My friend Brett told me how she used to be very close
with another writer. She felt that they really had
their communication going and that she could share
anything with him. So, one day, when she sensed that
he was stuck in a troubled and joyless state, she sent
him a picture of a kitten. She never heard from him again.
She wrote to me about this and said "But those dry
brilliant dudes DO need their fuzzy
kittens!"
They do, but when they cannot find the space in
themselves to appreciate pictures of fuzzy kittens,
then what?
The skill that we learn by experience and age is to
present our gifts in a shape that others are able to
recognize and appreciate.
There is a frog that will die from hunger surrounded by flies, ready to
be eaten by the frog. But if the shape or smell or
whatever it is that makes those flies attractive to
frogs is not exactly what the frog is used to
recognize as food, the frog cannot see them and eat
them -- and he'll starve.
This is very similar to what I often experience when I
design clothes. I want to share my ideas of beauty and my
inspiration about what should be hot right now. But sometimes
what I imagine as groundbreaking and directional and
absolutely necessary for every woman to wear, just
comes off as strange and weird and totally wrong.
There have been some times, that I proudly
presented a new collection, that was received with a
polite 'Hmmm, pretty, but not exactly right for us at
the moment" (from a kind buyer), to outright sneers
and thumbs-down rejection. In the world of
fashion, it is not a sign of genius to design the
most beautiful dress at the wrong moment.
When I miscalculate the ability of the receiver, it is
all for nothing. Part of being an effective woman is
getting it right, figuring out what they really need
and especially what package they will be able to recognize
and appreciate.
What helps me most are examples of how to accomplish
this, human examples who are already good at this.
The man in my life has this down to perfection. He
always, and I mean always, every time, comes up with
just the right gift, the perfect words, the right
mixture of giving space and comfort and then, as if
this wasn't already amazing enough, he'll find the
item that will fill the need and find a way to ship it
to this person without breakage and delays.
With this example of perfect giving in mind, I have
been able to design the dresses and tops that flew out
of every store the moment they arrived. I hit the
need, before the shoppers even knew they had a need, a
craving, a total obsession with a jersey/silk mix of
fabrics in a drawstring dress with cup-sleeves and fabric covered buttons down the front.
Everybody, every store had to have it and reordered it over and over
and over. In the meantime, I designed about 200 other
dresses, just as lovingly and obsessively created, but
without any result at all.
The designers from C&C California tapped into a huge
need for tunic-length T-shirts in buttery soft and
washed-out jersey, when every woman of every age
was still trying to fit into a totally inappropriate style of cropped baby-shirts. When C&C
hit the stores they were literally ripped off the shelves.
They shot to such success all because they figured
out what we wanted before we knew it ourselves.
I get it: pictures of fuzzy kittens, no matter how
cute they seem to us, are the equivalent of
high-waisted, pegged and easy-fit mom jeans for a hip
and clued-in fashion consumer. Perfect giving is the
right gift, the perfect words, the right mixture of
space and comfort to fill the need.