frock

For Elsbeth’s first time at the opera, a Carolina Herrera rose-print frock ticked the “cacophony of colors and patterns” box but was still appropriate for the culturally rich setting.

It is summer in the Midwest, hot as soup, and I don a frock the size of a twin bed sheet in cooling cotton.

Given the “Garden of Time” theme and the last-minute nature of her frock, could we be in for a living garment in the form of flowers?

Then here came the tailors for Mr. Cranston’s frock coat and morning coat and striped trousers and silk nightshirts with his initials sewed on.

“C’mon now, Carmen had to get to her 90s before people cared,” she says, standing in her roughly 5,000-square-foot Kingston studio, about two hours north of New York City, on a rainy late spring morning, attired in her usual work garb of a knitted cap and an indigo Japanese frock coat now used as a smock, flecked with clay dust and wood chips.