The summer of 1968 began at dawn on June 5, in my grandmother’s living room. Andy Warhol had been shot two days before. I awoke to see my grandmother turning on the TV.
“Nana?” “He’s been shot! He’s dead!” “I know,” I said, warmed that she cared about someone I almost knew, “but that was the day before yesterday. And he’s alive, he’s going to be OK.” “They shot another one! You know!” The TV made that curious zipping sound as it came to life, and we were in the middle of a newscast.
“Senator Robert Kennedy was shot last night in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel. . .
.” It was an unbearably strange year. Percussive, angry, out of control.
Martin Luther King had been shot in April. In May, student riots brought France to a halt for weeks. My mother, caught in the upheaval on a little spring shopping trip in Paris, coped with customary brio.
She tracked down her father’s old chauffeur and persuaded him to convey her up to Belgium on a tankful of bartered gasoline, with all her new clothes in the trunk. I was nineteen and held on to glamour as a talisman against the dark. The Vietnam War was intractable, the violence terrifying.
The only way through had to do with style, élan, panache. I wasn’t tall, and I didn’t look like a dolly bird, but I knew how to dress. I had a dab way with velvets from the Portobello Road.
I had inside knowledge of Biba’s, knew my styles from long hours at the Victoria and Albert Museum, and when I went to S.