A Backward Glance.(Marimekko dress)

Byline: Elizabeth Kendall

Elizabeth Kendall recalls the moment--and the Marimekko dress--that changed her life forever.

It is a little painful to remember myself in the first gathering of college freshmen, in the fall of 1965, in the faded genteel living room of a Radcliffe dorm. The other girls, in drapey clothes, offered limp hands and languid smiles. I, Midwestern in wraparound skirt and shirt, all but pounced on my new classmates, quoting them back their middle names--Claire Adriana Nivola!--memorized from the photos in the freshman handbook.

By the end of that year I myself had become languid, or a facsimile of it--and that's a little painful to remember, too. I tried to speak in a bored breathy voice. I wore slingback heels to the library and a little tweed skirt suit smoothed inside by a severe Lycra girdle. That, I thought, was how you attracted a Harvard grad student. After all, I had been schooled by my mother to believe that my body's whole task in life was to avoid doing something shameful: never to bulge out of clothes, reveal underwear straps or leg hair, get too hungry, restless, or joyful. My body was not to be trusted.

Fortunately, a wave of new thinking was rolling in from the West Coast, a slow wave that would come to be called the sixties. My first taste of it came at the beginning of sophomore year, when a girl from California appeared on the front steps of my dorm wearing a sky-blue coat and a straw boater. I'd heard about Robin Von Breton from older girls. She'd taken a year off to work in L.A. for Charles and Ray Eames. She was a poet. But the jolt of this sky-blue coat (coats then were gray, black, brown), on this blonde earnest person, and the hat out of a Victorian novel--this sense of a costume that pleased her alone--was unlike anything I had ever seen. We proceeded inside together. She took off the coat. She was wearing a trim tent-shaped dress of stiff canvas, imprinted with huge red strawberries on a field of yellow.

There are moments that are watersheds in one's life--when a vast structure of assumptions shifts, opens, tumbles. Robin wasn't trying to look like an adornment to a Harvard man. She was a young woman whose every move proclaimed originality. And it wasn't just a pose. Her poems were clean and natural (although turquoise, from a turquoise typewriter ribbon). Robert Lowell had let her into his seminar. But the most potent of Robin's traits, to a dazzled me, was the boldness that had led to that dress. Actually, she had several such dresses, all with different patterns. "You don't know about Marimekko?" she said.

I did know vaguely about the small fabric company in faraway Finland, the source of these geometrically shaped canvas dresses with the wild patterns. They had become all the rage in fashion magazines. VOGUE 's pictorial had been positively sylvan: Marimekko-clad Finnish models posed on old wooden docks, among lakeside reeds, in forests. But I hadn't known about the store right here in Cambridge, on elegant Brattle Street, which was called Design Research, or DR.