Mommy Dressing: A Love Story, After a Fashion Book

There is a photograph of her wearing my favorite of all her costumes: a long, shining robe that rippled with light when she moved...What I knew about her was only the dressing. Nothing of the rest of her life was visible to me. Unless the dressing was, in fact, the life.

Compelling and multilayered, Mommy Dressing recounts the author's bittersweet girlhood as the daughter of one of America's first star designers. In the exquisite, focused prose that distinguishes Lois Gould's acclaimed novels, she now offers a memoir that is at once a personal history of her family and a fascinating portrayal of New York's emergence as the world's fashion and glamour capital.

Both stories revolve around the central figure of Jo Copeland, a brilliant artist and working mother whose career spanned four decades, from the birth of New York fashion in the 1920s to the close of her own design studio in the 1960s. Lois Gould paints a mesmerizing and vivid portrait of the kingdom of movie stars, fashion shows, and steamer trunks her mother ruled, but always as she witnessed it: a lonely girl as painfully observant of her mother's world as she was painfully aware she could never enter it herself.

The story of Jo Copeland's rise to success--in the company of other such early designers as Hattie Carnegie, Claire McCardell, and Vera Maxwell--is also the story of the headstrong, difficult rise of American fashion. And through the lens of Lois Gould's childhood, an interior world as remote and complex as the mother she strove to understand, readers are given a glimpse of the distant landscape of beautiful exteriors that her mother both created and inspired. Featuring twenty-four period illustrations, including original sketches and designs by Jo Copeland, Mommy Dressing is as captivating and provocative as the women whose lives it portrays.