Some people are handed babyhood in a box—christening lace with an off-white patina, first shoes tied with ribbon, a silver cup engraved with initials. I received precious little from my earliest years—save for a tiny pearl bracelet my father gave me at birth, but only because I had it expanded to fit my adult wrists years ago. My remedy when I became a new mother? To go shopping: for vintage baby clothes, and for the hand-me-downs I never got, owing to my mother’s light hand with keepsakes.
Amusingly, this was not a trait she inherited from her own mother. My grandmother might have been called, in her own peculiar way, a domestic archivist. She saved not simply photographs but evidence. Plane tickets, report cards, baby teeth wrapped and labeled, every ordinary scrap of family life dignified through preservation. Her photo albums were annotated with captions so meticulous they read like contributions to a time capsule, as though some future historian might one day require context for a child on a tricycle in Houston in 1997. She later wrote her memoirs with almost inconceivable precision, recalling, among other things, the names of waiters aboard the Queen Mary when she immigrated from England. By the time great-grandchildren arrived, she was making annual albums for each branch of the family. She understood, instinctively, that memory likes a vessel.
My mother, meanwhile, has always had an anti-stuff instinct. It’s so ingrained that our routine “What did you do this weekend?” calls often include reports of another closet edited, another shelf gone through, another donation bag dispatched. Her eye is exacting. She keeps not simply what she loves, but what suits the season of life she is in. This is not to say she is not sentimental. Where my grandmother worked in paper and paste, my mother works in pixels—photographing and recording family trips, birthdays, and ordinary weekends into video montages worthy of a Best Live Action Short nomination. I have sometimes thought she never felt urgency around saving physical objects because her own mother had done it so magnificently on everyone’s behalf.
It was only when I became pregnant and began putting together a nursery that I realized how much I minded that so few of my baby things had been kept—specifically, my clothes. I often found myself thinking of my second Christmas dress, which I had spotted in a photo album, and the white tights embroidered with tiny candy canes I wore with it. I thought, too, of a pink and white Hawaiian-print hibiscus frock which I wore with near-religious devotion until I nearly burst out of it. My mother gave it away when she couldn’t get me to dress in anything else. I remember throwing a tantrum, not being able to find it in my closet. I still wish I could wear it—or, more to the point, dress my daughter in it. And so I have found myself hunting for one just like it—along with, it seems, an entire trousseau of vintage pieces dating to my own childhood but also my mother’s and grandmother’s. Each little garment feels like an heirloom retroactively installed into my family.
That this should happen was probably inevitable. I wear vintage almost exclusively, having made a career out of old clothes, researching labels, sourcing vintage, and writing about garments as repositories of memory. Of course, sooner or later, I would turn this gaze toward baby clothes: hand-smocked bubble rompers stippled with French knots arranged into flowers, bonnets pleated like shells, little dresses embroidered with bunnies at Easter, pumpkins in October, decorated Christmas trees in December.
Serendipitously, a friend, Alessia Fendi, had just launched a vintage children’s venture, Le Fefi, when my daughter was born and invited me over to choose a dress. She placed in my hands a pale pink striped frock with smocking so exquisite I wanted to dress my daughter in nothing else. What seduced me was not simply workmanship, though I could deliver a sermon on the decline of proper smocking, but that these looked like baby clothes. Not shrunken adult fashion—tiny cashmeres and Breton stripes—but garments from a more ceremonial notion of infancy. Bubble silhouettes with absurdly generous proportions, Peter Pan collars galore, and onesies with little needlepoint bows across the chest. Less practical, certainly—there are no two-way zippers in this world—but celebratory in a way modern baby clothes rarely are, honoring the fleeting days we are babies, and those with the good sense to revel in their cuteness.
