That Familiarity

IT'S COLD AGAIN and I am lost again. Lost to the nuances of cold-weather dressing. "Can't help you there, I grew up in the tropics." was my response when asked to help knot a scarf some time ago. "I'm disappointed." was her joking reply, assuming that such knowledge would be up my alley.

The trouble really is that my style of dressing has always been hinged on warm-weather clothes. In the cold, I scramble amidst a potpurri of looks around me: the glamorous wives in head-to-toe designer, the sexy-grungy girls in hot outfits on freezing nights, the hip young ones with deliberately old, mismatched pieces strewn about them in conscious coolness.

Left feeling shabby next to the glam, frumpy next to the sexy, and plain next to the cool, I find myself comforted by a familiar style in an unfamiliar season. Massimo Dutti's new NYC collection is familiar to me, with items that look very much like what I already own. A timely cue to leave the glam to the glam ones, the sexy to the sexy and the cool to the cool.

I should learn to knot a scarf though.

Massimo Dutti 689 5th Avenue Collection + Limited, www.massimodutti.com