pinafore

Ella noticed how Auriga kept smoothing her small pinafore and Aries kept stealing glances at Brigit.

She designed shift dresses and pinafores, released soft bras that she dubbed “booby traps,” and helped popularize brightly colored tights, releasing the garment in exotic yellows, blues and reds instead of just the traditional black.

Here’s the appropriately macabre opening of Coleridge’s “The Crime of the Urchin Mary”: “It was an ancient crone who wrote / Silly rhymes for tots / Was stopped by a maid in a pinafore / With blood-red polkadots.”

In photos I saw when she was a kid and I was a kid, she looked like one of us, in pinafores and high pigtails, or Benetton sweaters and frizzy hair.

On the night she died, she had dressed up in a frilly blouse and pinafore dress.