Style in a suitcase; Compelled to condense her wardrobe into a single carry-on case, Katherine Mosby found her sense of fashion expanded.

Byline: Katherine Mosby

Born at the end of the fifties, I fused in my mind that decade and the notion of high style. As a young girl, I had chafed under the tyranny of its rules. Patent leather only after dusk; white shoes after Memorial Day-the length of glove or coat required at any given time seemed as arbitrary and onerous as the irregular verbs in a foreign language. Glamour was, however, spoken fluently by the women in my family. It was through luggage that I finally came to terms with fashion.

My aunt Barbara was legendary. She appeared in photographs in fashion magazines, luminous in couture by Balmain or Balenciaga or Worth. Every detail-the evening clutch and long gloves, hat and muff, fan or jeweled tiara-evoked a life of such exacting refinement as to seem otherworldly. I saw her as a cross between a movie star and a princess, impeccably elegant and almost imaginary. She lived in Paris, naturally.

My aunt Geraldine drove a green Jaguar and was so glamorous my mother (who had herself modeled briefly) said it was exhausting to be around her. Geraldine was always brilliantly jeweled by Buccellati and dramatically hatted by Lilly Dache; she favored ostrich for her handbags, and her capes were trimmed with fox and lined with fuchsia satin. Her luggage would arrive at European hotels in its own taxi, with steamer trunks and train cases, stacks of hatboxes piled precariously. These were women who never left the house without looking polished and poised and ready to be admired.

I loved all the accoutrements of that world, the cocktail dresses that shimmered, and the blouses of silk gauze, spun thin as a dragonfly's wing. I liked to sit at my great-aunt's vanity, marveling at the cut-glass perfume bottles, jeweled hat pins, enameled compacts, or ivory hair clips. But from earliest childhood it was clear to me that while it was a world I loved, it was also one in which I would always be more comfortable as a visitor than a resident.

Knowing this about myself in no way diminished my appreciation of the gilded world in which my aunts reigned. If anything, it only heightened it. I had been raised as an acolyte at the altar of female beauty; I was well aware of the rigors of its service. I knew that what others made look effortless remained for me elusive. As a child I was always the first at a gathering to get chocolate ice cream on the pink sash of my party dress or to lose a button or bow.

Once I ripped out the stiff tulle netting from the underskirt of a dress I was wearing because it scratched my legs like nettles and its poufiness got in the way of play. That was a dress my mother had chosen specifically for me to wear the summer we spent in the south of France, when I was six. "You'll need it at the ch,teau, when we visit the grandes dames," my mother said when it was being fitted. The grandes dames, I was disappointed to discover, were very old ladies who didn't like noise or children, no matter how much starch was involved.