Wendi Ranks – August 2026
As I settle into my fifties – I can’t bring myself to say “sixth decade” – I am finding wardrobe staples just failing all over the place.
Take my little black dress – LBD, the kids call it. I don’t know what kids. Gen Y maybe? It was perfect. Black and slinky, it could be tossed in a suitcase and emerge looking new. I wore it to formal dinners. Nights on the town with my husband. An upscale wedding once. Four months pregnant. I bought it before my husband and I were even engaged. That it lasted – and fit – through my childbearing years, my forties created a sense it was here to stay. That sense, sadly, was false. I donned it during a recent closet cleanout.
Slinky black dresses, sans bra cups, are not made for this stage of life. Decades of loving chocolate, of living with gravity have rendered that dress, well, unwearable. It’s a sad day when that chapter concludes. A sad, sad day.
Right on the heels of that tragedy, another befell me. My black cardigan, the one from Express – that’s how old it is. I remember buying it, back in the nineties, at the Willow Grove Mall. It hit just at the waist, with quarter-length sleeves and onyx buttons set in a gold base. I could dress it up. Dress it down. Throw it in the washing machine. Take it to the dry cleaner, once I was no longer a poorly funded grad student.
That sweater has traveled halfway across the globe. Most of the way across the country westbound. All the way across the country southbound. I have worn it on dates before my husband and on dates with my husband. School field trips and parent-teacher conferences. I have worn it, like my marriage, in sickness and in health. In good times and in bad. In richer times and in poorer times.
So when, exactly, did that hole form in the collar? This isn’t like the LBD, where I look like a fiftysomething trying to pass as wentysomething. Where I look like a cougar on the prowl. Where I look like I’m going to ask you to light my cigarette, all Anne Bancroft with none of Anne Bancroft’s Anne Bancrofty-ness. Also, she was thirty-six when she played Mrs. Robinson. Thirty-six. I couldn’t be Anne Bancroft even when I was thirty-six.
My cardigan isn’t like any of that. It’s my most Carolyn Bessette wardrobe piece, at a time when I’m wanting to be at my most nineties Carolyn Bessette. I implore you to watch Love Story: John & Carolyn. You will change both your wardrobe and your lipstick. How does a sweater survive the turbine-like washers in the laundromat down the street from my single-girl apartment, yet fail to survive the wooden hangers, the walk-in closet those years of grad school were able to buy? What else from that era is waiting to fail me? My hiking boots? My pinstripe button-down? My love of Gwyneth Paltrow, Jennifer Aniston, bootcut jeans, Beverly Hills, 90210?
A few weeks ago, I replaced that sweater. My new sweater doesn’t have onyx buttons. But then, it’s also never been through the turbulence of a laundromat washer. It just needs to last until I’m eighty. You know – my ninth decade.
Contact Wendi Rank on Instagram @wendirank
