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Growing
up in a trendy country home made me stylish
Quest
of a woman in her thirties to find a man of her dreams
By Nancy Ryder
When many of
online friends write to me, they think of my town as the pristine
country-side with farms and cows everywhere. Well, both images are true, but life in Michigan, like anywhere else, is a mix of little bit of everything. I do not come from a city with neon lights and in fact when McDonalds first came to our town, when I was in high school, and installed the first traffic light, we all grabbed our bikes and rushed to see it. Not because we had never seen those before (in other towns); it was just that we now had our own traffic lights. It was just too exciting for me as a
high-school girl in the middle of nowhere.
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From my
trendy country home on a winding road up the hill, all I could see was white snow for at least six months every year. Though girls at my age would have loved to hang out in our most
fashionable
clothes, the snow made it harder for us to do that. The snow in fact would be so high around
our home that we could not imagine wearing anything but long, woolen pants and snow
boots. In fact my
tank tops and
mini-skirts had to be neatly folded and stored in a closet for several months.
You probably may not know this but there are still ways of being what you really are, even when you live in the middle of nowhere. You can do that in the privacy of your home. I grew up in a household where
looking
elegant, dressing in
style, and being what you really are, was emphasized. My mother was a career
model and she always had the latest information on what was ‘in’ and ‘out’. While the type of work she did had changed over the years – she no longer posed for high-end fashion magazines, but was still sought for department store brochures and local newspaper advertisements. |
 My father had inherited a family
lingerie store and met my mother when she would shop at the store. As a teenager I was used to my parents traveling for days to secure the latest in fashion for our lingerie boutique. They visited
cities such as New York and Los Angeles very frequently but also made trips
outside the country to Hong
Kong, Paris, London, and Milan. What they wanted to bring to the women in my town was the
latest in
fashion, regardless of where it started, as long as it would be appropriate for an American woman’s body and her fine taste.
If it was trendy, my parents would buy it.
For days after their arrival from these shopping sprees, my mother would invite
trendy women in our town for informal focus groups to discuss style, assess reaction to new items, and try some new items on. These sessions allowed our business to better determine pricing structure and develop marketing and promotion programs. However, I was being trained inadvertently as a
fine dresser. I would get to meet the most fashionable ladies in the area and hear their comments on what they liked and why. As someone who would help these ladies try all the new items, I got some serious exposure to
what made women so desirable to
men, knowledge that I would use in my adventures with men later on.
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