The April Issue: Christine Fernsebner Eslao
+ a few notes on fragrance
Meet Christine Fernsebner Eslao
On what I believe was our second friend date—a picnic at a local outdoor screening of Soul—I picked Christine out of the crowd immediately. She was wearing a white linen button-down tucked neatly into tailored peach trousers and carrying a wicker basket full of wild blueberries. She looked effortlessly chic and comfortable, like a heroine in a Nancy Meyers film. Her ensemble had the practical advantage of protecting her from the mosquitos that eventually ascended, driving us out of the park and into the night. We took a stroll, and Christine told me of her plans to finish sewing the perfect striped shirt for an upcoming sailing excursion. I realized then that Christine is one of those people who knows how to dress precisely for any occasion.
Christine is, officially, the Metadata Technologies Program Manager for Harvard Library’s Information and Technical Services, but she is also the driving force behind many of the library’s coolest initiatives: creating linked data descriptions for underexposed moving image materials by women directors in the Harvard Film Archive collections, spearheading a grant-funded project to facilitate author self-identification across discovery platforms, and helping coordinate crowdsourced description for Harvard’s collection of Boston rock music performances.
Somehow, in addition to being a metadata sorceress, Christine is an authority on topics ranging from perfume to typography, Italian cinema to Boston’s music scene, cocktail bitters to edible flowers. She is also, of course, a talented seamstress and has a great eye for sartorial detail. Here is our interview:
How would you describe your style?
I honestly don’t know how to, but the time I felt best about it was that time when I dressed up nice for a protest and a very kind young person yelled something like “YOU ARE MY DREAM OF A QUEER PROFESSIONAL AESTHETIC.” I don’t think I live up to that, but it’s a decent goal, right?
We both know you absolutely live up to that aesthetic. Where do you find your clothes?
I sew nearly all of them on a vintage Bernina 1000S. But when I find something that goes well with my homemade garments, I buy several of whatever it is and wear them to death. Right now, that means I own five pairs of nearly-identical canvas pants from Everlane.
I buy t-shirts at shows; my partner and I both wear a men's medium and we share a huge drawer of these, heavy on local bands, indecipherable metal lettering, and cat imagery. I scour Goodwills in Maine for vintage Brooks Brothers shirts—even when they're beat up, they seem to last longer than new shirts from the mall.
I recently got fitted for a grey linen-wool-blend suit at Bindle & Keep, in Brooklyn. It'll be ready to be tried on in a few weeks and it's killing me.
This! Suit! Tell me about your favorite thing in your closet and how you wear it.
I'm terrible at choosing favorites, so I’ll mention three.
The first thing that comes to mind is a shirt that I sewed with a cotton lawn from Liberty. It's printed with a sort of crystalline pattern called Vanessa, which started out a cool grey-blue on white, and has slowly taken on a violet tinge over the years. I stitched the buttonholes by hand.
The shirt pattern is called Archer, from an indie designer called Grainline. I had sewn several shirts from that pattern previously, so by that time it had been incrementally modified to fit me better, all over—shoulders, chest, hips, my absurdly short arms. I went with some non-standard choice of adding shoulder darts, and never looked back. This was about the point when I realized that, even if I got bored of sewing as a hobby, I couldn't go back to rolling up the sleeves of ready-to-wear shirts.
I've mended it repeatedly, so there's some sloppy sashiko to graft the patches on—little constellations of white silk plus signs. The cuffs are, right now, a frayed mess, so it’s currently buried deep in the mending pile that all my favorite clothes pass through.
How do I wear it? Very seldom. With khakis.
What I wear an awful lot right now is a coat that I sewed with mohair and another modified Grainline pattern. It’s one of my biggest sewing mistakes ever: I cut the fabric with the nap of the mohair running in the wrong direction. This means it’s a bit more Fraggle Rock than intended, and I have to tend to it with a hair brush periodically. I like to wear it with a silk scarf, preferably with oversaturated colors.
The third is a t-shirt for the Japanese doom metal band Boris. It’s an abstract design screen printed on dark heathered grey. I’m convinced that it goes with everything, but especially a light grey blazer.
Who are your style icons?
I saw Tilda Swinton in Orlando when I was 14 or 15 and I apparently never got over it. There's a scene in I Am Love where she's wearing a white shirt and orange pants to hook up with a handsome younger chef and I think about that more than is reasonable.
Closer to home, Kazeem Lawal runs my favorite shop in Portland, Maine. He has impeccable taste, looks amazing all the damn time, and every time I stop in I get ideas about what to sew next. We usually end up chatting about shoes or perfumes or where to shop in Munich or fabric stores in Tokyo.
I love everything Tilda wears in I Am Love. Do you have a penchant for a particular clothing item or accessory?
I seem to have developed a serious pocket square problem over the course of the pandemic.
And perfumes. Do perfumes count? Not being in the office, or in social spaces, for a couple years, it's been wonderful to experiment with and to realize that—for me, anyway—wearing a scent isn't about what other people smell, but my own pleasure and comfort. Which has been good fodder for thinking about clothes and other things that I wear.
Would you like to share a book, film, or cultural heritage object with readers of Luxe Libris?
What little I know about clothes that I didn’t learn from sewing them has mostly come from watching movies. I’m especially delighted when a costume in one movie seems to reference a character in another movie, or when putting on a dress is a plot point. It’s really hard to pick one to point at, so I’m relying on the traditional divination method of listening to my iPod Shuffle, and whenever it randomly plays “Pink Glove” by Pulp (specifically the Peel Session version) I end up thinking about this question, and I end up thinking about a Douglas Sirk film called There’s Always Tomorrow.
In There’s Always Tomorrow, Barbara Stanwyck plays a successful fashion designer who accidentally encounters the now-married love of her life, played by Fred MacMurray. Their inevitable, torrid almost-affair, is foiled by Fred MacMurray’s children. It has all the trappings of a happy ending, culminating in a scene where Joan Bennett, who plays his faithful wife, welcomes her husband back into their home and declares that she knew that marriage and wholesomeness would win in the end. I can’t remember any of the fancy clothes that Stanwyck’s character designs or wears, but I remain terrified of Joan Bennett’s outfit in that last scene, which I remember as simultaneously normal and suburban (it’s some kind of gauzy loungewear) and hyperfeminine (it’s fluffy and pink) but also aggressively desexualized—that’s probably the wrong word, but it seems like sterile femininity that’s been weaponized somehow.
It’s like a hitherto sympathetic, ordinary character in the film has suddenly been revealed in her final, monstrous supervillain form. Something similar happens in the climax of The Red Shoes, when the protagonist’s husband righteously barges into her dressing room in an ominously slick black raincoat (and it hasn’t been raining). I’ve watched The Red Shoes an almost embarrassing number of times (thanks, Criterion Channel) but I’ve seen There’s Always Tomorrow exactly once, as part of a Stanwyck retrospective at the Brattle Theatre in 2007, and it’s not on any streaming services, so that chiffon bathrobe or whatever it was has had a lot of time to grow into something more monstrous in my memory. (In the bridge of that Pulp song, there’s a line about how “it’s hard to believe that you go for that stuff / all those babydoll nighties, synthetic fluff”, which probably contributes to me ruminating, for years, over this thing that isn’t actually my favorite Sirk film.)
I love the connection here between Barbara Stanwyck and Pulp. Thank you so much for chatting with me Christine! You can find her on Twitter @fernsebner.
Fragrance Notes
Since Coco Chanel put her name on a bottle of perfume in 1921, fashion houses have subsidized their couturiers with signature fragrances, slices of luxury the average consumer can afford. Distilling the essence of a label’s ethos into a sophisticated but mass-marketable aroma is difficult; designing a bottle that will stand out on the perfume counter? A herculean feat. Few have achieved the iconic, instantly recognizable success that Chanel No. 5 enjoys, but a few come to mind, including Daisy by Marc Jacobs and the wonderfully feminine-meets-phallic paradox that is Halston by Halston.
The Smithsonian’s Cooper Hewitt Museum has a sensational collection of perfume bottles, bottle designs, and even a small collection of perfume shopping bags. Among my favorites are works by Lucien Lelong, such as this ornate bird cage design and this bottle of “Razzle Dazzel” which looks difficult to atomize but perfect for the woman in your life who is a hoot and a half.
Sundry
Speaking of perfume, Literary Hub has reprinted an excerpt from Megan Volpert’s Perfume, part of Bloombsury’s Object Lessons series.
The Philadelphia Library Company has several free, virtual events this month on the history of dress including “The One that Wears the Breeches” Women’s Fashion, Dress Reform and Gender Expectations in Nineteenth Century America on April 21st and Dressing Up: The Women Who Influenced French Fashion on April 28th.
Last month I told you about my friend Britta, whose organization forPEACE is supplying Ukrainian rescue mission units with armor and gear, while also supplying refugees with trauma blankets, gloves, ponchos, and dozense of other necessary supplies. Because of her org's efficiency and flexibility, their help is in more demand than ever—requests for supplies have skyrocketed over the past few days. Please consider donating here.