Hello, friends. One blog that always cheers me up with it's colorful interior shots and original, out of the box ideas, is Jill Sorensen's LiveLikeYou. Jill, of Marmalade Interiors, is a talented designer and a past model. Her Outfit with a Past story had the same effect on me as her blues-defying interiors, so important on my birthday! (see what I'm doing here?;p) xo, Chedva
Hi Belly button readers! I’m Jill and I write the blog LiveLikeYou. I’m so thrilled to have been asked by Chedva to participate in her clever series “an outfit with a past”. As soon as she asked me, I knew immediately the outfit I would write about. My old US customs jacket!
I just dusted the jacket off to take a picture of it for this article! It’s been hanging in the basement for years! I’m really good at giving away, or throwing away, clothing that I no longer wear. But somehow I’ve never been able to throw this old jacket out. It reminds me of a very special time in my life - my first year living in New York City!! I had just started modeling with Elite Models, after spending a year as a Swedish au pair in San Francisco. I was eighteen, spoke broken English, my family was on the other side of the Atlantic, and life was this big, exciting, insanely fun adventure. For some reason I decided I would wear only men’s clothing. Men’s suits, jackets, ties-the whole thing! So one day I bought this worn 1950’s, oversized, man’s US customs jacket in a vintage store in Soho. I obsessively wore this very large jacket on my tall, gangly frame every day, and with a captain’s hat of all things. I know…eccentric! And I probably thought I looked really cool…
The funny thing is it wasn’t some fashion statement, it was just something that spoke to me. I could simply not go outside without my US customs jacket and my captain’s hat!! I lived in a “model’s apartment”, a place where the agency put up some of their girls. It was in a big fancy high rise on 2nd Avenue and 54th street. I come from a small town in Sweden so living on then 20-something floor was the most exotic thing to me. I shared the apartment with (my partner in crime) Jenny, and then unknown Cindy Crawford and Stephanie Seymore. They were always dressed in Azzedine Alaia or something fashionable, and probably had the doormen swooning when they arrived home. But I stuck to my US Customs jacket! Every day when I arrived back from work, all the doormen would start laughing, and yell out “AYAYA CAPTAIN!!” when I came through the revolving doors.” I of course found this very funny, and always played along.
I wonder sometimes who this jacket belonged to? Some guys like this? Did they know I overstayed my visa?? I called Jenny to see if she had any pictures of me in the jacket, that I could use in this article, since all my photos from that time period got lost at an old (bad) ex-boyfriend’s house. She laughed hysterically at the mention of The US Customs jacket and captains hat!! It made a mark on all of us!! She also reminded me on how we would dump water down on people on the street from our balcony, but that’s a whole other story…
The US Custom jacket came with me when I got married and moved to Virginia, and it came with me when I got divorced, and it’s still hanging in my basement, and it will probably hang in one of my closets forever. Thank You Chedva for inviting me to write this article! I knew there was a reason for keeping it all these years…
