

PG: How much of your own lives contributed to these coming-of-age novels? Colm, you grew up in a rural village in Ireland, like your heroine. Your mother was also a widow.

CT: My father died when I was 12. The town had about 6,000 people. And over several months, a lot of them came to our house. They came every night. There was no telephone, so you never knew who was coming. Just a knock on the door. My job was to answer it and lead the people into the house. They would sit and have tea, and I'd watch like a hawk. They'd say how sorry they were at the beginning and the end, but the middle was something else — ordinary stories about things that happened in town, you know?

AW: I can see it perfectly.

CT: One night, a woman came and talked on and on about her daughter having gone to Brooklyn. I can see her to this day: her scarves and her hat. Brooklyn, Brooklyn, Brooklyn. And after she left, somebody said that a man in Brooklyn had fallen so in love with the daughter — "mad about her," as my mother would have said — that he wouldn't let her come back to Ireland unless she married him first. That's all I knew. I had the story for 40 years. And I wrote it after a semester teaching in Austin, Tex., where I'd never felt as far away from home in my life. And when I went home, I really felt it. I thought, "I know what home is." I found a way to tell the story because those feelings were so urgent.

AW: In my case, it was the terrible things I'd heard about my grandfathers, both of them, when I was 8 or 9 years old. They'd been so mean when they were young. They were fine by the time I knew them, decades later. It was an enormous puzzle: What happens to people?

PG: And it goes straight to the Phil Donahue craziness about your male characters, no?

Photo Alice Walker and Colm Toibin sharing thoughts over lunch at Chez Panisse in Berkeley, Calif., not far from where they each wrote much of their books. Credit Peter Earl McCollough for The New York Times

AW: Of course. Now I know about the hardships that my father, my grandfather, all of the black men went through. The women too, of course, but I was fascinated by the men. They were totally oppressed by the culture. Lynchings were frequent. I used to wonder why my father always had this look when he went off to town that said, I might not be back. He had to behave in this servile way. And if the white people were drunk, they would abuse him anyway.

PG: And that was their model for treating women?

AW: Enslavement culture was their only model for 300 years. They would be looking at the behavior of brutal white overseers. Did you realize that they used to behead people in our country? They put heads on spikes and lined the rivers to keep enslaved people in complete terror. But it was only later that I knew this. My parents hadn't permitted me to understand it as a child; they never talked about it.

CT: Both of our country's histories are filled with silence.

PG: And so are your novels. Colm's line: "The one thing the Lacy women could not do is say out loud what they were thinking." And Alice's: "Don't you never tell nobody but God. It would kill your Mammy."

CT: As a novelist, this is really interesting. Because what a novel can do is show the dist ance between what's being said and what's being felt. Then the reader starts to see: "Oh, my God, they're not talking about it, but I know what they're thinking." It's very hard to do in a play or film. But in a novel, you can literally show the two things beside each other. And the drama is the distance between what's to be spoken of and what's not to be mentioned again.

PG: When your father was ill, your mother left you, as a little boy, with relatives for a long stretch. Did you ever talk about that with her, or would that be one of the moments you're talking about?

CT: I never did. Does this happen to you when you're working, Alice? You think you're making something up, and suddenly, you realize: Oh no, here it comes again: the aba ndonment. It's coming up all over again.

AW: All the time. I've decided to work with it until I don't need it anymore. No repression, no regret. Here it is. What can I make of it this time?

PG: Like the story of your grandfather, shooting at your grandmother with a rifle. …

AW: And only missing because he was dead drunk. They told that as a funny story. Can you believe it? I'm sure that's why my brother shot me in the eye when I was 8.

PG: How old was he?

AW: Ten. Poor thing. But everything that happens to us teaches us, if we are open to it. And eventually life will open you. What I learned from that moment in refusing to tell on him. …

PG: What?!

AW: No, no, no. I was loyal. He would have been beaten by my parents if I'd told. So, my other brother and I conferred and came up with another story. And what I learned from that moment has served me so much better than what happened to my brother. I don't think he ever cared, and his life was like that. He died, later, of cocaine and anger and frustration. He never apologized, so I've had to work with it forever. But I try not to cling to the things that are devastating.

PG: What do you cling to instead?

AW: There was a tree growing out beyond the porch. I was lying in bed. And as I gradually lost sight in that eye, the last thing I saw was that tree. And I love trees.

CT: How beautiful is that?

What Wearing Heels for a Week Straight Did to My Confidence

I moved to New York last summer, and after a couple of months, I came to the realization that I had only worn heels about two or three times. Though I don't fancy myself a heels devotee (love sneakers and loafers to boot), this was well below my average percentile. Why the sudden drop? I'm guessing it was a combination of not understanding the commuter lifestyle and feeling intimidated by navigating the uneven city streets in stilettos (tiptoeing between cobblestones is not the best look).

Whatever the reason, I made a New Year's resolution to slide into a pair of heels more frequently, and this goal commenced with a self-induced challenge to wear them every day for my first week back at work this month. Why? Simply put, I feel more polished and professional when I'm in a pair of heels. Though I'm not particularly short (5'5"), there's something about the extra height that gives me a boo st of confidence. (Societal norm? Perhaps. Anti-feminist? No way, José.) What would happen to my confidence if I wore them every day for a week? And so began the challenge. Scroll down for my riveting shoe log!

Ed. Note: I commuted in sneakers, and there were kitten and chunky block heels involved—no visits to the podiatrist required to conduct this experiment.

Wilkes Bashford, Clothier to Affluent San Franciscans, Dies at 82

Photo Wilkes Bashford putting together an outfit in 2009. Credit Darcy Padilla for The New York Times

Wilkes Bashford, a clothier whose eponymous emporium is famous for having dressed affluent, elegance-conscious San Franciscans for the last half-century, died on Saturday at his home in San Francisco. He was 82.

The cause was prostate cancer, said his brother and only immediate survivor, Bruce.

Mr. Bashford established his store as a high-end men's shop near Union Square in 1966, a counterintuitive business move perhaps with hippiedom on the rise, though it rapidly paid off. He added women's wear in 1978 and moved the store to its current location, in a seven-story townhouse nearby at 375 Sutter Street, in 1984.

Known for a keen antenna regarding emergent fashions for the well-heeled, Mr. Bashford described the store's sartorial aesthetic as "bold conservative"; it was often given credit for being among the first retailers to feature Italian designer labels like Versace, Armani and Zegna.

If critics sniffed at the store as unhip — "Much of the men's wear is the stuff of a bygone Fitzgeraldian era," Cintra Wilson wrote in The New York Times in 2009 — its defense was that good taste and the highest standards have always been and always will be cool.

Hollywood celebrities have been spotted there with some regularity, and the store's most famous regular customer has been the dapper former mayor of San Francisco Willie Brown, who had known Mr. Bashford since walking into the shop, reportedly on the day it opened, and buying a Brioni blazer.

"This town was devoid of any attention to quality of fabric or style until Wilkes came along," Mr. Brown said last fall to The San Francisco Chronicle, for which he writes an opinion column. "The first time I walked into the store, I was frankly blown away." (On the eve of Mr. Brown's first inauguration, in 1996, Mr. Bashford told The Chronicle that the incoming mayor "was in Nehru suits before he met us, but he's been fine since.")

Mr. Bashford himself was a fixture in San Francisco. A city booster, he was the board president of the War Memorial and Performing Arts Center, home of the San Francisco Ballet, the San Francisco Opera and the San Francisco Symphony.

For decades he was part of a high-profile Friday lunch a t Le Central, where he discussed politics, restaurants and real estate and exchanged gossip with the likes of Mr. Brown, the architect Sandy Walker and the columnist Herb Caen (who died in 1997).

The original Bashford store was in a building owned by the city. Through the 1970s, as the site of glittery fashion shows, it was a focus of the San Francisco fashion world. But it also became the center of a scandal in the mid-1980s, when Mr. Bashford and two partners were accused of bilking the city in a rent-evasion scheme.

Mr. Bashford pleaded no contest to felony theft charges and was sentenced to five years of probation and 1,200 hours of community service. He also had to pay $750,000 in back rent.

Mr. Bashford was born on May 17, 1933, to Byaly Bashford, a draughtsman for General Electric and later an International Harvester farm machinery dealer, and the former Dorothy Wilkes. His place of birth is uncertain. The Chronicle reported that he was born in Manhattan, but Bruce Bashford said in an interview that his parents were living in Yonkers at the time and that he did not think his brother was born in New York City, though he was not sure.

The family eventually moved to Hillsdale, N.Y., just west of Great Barrington, Mass., and Wilkes graduated from high school there. He attended the University of Cincinnati and started in the retail business by working at Shillito's department store in Cincinnati while he was in school. Mr. Bashford moved to San Francisco in 1959 and got a job at the White House department store there, where he later became the men's wear buyer.

He opened his own store with timing that might be termed quixotic; at the time, long hair and frayed jeans were the emerging fashion tics, and the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, the counterculture hotbed not far away, was nearing its freaky peak. But Mr. Bashford saw an opportunity with the kind of customer who wanted to dress well in a contemporary mode — Carnaby Street meets Madison Avenue.

"In 1966, career men wore single-breasted suits, flat-front pants and skinny ties," Mr. Bashford recalled in a 2006 interview with The Chronicle. "We sold pleated pants, double-breasted suits and wide ties."

Business waxed and waned over the decades. Mr. Bashford opened — and closed — a handful of satellite stores in and near the Bay Area, and a downturn after the 2008 recession resulted in his filing for bankruptcy protection.

In 2009, the San Francisco store and its affiliate in Palo Alto were purchased by Mitchell Stores, an upscale retailer based in C onnecticut. The company renovated the Sutter Street location and allowed Mr. Bashford to continue working there, which he did until nearly the end of his life.

Correction: January 22, 2016

An obituary on Thursday about the clothier Wilkes Bashford misspelled the given name of his father. He was Byaly Bashford, not Bialy.