With the sexy schoolgirl look alive and kicking for fall, Stephanie LaCava—a pretty baby from way back—opens up about being watched by men, reviled by women, and misunderstood, all in the name of style

On the fall runway at Saint Laurent, there were Madeline-perfect peacoats, Courtney Love circa “Doll Parts” velvet dresses with white collars, plaid minis, liberal polka dots, thick black school-girl tights, and shiny Maryjanes—every piece worn by a slip of a girl who looked a bit disheveled, as if she’d thrown it all together before heading out to the Paris streets. In his four seasons helming the house, Hedi Slimane has kept returning to the fascination of youth, the magnetic power of girlhood. And whenever that happens on fashion’s main stage, a question inevitably arises: What grown woman wants to risk looking childish in an expensive designer dress?
That would be me.
In Slimane’s models I see both my own look and that of the girls of my expatriate childhood—irreverent, oddly empowered, dressed for a bar yet too young to drink. I ask my friend the Carven designer Guillaume Henry— another French creative who returns to schoolgirl tropes season after season—to describe the look we both love. “It’s maladroit,” he says: gawky, a little sweet, like a baby giraffe struggling to stand, but also a little off, “like a girl growing up too fast.” One might expect that a married 30-year-old with a baby son would balk at such a description, but I take it as the ultimate compliment. In the world of writers, there exists the idea that frivolity and intellect are a misaligned pair. So I play the devil and, at least with my appearance, the tease.

The uniform I’ve worn more or less consistently since I was a girl growing up too fast consists of Peter Pan collars with navy V-necks, T-shirts with extralong sleeves to pull over my hands and hide my thumbs, tops that are sailor striped or cropped. I rarely wear pants; more often, it’s shorts or flirty skirts or—even in winter—bloomers, lingerie tap shorts, rompers. To keep my legs warm, I have an assortment of knee-high socks and thigh-highs—striped, cashmere, garterless, some with fluorescent salmon seams, others with black embroidered snakes. My shoes are Converse, wrecked motorcycle boots, men’s slipper flats or their opposite: platforms with the highest possible heel. For jewelry, I often wear only a black ribbon or a string around my neck, as I did when I was a teenager, and my wedding band is a simple black circle. I like to think of the effect as Lolita-girlish with a Deneuveian wink of icy, untouchable promiscuity.
Related: http://www.elle.com/life-love/personal-style/goodbye-to-all-that
Dressing this way both hides and highlights the things I value most about myself, which—despite the accusing looks of women on the street—aren’t my legs, but rather my combative spirit, my sexuality, my curiosity. And it suits me well enough, since, like my mother before me, who got carded well into her thirties, I’m often mistaken for a student. My legs make up three quarters of my frame; my eyes take up half my face. With pale skin, red hair, gangly arms, and clumsy legs, I’ve been told I look like either a manga character or a high school senior. There is no mature beauty about me. Rather than mourn that fact, I dress to embrace it.
Not everyone gets it. Friends joke that I forgot to outgrow adolescence; one tweeted about a photo of me, “everyone’s favorite Teen Mom, looking fly.”
As for strangers, the reactions vary from bemused to outright offended. The cliche? may hold that women dress for other women. Not me: I dress to please my own weird self. Certainly my husband would prefer me to dress in a more subdued way; our romance is fueled by my quirkiness, but not, as you might suspect, by my Lolita tendencies. He often interrogates me about what I intend to wear to important functions—like the floor-sweeping black Gucci gown with a deep-V neckline that was swiftly decreed “not appropriate” for a recent summer wedding—as a not-unwelcome hedge against my more risque? choices.

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