HOLLY NADLER

508-274-2329

(hollynadler@gmail.com)

I knew I’d be writing about this sooner or later: I am so glad to be back from France, here in Oak Bluffs, where the clothes you throw on in the morning can be a paint-splotched Boston University sweatshirt, grey leggings with holes in them, and flip flops that expose toe nails with microscopic remnants of red polish.

Before I left for Paris early last July, I sent anxious e-mails to my personal fashion consultant, Olive Tomlinson, who lives in the Highlands. Olive stopped me on Circuit some years back when I had on frayed Birkenstock sandals, gold and black-striped leggings, and a Sun Porch Books T-shirt over a coffee-stained neon green jumper. She looked me up and down and asked, “What exactly were you thinking this morning when you combined these particular garments?”

So pre-Paris, Olive told me her essential fashion dicta remained the same: Keep it simple, black slacks or black skirt and a white top are eternally useful, a bit of tasteful jewelry, stylish shoes, and a good haircut will see you through. She offered to lend me a few of her sophisticated urban frocks — the ones she brings to New York — but I thought I’d sink or swim with a few carefully culled items of my own.

In the first week abroad, I sent Olive an astonished e-mail: The French women were as chic and gorgeously turned-out as ever, stiletto heels and all, but a shocking new development had occurred. Maybe it was just the slant of the sun where Jack and I perched on a concrete bench on the Boulevard St. Germain, but we glimpsed, under the girls’ summer frocks, black-undie thongs! Under gossamer white or pastel skirts!

Olive had nothing to say on this matter, and I certainly wasn’t about to adopt a when-in-Rome (or Paris) policy. I concentrated more on looking clean. I discovered that the reason French women always look their best, and would never consider throwing on jogging pants for their first scamper to the post office at eight in the morning was because they dared not disrespect the establishment.

It reminded me of Tony Soprano killing (and even beheading) Ralphie Cifaretto because he’d “disrespected the Bing.” The Bing was the strip bar, the Bada Bing, and Ralphie had dissed it by beating to death his girlfriend in the alley behind the club. This was a bigger crime than my visiting the patisserie on the Rue Jacob with hair still wet from the shower, but I wasn’t about to “disrespect the Bing” in the seventh arrondissement of Paris.

But, jeez, it’s nice to be back where no one cares that your hair has gone orange and rasta and it looks as if mice have chewed the neckline of your Ag Fair T-shirt. Vineyard people like each other — or don’t like each other — no matter what they’re wearing.

I read the memoir of an Australian woman who settled in Paris with a French husband and had a difficult adjustment period. Slowly she learned that many Frenchwomen, exquisite as they looked, weren’t comfortable in their own skin. And how would they be when the skin requires expensive lotions, and needs to be draped in clever fashions, framed by shoulder-length silken hair, topped by expensive cosmetics and earrings and supported by trippy, high-heeled, preferably red or blue or gold sandals?

Fashion is a high art, and a rewarding art, but shouldn’t it also be okay to saunter out for your morning coffee without having to go through the throes of Leslie Caron as Gigi, re-assembling herself in all the luxe layers Robert Jourdan has just bestowed upon her?

Nuf said (Jack has threatened to put that on my tombstone).

Katy Fuller, marketing, membership and special events manager for the Martha’s Vineyard Museum, writes to us, “The museum is opening a new exhibit called Your Town, Our Island that displays the unique personalities, histories and stories of each of the six Vineyard towns. Part of this exhibit includes town celebration days where residents of a specific town will get free admission to the museum to see the exhibit and the other museum exhibits as well as get discounted membership. Oak Bluffs’ day is Saturday, Oct. 9 from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.”

From the Oak Bluffs School we hear: “Today is our last paper Carousel [that’s the name of the school newsletter]. Please check out our Web site www.oakbluffs.mv.k12.ma.us for future issues of our weekly newsletters and our monthly lunch menu. Please support the school’s efforts to go green. Starting next month, a paper copy of the lunch menu will no longer be going home. The office will always have paper copies of both the weekly Carousel and monthly lunch menu if you prefer a hard copy. Just stop in and ask either Carla, Helen or Michelle.”

Ah, brave new world to have such wWb sites in it!