When I was seventeen years old, I shot a commercial for a face wash product that ended up doing pretty well (I'll dig it out of my video archives someday; I guarantee that those of you who were teenagers in the '90s will both remember it and remember being vaguely annoyed by it, because the thing played a lot).

Anyway, as a sort of celebration for booking that commercial I decided to do something I'd never done before: buy a really special piece of clothing that didn't come from somewhere like the Salvation Army (my go-to shopping destination for most of high school). My mom and I went down to DKNY on West Broadway and I bought the most beautiful sweater I'd ever seen: it was a light camel color, cashmere, with an enormous cowl-neck and extra-long sleeves. For something like ten years, that sweater was what I put on whenever I wanted to feel casually elegant and sort of 'Oh, this old thing?', like I'd just stepped out of a Nora Ephron movie set in the Hamptons or something.

All of this is to say that I have a big soft spot for DKNY, and so the chance to work with the brand in such an involved, collaborative way was more than a little bit exciting.