The Time-Traveling Fashionista

Genres: YA Historical Fiction

Synopsis

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What if a beautiful vintage dress could take you back in time?

Louise Lambert has always dreamed of movie starlets and exquisite gowns and longs for the day when she can fill the closet of her normal suburban home with stylish treasures. But when she receives a mysterious invitation to a vintage fashion sale in the mail, her once painfully average life is magically transformed into a time-travel adventure.

Suddenly onboard a luxurious cruise ship a hundred years ago, Louise relishes the glamorous life of this opulent era and slips into a life of secrets, drama, and decadence. . . .

Dreamy and imaginative, The Time-Traveling Fashionista features thirty full-color fashion illustrations to show gorgeous dresses and styles throughout history.

Release date: April 5, 2011

Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers

Print pages: 272

Sample

The invitation arrived on an ordinary Thursday. When Louise Lambert came home from swim practice that April afternoon, as
she did every Thursday afternoon, it was lying on top of a pile of mail on the antique, oak hall table. She grabbed the lavender
envelope on her way upstairs.


Louise dropped her purple backpack haphazardly in the middle of her room and flopped down on her full-size canopy bed to examine
the letter. The envelope was addressed with her name.


To: Ms. Louise Lambert

Her name was written in a beautiful, sweeping script. There was no street address, no return address, and no stamp. She turned
over the envelope; it was sealed with bloodred wax, a strange and old-fashioned touch.




Louise rarely received any mail aside from her monthly Teen Vogue, Anthropologie catalog, and an occasional Hallmark card, with a twenty-dollar bill enclosed, from Grandpa Leo in Florida.
She took an extra moment opening this one, feeling the weight and texture of the paper, examining the seal like a scientist.
It seemed to be a monogram of the letters MG, intertwined like vines. Her impatience and curiosity prevailed, and she ripped open the envelope, breaking the thick seal.


Cool! And what perfect timing. Maybe she would find a fabulous dress for the seventh-grade semiformal next Friday. Her first dance. Louise twirled around her room with an imaginary partner as though dancing in a fancy ballroom, stopping
abruptly in front of the full-length mirror that hung on the back of her door.


The mirror was covered in taped-up photographs of fashion models she’d ripped out of Teen Vogue, overlapped with pictures of Old Hollywood movie stars like Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor she had printed from the Internet.




Growing up in England, Louise’s mom always loved Old Hollywood movies, and said that was the reason she moved to the States
as a young woman. She thought life in America must be like a classic movie, as magical as The Wizard of Oz and as romantic as Casablanca. Louise had inherited her mom’s love of the Golden Age of Cinema, and some of her favorite memories involved curling up on
the couch with her mom and a bowl of microwave popcorn, watching black-and-white classics with Cary Grant, the George Clooney
of his day, or Audrey Hepburn on the television screen.


Louise studied her reflection and was once again disappointed. She was still short, still had braces, and, she saw as she
turned to the side, was still flat as a board. Her shoulder-length, curly brown hair, damp from swim practice, was pulled
into a tight little bun at the nape of her neck, with a few frizzies escaping around her face.


She picked up her antique Polaroid camera, pressed the automatic timer, and waited. Five… four… three… two… FLASH. The camera
spit out an underdeveloped picture, and Louise labeled it April 14 with a ballpoint pen. She placed it with all the others, in the top drawer of her dresser under her balled-up socks and underwear,
not waiting for it to come into focus. One day she was sure she would see a change. Something. She was waiting for something
to be different.




Louise had almost thirty minutes until dinner. Bored, she restlessly pushed open her closet door and stepped into the musty
annex. Her closet was huge—about half the size of her bedroom. But because of the house’s steep gabled roof, the ceiling slanted
sharply and rendered half the space useless. One bare bulb illuminated the room with a dim, shadowy glow. Her vast walk-in
closet was by far her favorite hideout in the huge, drafty house. It was the only place left where she still felt the nervous
anticipation that extraordinary and magical things could happen if she let her imagination go wild. She wasn’t a kid anymore,
though, so she couldn’t help feeling a little self-conscious now at her excitement over a closet.


When Louise was younger, she liked building forts in here; it was cozy and dark and somehow made her feel safe. She spent
hours reading with a flashlight in the nest of blankets she would arrange for just this purpose. Over the past year, as her interest in fashion grew exponentially from the J.Crew catalog to Rodarte (the only dress she owned by them was made for
Target, but still, an actual designer label), she realized how lucky she was to have such a great storage area entirely for
her clothing. It was one of the lucky breaks of being an only child.


Her enthusiasm was sparked by a visit about a year ago to a thrift store on the Lower East Side of New York City with her
best friend, Brooke. Louise bought an amazing, one-of-a-kind, colorful knit dress that, according to the salesgirl, looked
like a classic Missoni piece from the 1970s. She wore it to Caroline Epstein’s bat mitzvah. The dress got her a million compliments
and cost her only $13.50. She was hooked.


A suspended wooden bar spanning the length of the closet hung from the highest point of the sloped ceiling. Her father, in
a surprising burst of do-it-yourself fervor, had constructed it for her last year out of some rope and dowels to house what
she had hoped would be an increasingly expansive collection. At this moment, her vintage acquisitions weren’t much of a collection
at all. They were more like three random pieces. But she was hoping that soon things would change.


Now she loved vintage fashion. If she couldn’t live in an old movie, at least she could dress the part. That was where she
and her mom differed. Her mom thought films should be old, but clothes should be new and donated to, not purchased at, places
like the Salvation Army.


When Louise wasn’t scouring the two local thrift stores, she was online researching different designers and eras. A well-worn
copy of Shopping for Vintage: The Definitive Guide to Fashion, a surprisingly perfect birthday gift from Grandpa Leo, was conveniently placed on her bedside table, so that if she dreamed
of a particular outfit, which Louise often did, she could look it up before it disappeared from her mind’s eye. The book also
gave her lots of tips for collecting vintage, and a directory of all of the best vintage stores throughout the world. She
would read through the shop listings on nights when she couldn’t fall asleep. Names like Decades, The Diva’s Closet, and Polka
Dots and Moonbeams. They all sounded so alluring! It was much more effective than counting sheep.


Louise now considered herself somewhat of an expert on vintage clothing. She could easily tell a Balenciaga from a Givenchy.
She knew that the term “vintage” referred to clothing up until the early 1980s, and everything past that would just be considered
secondhand. She could tell a Coco Chanel suit from a Karl Lagerfeld suit for Chanel. (Current Chanel designer Karl’s skirt
would fall above the knee—House of Chanel founder Coco would have found that indecent.) She knew that zippers were rarely
used before the 1940s. And she also knew that just because something was old, it wasn’t necessarily valuable.


Louise pulled out a royal blue, knee-length flapper dress with a drop waist, sequins, and ostrich-feather trim, from her 1920s section (presently rather limited to this one piece).
It wasn’t a genuine Madeleine Vionnet, the French fashion designer of the twenties and thirties who basically invented the
bias cut, but on her current allowance, it was about as close as she was going to get. Noting that a matching sapphire boa
and T-strap heels would perfectly complete the look, Louise remembered the invitation to the Traveling Fashionista Vintage
Sale.


That would be a great place to look, she thought, excited about the prospect of adding to her collection. At this point, she had completely exhausted the local
Salvation Army and Goodwill stores.


Hugging the flapper dress to her body, Louise closed her eyes and stopped for a moment to lose herself in the fantasy of the
outfit. It almost felt real. She was dancing in a speakeasy. It was loud and sweaty, and she swayed to the imaginary jazz music playing in her head and
twirled an invisible string of pearls between her fingers.


“Louise! Supper is ready!” Her mother’s shrill voice permeated her consciousness.

What an exciting life the woman who owned this dress must have led! Going to parties wearing this fabulous sparkling garment—Louise
guessed it was most likely a life of dancing in secret backroom joints, gambling, and gangsters. She had read about the Roaring Twenties in history last year. The farthest Louise had gone dressed in this outfit was in front
of her bedroom mirror. She was excited for the dance because now she actually had an opportunity to dress up for something
besides her own fashion shoots with her Polaroid.


“Louise! I mean it!”

Well, for one thing, she bet this woman’s life hadn’t involved a nagging mother who freaked out if she was five minutes late
for dinner.




The Lamberts always ate dinner in the formal dining room. They lived in a large, rambling Tudor home, with lots of rooms that
always needed dusting, a back staircase, dumbwaiter, and two guest bedrooms whose doors remained closed. For a family of three,
it was enormous, but Louise knew every inch of it by heart—every squeaky floorboard and reading nook, and all the best spots
for hide-and-seek. It was the kind of place that felt like there had to be a secret passageway somewhere, and Louise was still
determined to find it.


Often it was only she and her mother sitting around the long mahogany table. Dark and shadowy oil portraits of Louise’s ancestors
hung gloomily on the Venetian red walls. Her father rarely made it home for supper, often working late hours at his law firm.
Dinnertime was when she most wished she had brothers and sisters to talk to. Sometimes she would imagine that her two-dimensional
painted relatives climbed out of their canvas backgrounds and sat around the long table with Louise and her mom, filling the room with laughter and
lively conversations about her family’s history.


Mrs. Lambert was already at the head of the table when Louise came down. “Dahling, what were you doing up there? The meat
is getting cold,” she said in her faintly accented English, unfolding the white linen napkin and placing it on her lap.


“Sorry, Mom, I guess I got a little distracted,” Louise said, plunking down into the uncomfortable high-back chair.

“Hmm.” Mrs. Lambert sighed. “Why am I not surprised?” she asked, daintily cutting up a gray piece of mystery meat.

Before moving to Connecticut, her mother had grown up in a wealthy family in London and, unfortunately for Louise, after a
lifetime of maid service, Mrs. Lambert never really learned to cook. Boiled sausages, boiled po. . .