I Am So Popular: Fashion—Turn to the Left

What’s my secret to success? Well, for starters, this is one area of my life where I gladly cast aside my inner control freak and delegate, delegate, delegate. I’m a shitty seamstress, but I happen to have two friends, Sam and Geneva, who are 20, wildly fashionable, and whizzes on the sewing machine. This means that the occasions I, personally, come in contact with needle and thread are usually no more than once over the course of the camps. Then there’s Ann, another friend, who is a genius at making accessories from found objects—she’s got the kids whipping up jewelry from boxes full of stuff most anyone else would throw away. And this year, our latest addition to staff is Ceci, who can make anything out of duct tape.

So basically, it falls to me to bark out orders—Time to clean up!—and hand out treats during the daily ritual known as Unhealthy Snack Time. Occasionally I am enlisted to pin fabric together or run a drawstring through a waistband. And, getting back to the Thurber story, I’ve got one other duty, a task that reminds me anew every summer just how important it is to ask questions of my charges, rather than tell them how it’s going to be.

The super short plot summary of Many Moons goes as follows: there’s a princess, and she sees the moon out her window, and she wants the moon for herself. She so desires this thing she can’t really have, that she gets sick. Her father the king consults all manner of wise men who futilely theorize ridiculously complex solutions. They argue over what the moon might be made of and how to recreate it for her little royal highness. Of course, in the end, it is the jester that saves the day.

How does he do it? He asks the princess how far away the moon is, how big it is, and what it’s made of. In this way, he discovers that she believes it is made of gold, hangs at a height just higher than a tree, and is around the size of her thumbnail. These are conclusions drawn from the fact that she can see it, right there, just above the tree outside her window, and it is shiny, and when she holds up her thumb, it blocks out the moon. (Which calls to mind for me the Kids in the Hall skits where they say, “I’m pinching your face”; and “I can’t SEE you!”)

Later in the story, once the princess has been brought back to health by the gift of a little golden moon on a chain, panic ensues when a full moon is about to rise again. Now she’ll realize she’s been tricked, right? Wrong. Again, the jester turns to the girl to get her perspective, rather than press upon her his. Her theory? Just like a baby tooth that falls out is replaced by a new one, so, too, a new moon sprouts to replace the old one.

So, do I rely on this story as proof that it’s okay to fuck with kids’ heads? Nah. But I do use it as a handy excuse to keep from overwhelming them with prototypes on the first day. Sure, we hold up a sample garment or two, just to give them a few ideas to get them started. But if you were to walk into camp what you’d see is an utter explosion of fabric and, at least on the surface, pure chaos.

Now look closer. And listen to me, as I try to come up with a way to avoid having to learn how to solve complex design issues. “How do YOU think it should go?”; goes a very long way toward this goal, much further than, “I think you should do it like THIS.”; And nine out of ten times, at least, the young fashionistas have pretty simple ideas on how to solve what, at the outset, might appear to me on par with rocket science.

Today is Friday. That means Fashion Show day, the culmination of all their efforts. As they parade across the stage in evening gowns made from pillow cases and embellished with rusty washers and old Christmas decorations, and accessorized with duct tape purses, they will, I promise you, beam. Much of this I attribute to the sugar rush brought on by unhealthy snacks and, okay, the freedom they’ve been allowed.

Warren, who is childless, recently emailed me an article from New York Magazine, one that examines a number of studies that suggest parenting makes a lot of people miserable. I took great umbrage with this piece; in fact, I couldn’t get all the way through it. Don’t get me wrong—there were many moments raising my kid that were difficult, left me in tears, and had me questioning my sanity. And I don’t mean to look back through the rose-colored glasses of revisionist history and proclaim that the whiners are all full of shit, that ushering a child from diapers to diploma is a piece of cake.

But I do think one thing I got right—perhaps entirely by accident—was a little something I picked up courtesy of Henry’s Montessori pre-school days. The philosophy of the school is this: let the child lead. I had a rule—if he was cognizant enough to raise a topic, no matter how difficult it might be to address, I would entertain the subject. I’d aim for an age-appropriate response, and maybe leave out some sordid details. I wanted him to learn to think for himself and, I’m happy to report, that was one experiment that worked out well.

Rule two, one I’m still working to apply to my own life, is to keep expectations for what he should do with is life way down. All those miserable parents in that NY Mag article? A lot of them get into trouble because they micromanage, push their kids to hit certain goals, and expect them to turn into X, Y, or Z. They’re not asking the kids what the moon is made of, they’re telling them that they must aim for the moon, and that they mustn’t stop until they get there, and that part of getting there involves beating all the other kids also being pushed in that direction.

What a load of crap.

It’s fascinating to work with twenty kids at a pop, to see their different personalities already solidly formed. From the over-confident to the indecisive to the utterly insecure. By the fourth day of hearing my name uttered 340 times per hour, questions assaulting me from all corners, inside I often hit a place where I think, enough already! Then I think of Thurber and the Many Moons, and I remind myself not to expect them to know what I do—in fact, not to expect anything particular at all.

Then I turn the question back around on them. “How do I do this?” they ask, in a thousand different ways. “How do you think you should do it?” I respond, driven sometimes less by patience than the terrifying thought I might actually have to develop a sense of fashion and the skills to execute Project Runway-esque masterpieces.

And I’m telling you, like the princess in the story, they hardly hesitate at all before figuring things out on their own, almost always solutions far simpler—and in the end far more satisfactory—than anything I might offer. Their creations run the gamut from super simple to outrageously amazing to downright hilarious. But regardless where on the spectrum their fashions fall, always they carry with them moons of their own creation, and a palpable joy in that process.

Spike Gillespie is long overdue for a nap. She’s got a couple of openings for next week’s Fashion Camp—email spike@spikeg.com if you want to know more. She blogs for JetBlue, KnitBuzz, and her own damn self. And she’s teaching writing workshops for adults this fall—info here.