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FROM NEW YORK Self-fashioning at bargain rates By Alexandra J. Wall More than a month before we are to meet, Andrea Siegel ’84 confesses she is already wondering what to wear. It’s fitting for the author of a self-published book, Open and Clothed, and the great-granddaughter of Manhattan discount store scion S. Klein. The petite and dark-haired Siegel shows up looking like the true New Yorker she is, dressed all in black, except for a red, almost-paisley shawl draped around her shoulders. She needs no prodding to reveal that she got it for under three dollars at a thrift store. Siegel grew up in Westchester, New York, and began thrift-shopping in high school, experimenting with clothing designed to provoke a reaction from people—usually shock. But when she got to Cal, she was the one who was shocked. “I chose Berkeley because I didn’t know that northern California was different from southern,” she says. “Then I got here and saw all this hippie-dippie stuff. No matter what I did, it wasn’t as weird as what was happening on Telegraph on any given day. When I couldn’t shock anyone, it was like a loss of identity.” After graduating from Cal with an English degree, she worked in a sporting goods store, a produce store, and a Jewish cemetery. But eventually she returned to her first love: fashion. Yet Siegel is not quite the fashion maven one would expect; or, rather, she is—it’s just that she’ll never pay retail. She sings the praises of Salvation Army and Goodwill as loudly as any socialite does Prada and Gucci.
Siegel is also critical of the fashion industry for creating a culture in which women feel uncomfortable about their bodies. “In order to have a fabulous relationship with your wardrobe,” she writes in her book, “accepting your body is essential. Many people think they’re familiar with their bodies, but they may only be familiar with hatred for their bodies.” Open and Clothed is about what we wear, and what it says about us, but told in a light and breezy way. It’s filled with enough anecdotes about fashion and people’s taste in clothing to last a lifetime. Like the story of a peek-a-boo skirt dug up at an archeological site at Egtved in Denmark, made entirely of string—proof, she says, that people have always enjoyed the frivolous. It’s also dotted with comic entries, like the “Shopping Anxiety Checklist”: —I don’t belong here. —I’m not good enough. —Salespeople frighten me. —I frighten salespeople. —When shopping, I become obsessed with the idea that they think I’m shoplifting, even though I’ve never stolen anything in my life. —Salespeople glance at me, say snide things about me I almost hear, and laugh. I’m never going shopping again. What’s interesting is how Siegel created such a buzz over the book. “I had no degree in fashion, I’m not a celebrity, and I had no connection to the industry except a dead great-grandfather,” she says. “I had to invent myself.” And so she did, becoming “Andrea Siegel, fashion expert.” Soon, newspapers across the country were quoting her. It all started with Lil, an elderly woman she bumped into on the street, and complimented on her fashion sense. Lil told Siegel where she bought the dress that drew the compliment, how much she paid for it, and her thoughts on fashion for the elderly in general. Siegel wrote up the encounter for her book. But she also sent it to the New York Times for its “Metropolitan Diary,” a weekly section of anecdotes about city life, contributed by readers. So, all of a sudden, Siegel had her forthcoming book “excerpted in the Times”—never mind that the Times doesn’t excerpt books. Then, pitching herself as “the poster child for Queens” to a Times real-estate reporter, she made up her entire apartment to reflect the book. When the reporter arrived, Siegel was on the phone talking about the book, and mentioned it repeatedly throughout her interview. When the article came out, sure enough, there was paragraph upon paragraph about Open and Clothed, a new book by “fashion expert Andrea Siegel.” “I studied the New York Times like a terrorist,” she confesses. Next came her greatest coup: appearing as a guest on Terry Gross’s Fresh Air on National Public Radio. Being obsessed with clothing and being a thinking-person-with-values are not mutually exclusive, Siegel insists. She is both. She likes the fact that she can tune out her troubles while she’s shopping. “It’s therapeutic for me,” she says, “to move hangers along the rod.” Back to Top IN STEINBECK COUNTRY Life in the shadows By Kate Rix It is said that when John Steinbeck wrote his chronicle of the dust bowl migration, The Grapes of Wrath, he spent weeks jumping freights and sitting around campfires with the Oklahoma and Arkansas farmers whose hard-scrabble journey he would fictionalize so powerfully. While Steinbeck’s great writing talent may not have been passed down to his son, John Steinbeck IV, his huge appetite for first-hand experience of life on the edge certainly did. In his memoir The Other Side of Eden, Steinbeck the younger has chronicled life in the shadow of the literary giant. His memoir of his close encounters with drugs and wartime Vietnam reads almost like a novel, sweeping through the 1960s and 1970s. The book also tells of John and his wife Nancy’s deep involvement with a Buddhist cult, their travels around the world, and their struggle through John’s severe health problems and addictions.
The Other Side of Eden takes its name in part from the elder Steinbeck’s novel East of Eden, and offers some parallels to the novel: a remote father, a distracted, abusive mother, and two sons (John and his brother Thom) raised to compete for their parents’ occasional attention. As a father, Steinbeck the elder doesn’t come off well in The Other Side of Eden. “For reasons that were never made clear, at least not to us, my father felt early on that it would be good if my brother and I were separated,” the younger Steinbeck writes of his father’s decision to send his sons away to different boarding schools. “Since we didn’t actually live with him, this idea smacked of those old Spartan theories that were fast becoming his trademarks as a part-time parent.” The book’s title also plays on the idea that fame isn’t always the paradise that many assume it to be. The younger Stei |
 A tale of two extremes
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