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274 Main Street Rear
Behind David Gavin salon
Great Barrington, MA
413.528.1145
petria@petriaboutiq.com

Fri Sat Sun: 12-5
Monday holidays

Red or Dead

by Petria May

Picasso had a blue period. City folks tend towards black. Midwestern suburbanites have a penchant for pastels. Redheads gravitate towards emerald green. As for me, like a Chinese woman on her wedding day, I am enjoying the merits of red.

As a lawyer, I dressed like a lawyer. Or at least I tried to. Since a healthy number of people in my former profession think that only superficial people care about clothes, I wanted to blend in. At my first (summer) job, I found a uniform in two, French, grey suits from agn�s b. I regularly changed my blouses and shoes.

When I began working full-time, I bought a few pant suits, including two from Helmut Lang and two from Zara in Lisbon, Portugal (Zara had not yet opened in the United States). I also bought a black dress that I once wore it for four days straight. No one noticed, of course.

Two years into the profession, I sat in the office of one of the ordinarily dressed partners I worked for. It was almost as if he was visually erased, forgotten, abbreviated. During an approximately two-hour monologue, poorly performed by this well-educated Willy Loman, he talked about his diet, his wife's bad knees and briefly, me. "You should perhaps be a judge," he said. "You like bright colors."

For more than two years, I had intentionally worn dull, muted colors. Yet, somehow, Monologue Man had noticed something about me that I could not hide. Nor could I fully disclose it. One would think I am discussing a nasty drug habit here. But no, we're talking about personal style. Clothes.

Finally, I can love color out in the open. Red is another manifestation of my liberation. Some say it shrieks, screams "Look at me!" or is garish and excessively bright, unrefined and well, just much too much.

I say, join Monologue Man; erase yourself, if you please. Like the blood coursing through our living bodies, red is certainly not dead. Even redheads boldly and beautifully don it nowadays (actress Julianne Moore comes to mind).

My current favorite reds include a blood red velvet top from Jean-Paul Gaultier (with a fluorescent orange trim that looks a bit like a vacuum cleaner hose), a 1950s red velvet opera jacket, a red Pauline Trig�re dress with puffy sleeves, and a thick silk Chinese 1950s-style dress, which I wear with a true leopard belt.

At a museum party Saturday night, I saw two men wearing red velvet jackets with black pants, white tuxedo shirts and black bow ties. Oh, it pleased me so. I wore red tie up ballet flats and wished all night that I'd worn a red dress, too, as I did to a country wedding earlier in the summer. The women dressed in red looked fresh. Happy, too, like blooming roses. They promised that life holds interest. I felt sheer joy.

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