The Good Wife. Image: Fanpop.

Julianna Margulies Taught Me To Be 40

My style-crush on Alicia Florrick showed me it’s time to dress like a grown-up.

I come from a long line of small Jewish women with good skin. “Russian skin,” says every Eastern European esthetician who’s ever extracted and otherwise pummeled my face, using the excuse of a Bliss lab coat to inflict pain.

I do not look my age. I get carded. If you don’t look too closely, I can pass. I’m saying this not because of vanity — I’ll happily tell you how old I am — but in order to set the stage. I want you to understand I could get away with dressing like a girl for far longer than it’s appropriate to do so.

But after turning 40, getting hitched, and giving birth to my son — in rapid succession, mind you — I decided it was time to grow up. It was no longer socially or ethically comfortable for me to walk around looking like Courtney Love in the nineties — a babydoll dress, poncho and boots — or any version of any Spice Girl. I am someone’s mother, I thought. It’s time to look like it.

So one afternoon, I went through my closet and dropped a bunch of clothes into a Trader Joe’s bag. These were cherished items:

  • the fake-fur Marshmallow hat I bought one afternoon on Avenue B;
  • the eyelet Nanette Lepore cocktail dress, an integral part of my “cupcake” costume one Halloween (the one item I wish I’d kept. I could have rocked that dress this summer);
  • the black poly pleated skirt;
  • a few teeny-tiny sweater vests; and
  • the red and blue paisley pants I always “got lucky” in, or so I bragged to our eighteen year-old babysitter when I gave them to her.

I handed the entire bag to her. And delighted, she took everything.

The Babysitter came into my life when our son was 8 weeks old. She was eighteen and going to community college while saving money for a four-year school. An artist, she was looking for her place in the world — and we became close. Through her, or rather in relief to her, I began to understand I was no longer a girl myself. And this is a very good thing.

I love being a woman, a mother, the person who signs the babysitter’s paychecks, the adult. There is an awesome and beautiful responsibility in being a true adult. The problem is this: how do adults dress — adults who do not work in corporate America, own their own house, or stand more than five feet two in stockings?

I looked for role models. Most other 40 year-old women in Los Angeles, I’ve discovered, are very busy trying to look 22. But I’d recently become addicted to The Good Wife (2009- ), and it is here I’ve found my role model.

The Good Wife. Image: Huffington Post.

I have a style-crush on Alicia Florrick. She is graceful and poised. She knows (for the most part) how to keep her mouth shut and how to get her work done. She’s a forty-something woman with children who is beautiful and and powerful in the most interesting way, which is to say, from within.

Plus, Alicia is an active player in her own life — lawyer, mother, wife, lover — without making a big deal out of any of it. She just — does her thing. And the people around her respond in kind. They respect her. They desire her. She is an adult.

But since I don’t work in a corporate law firm, Alicia’s rouched tops and red peplum-jacket suits wouldn’t work for me. (Pity. Who doesn’t love a little peplum? Especially pushing a stroller to and from Fix Coffee?)

So after giving my clothes to the babysitter, I went to Barney’s and settled on what I thought would be my new uniform: expensive jeans and a cashmere sweater. Alicia Florrick would wear this sweater, I thought! In fact, I swore I’d seen it on her. Even the color was adult — sapphire blue.

It was more expensive than any sweater I’d previously owned, and partially this is because most of my 20-something and 30-something wardrobes came from thrift shops like Beacon’s Closet in Williamsburg and Crossroads Trading in LA and San Francisco.

But Alicia Florrick does not thrift shop. Alicia Florrick dresses in cashmere even when (especially when) her husband is imprisoned.

The Good Wife. Image: Huffington Post.

So I bought the sweater. I took a deep breath and handed the saleslady my Visa card. I brought it home wrapped in tissue. When my husband came home that night, I said, “I have something to show you,” and I put it on.

I was hoping, quite frankly, he’d tear the sweater off my body, telling me how gorgeous I am and how he loves the soft touch of cashmere as he peels it from my lovely shoulders en route to the bedroom.

Instead, he said ”You look like my Bubby.”

I was crushed. The next day, the sweater went back to Barney’s. And I went back to the drawing board.

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