I'm afraid my grandma died because I stopped wearing her coat.
An Ode to RenRen and all her clothes in my closet.
I have a lot of vintage in my closet.
Like, a lot. A knee-length Matsuda blazer with eight “tails”, a 1960’S JCPenny prom dress, a cropped jacket that looks like throw blanket, and patterned maxi skirts galore from whatever decade suits your fancy. But what many don’t know about the vintage stuffing my precious NYC closet space is that half of it came from my grandmother, who passed away last week.
We weren't really close, I hate to admit, but I moved away from home at sixteen, and I’ve never really gone back reserve for holidays and the first five months of lockdown. Maybe this is why I have always cherished the things she gave me over the years, specifically the ones that were once hers.
Renetta Davis, aka RenRen, had opinions and she wouldn't hold back in sharing them. Perhaps that’s where I get it from. But I also can hear the elated, sing-song drawl of her low-country accent as she told me “well don’t you look pretty!” any time I had to get extra gussied up as a girl (which I hated), or “oh that looks real nice” when ever I tried on the coats she gave me.
One of those coats has been with me since I moved to New York. A black double-breasted mohair overcoat, slightly cinched at the waist . It was perfect - shape, arm length, hem, texture, weight. But it was also really, really old. Like, 1960’s old at least. The interior was deteriorating after a lifetime in South Carolina, where it probably got 20 days of use per year tops before it was relegated to the back of a closet for decades, and five years in New York, where it was the coat of choice for a bull in a china shop (me).
I wasn't gentle with it by any means; the sweaters I’d wear underneath would be too bulky and pull at the seams in the armholes or down the back in the lining. It lost a button on the back and the front, so I just moved the lonely decorative button from the back and replaced the functional one that fell off the front closure. My orange and white cat’s hair was always stuck in the mohair, which even the most industrial of lint rollers couldn’t get a grasp on to remove. The number of patches to the lining are comical - all of which came from old t-shirts I had cut up, most of them black.
This year, I decided I finally needed to get a replacement for it. Sure, I could have had it relined - but the cat hair dilemma is dire. I love this coat, the last thing I wanted was to stop wearing it, but there was a new hole every week or two, and handing it off to coat check at a nice restaurant was always … interesting. Maybe it’s because they’ve never seen someone actually patch their clothes like that; like how we draw patches on the clothes of cartoon versions of poor people of yore. I mean, I live in Bushwick and I haven’t seen anyone patching in a way that isn’t trying to make it a ~*design feature*~.
My search for a coat that lived up to this one was long and fraught. Months on months of scouring to the department stores and sleuthing out contemporary brands for a sliver of hope. Sniffing out composition and care labels like a bomb squad k-9. Nearly everything I came across was a poly-blend, and if it wasn’t it was unlined, three thousand dollars, or both. No mohair, no lining, no weighty hand feel could be found or compare to RenRen’s coat; not in New York. But in Paris, there was hope.
I took an entire day to search for a 100% black wool coat, which you’d think would be a short order in a city where everyone wears wool coats. But you would be wrong, and I was exhausted and dejected. At the 11th hour on my last day in Paris, we trekked to Le Bon Marché, the grand magasin of all grand magasins. I went to the second floor and weaved through the small, mid-tier brands on a mission.
After about five minutes, miraculously, I spot a long, heavy coat hanging from a rack that said 30% off. I darted over to touch it. It’s thick and the stitching, sturdy. It’s lined, and when I go to look at the tag on the left hand interior it reads “100% laine vierge” - it’s nearly the only black, double breasted, fully lined, 100% wool coat I’ve found in my months long journey to a purchase. And underneath the brand label, as if some kind of sign from God, it reads “fabriqué en France”. This was it.
I threw my ramshackle-lined coat onto a display table like the American I am and slipped the incredibly long overcoat on to look in the mirror. I texted my boyfriend who’d gone on his own hunt to one of the floors below, to find me as fast as he could to get his opinion. In the meantime, the girl who manned the brand’s territory came out from the dressing room where she had been with another client. I told her about what I was looking for and why, showing her the tired workhorse lining of RenRen’s coat. She was actually impressed; floored even, in its age and the sheer volume of times I tried save this coat. So much so that as I was checking out, while she was wrapping up my crisp new coat, she asked if she could take photos of its for a Substack she wanted to start writing. I gave her my instagram handle and told her to reach out if she ever ended up writing about it, but I still haven’t heard anything.
I love the Paul & Joe coat I ended up with, but something about it still can’t hold a candle. When my boyfriend came to give me his thoughts (full support!) on the replacement coat, I clued him in my divulging on the state of my grandmother’s coat. I remember semi-joking that I was afraid that if I stopped wearing her coat, she might die. Her health had been poor for most of the year, and was lacking the sharpness I’d always known her for when we visited her this past summer. I was afraid to leave the old one behind in Paris even though it didn't really make sense to fly it back with me - but I did anyway, and prodigiously it fit under the weight limit for my checked luggage. It now sits folded in my storage closet and I haven’t worn it since.
The final year of my time with RenRen’s coat, and the last year of her life were like mirrors to one another. Each repair gives you extra time, but all are omens for what’s to come. Perhaps the peaceful renunciation of my beloved coat that served well beyond its years, was a herald for a peaceful end for RenRen’s long life.
I bought my new wool coat about two months ago, one month before my last Christmas with her. I think it’s a reasonable amount of time to ponder whether or not I should have worn that coat one more winter so she could make it to her 90th birthday, which would have been this past weekend. I know that it’s faulty thinking and overly superstitious. I mean, one of my prized possessions is an heirloom opal ring of hers which I’ve worn it semi-religiously for years, including the last two months. I also use the set of painted plates she brought back from her own French travels decades ago, almost daily. They were given to me in college when I moved into my first apartment. Maybe I’m just worried I should have called her more even though we didn't have anything to really talk about.
Explaining modern liberal life in New York to someone accustomed to the culture of the rural south largely felt like an unbridgeable gap. Most of my extended family still dwells on the use of the subway as an unfathomable means of daily transportation. But the last time I saw her, she asked about my trip to France. It’s all she really wanted to talk about. I showed her photos and videos of the Eiffel Tower in a rare November blizzard, a rainbow off the coast of Brittany at Saint Malo, and the ins and outs of Mont Saint Michel - which happened to be one of the last places I wore her coat. Vicariously giving her a last glimpse at France; a thank you perhaps, for the plates that have served me for nearly a decade.
But I’d like to think that my grandmother, on the other side, knows that even though we weren’t close and I lived far away - that she was with me from afar for a lot of big moments, even when she was living. I’ve lived in Bushwick my entire New York life, and I’m due to move out of the neighborhood in a little more than a month’s time. Her coat defined an era of my life that is also coming to its own close. As one of my favorite poems (and closest thing to a prayer I use these days) reads, “Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth.”
There is a photo of me in front of the Boar’s Head distro center, outside of Roberta’s Pizza in Bushwick, wearing a shirt of hers. Another photo of my first year in New York features me in an even older baby blue linen short sleeve she once possessed, that I donned for a good many auditions. A camel colored wool blazer of hers was showcased at the closing of the play I directed and produced this year.
A few years ago I let go of a pair of wool plaid pants she had given to me (I wish I didn't, because they were fully lined and no one does that any more) because they never fit me quite right, and my tailor advised against the level of changes needed to make them work. What does she know!? A few weeks ago, I went to the Tanner Fletcher sample sale, where I met the impeccably kind Tanner and Fletcher, and I thought I would be taking home a frilled-up frocket (front-pocket) t-shirt I’d been eyeing. Instead my eyes floated to a lone pair of plaid wool pants that reminded me of the pair I’d parted with. They were everything I wanted my grandma’s pants to be: high waisted, wide legged, black (opposed to beige), with a perfectly proportioned wide matching belt. I knew I had tons of things already in my closet ready to pair them with. Specifically, a blouse with the Schiaparelli-like brass hand buttons adorned with colored crystals for cufflinks or held between their metallic fingers, and a bright red sport coat. I’ll let you guess who gave me both those.
Considering the midwestern grandma kitsch of the Tanner Fletcher brand, the pants were a perfect fit (I did have to get them tailored for my 5’3” frame) to elevate what remains in my closet that once belonged to Renetta Finklea Davis.