Taigan Fetch

My first ever paying job (not counting numerous lemonade stands and a brief fifth-grade career as a holiday cake baker) was during the summer of my 13th year, in a department store in my hometown in the Mississippi Delta. In those days, Greenville was a thriving port and a place of extraordinary sophistication, and the store, a two-story establishment called Hafter-Blum (complete with bridal, shoes, cosmetics, and menswear) had the contents to match. Every morning I got up early, rode my Schwinn the five miles from our house to downtown, and punched an actual time clock. I spent most of my days working in the windowless receiving room, unboxing merchandise and entering it by hand into an ancient ledger. I think I made $3 an hour, but I know I’ve never been as excited about going to work.

With the exception of a stint behind the counter at McDonald’s (penance after wrecking my mother’s station wagon), those glorious three months were the sum total of my retail career. I’ve spent my entire adult life as a journalist, and now, as creative director of Taigan, my adolescent passion and my lifelong career finally converge.

As it happens, the two fields, retail and journalism, are not so far apart. Every great store tells a story, after all, and if it’s truly great, it reflects the merchant’s personality and strong point of view. Further, retailers are reporters, cultivating sources and hunting down great “gets.” They are editors too, choosing from collections, presenting items in the best possible light, eliminating that which doesn’t fit into the narrative. All those factors combine to create a parallel universe of sorts-to walk into Hafter-Blum was to enter a separate, heightened, far more glamorous world, complete with characters and plotlines all its own.

I loved the merchandise: amazing pleated chiffon blouses and simple sexy trousers from Franck Olivier, appliqued silk panties and slips from Corham Noumair; Clovis Ruffin caftans in day-glo colors, Norell perfume, and paper thin cotton dresses from Cacharel (I spent my entire summer’s salary on a backless one with a glorious knife-pleated skirt). But the real reason behind the store’s magic was a woman named Lib Weiss. She had been a saleswoman and a buyer and when she married the owner, it became her domain. Long before I worked there, I was enthralled by her, watching from my spot on the floor in the corner of the enormous bridal dressing room, while she brought my mother armloads of clothes and shoes and lingerie and jewelry in preparation for some big event.

For Nixon’s first inauguration in 1969, there were mini-dresses, knee-high snakeskin boots, and a blonde broadtail mink coat with a linx collar. For a White House state dinner in the summer, it was a simple black-and-white pique evening dress (”You do NOT want to overdress, Judy, and look like country comes to town,” Lib admonished my mother); for another in the fall, it was a paisley chiffon number with a beaded bodice from one of Oscar de la Renta’s first collections which my mother and Lib bought together (they did that a lot). It was always a thoroughly exhilarating all-day process involving the shoe man and the seamstress and lunch brought in from Jim’s Café across the street, along with lots of murmurs of FABULOUS and TO DIE, and THAT’S THE ONE.

By the time I joined the payroll, I had already absorbed a lot. Lib had taught me, for example, that gray and brown could be much richer than grey and black-indeed, she had a chocolate brown Mercedes (one of the very first in our town) and a beautiful gray Weimaraner (the first I’d ever seen in the flesh) w ho rode around on the front seat with her. For a junior high dance, when all my school-mates were wearing frilly prom-style dresses or tacky jersey studded with rhinestones, she convinced me to wear a khaki-colored cotton sheath adorned with ropes of coral and turquoise from the jewelry counter.

She was tall and angular with coarse, steel-colored hair, cut short in the style of Marella Agnelli. She had Agnelli’s swan neck too, and though she could not have been called beautiful, I never once saw her when I didn’t wish I looked just like her. She had that thing that you can only be born with: tremendous, ingrained, off-hand style. She wore a vintage Cartier bar pin on the lapel of her beautifully cut blazers, chain-smoked from a short tortoiseshell holder, and left wafts of a Revillon scent called Detchema in her wake. (Of course, I tried to wear Detchema too-on Lib it smelled like musk and mystery, on me it smelled like hairspray.)

Lib was by far the chicest woman I have ever known, but she was also funny and profane and extraordinarily kind, and when she was killed in that brown Mercedes, I was devastated-and then devastated again when I went to work at Vogue. She would have loved that, but she would also have been an invaluable help-a shadow editor of a sort. When I got the job, I’d been covering business and politics for a newsmagazine; everything I knew about fashion and style had come straight from that wonderful store and from Lib and I have tapped into it ever since. Lib was the ultimate Taigan and she would adore her fellow visionaries on this site.

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