The Girl with the Diagonal Art: A Childhood Muse for a Fashionable Life

My earliest memory of fashion didn’t come from a store or a catalog. It came from a house I visited only once, likely for a band practice my dad was playing at.

At the top of the stairs, just to the right, was a piece of art—angled intentionally, hung diagonally like it didn’t care to follow the rules. It wasn’t hers in the sense that she made it, but it was hers. It belonged to her world. That piece, by Kandinsky, was my first brush with abstract art — wild, vibrant, and unapologetically different.

She was tall, dark-haired, and elegant in a way that left an impression. She wasn’t famous or professionally stylish. She simply was. Without effort, she embodied something I couldn’t yet name: the beauty of difference. She didn’t explain the painting or the way it was hung — she didn’t need to. It was clear she lived in a world where things didn’t have to be symmetrical or ordinary to be beautiful.

Then she gave me a bag of dresses.

To her, maybe it was just a gesture—clearing out a closet. But for me, it was like being handed a suitcase from another dimension. These clothes weren’t what I saw in the stores near my small Michigan town. They were high-contrast, black-and-white pieces with bold shapes, maybe even a flash of red. Looking back, they reminded me of Piet Mondrian—graphic, structured, unmistakable.

I didn’t feel fashionable. I was a chubby kid, awkward in my body, and those dresses fit me loosely and oddly. But when I put them on, something changed. I didn’t look like I belonged in a world of fashion, but I felt like I’d been allowed to peek inside of it.

The idea that some things are simply different — and that difference can be beautiful.

Until then, I didn’t know that clothes could create a world. Or that a crooked painting could suggest intention rather than accident. Or that a person could be unforgettable just by existing authentically.

I spent much of my childhood sketching those Kandinsky-like shapes during social events—tournaments, family outings, anywhere with noise and motion. I’d find a quiet spot nearby and draw circles filled with other shapes, usually placing an orb in the center. It was how I made sense of the world, filtering chaos into something beautiful and contained.

Looking back, I see that experience—the diagonally hung painting, the New York-like dresses, her understated elegance—as a portal. Not to a specific trend or aesthetic, but to the possibility of otherness. To the power of standing out, not fitting in. To the beauty in what isn’t expected.

And maybe that’s the most lasting influence: not a blueprint, but a spark.

A crooked painting. A bag of dresses. A woman who lived like art—without having to say a word.