Portrait of a Lady

Welcome Books published the photo collection called My Mother’s Clothes in 2009. “In the years since she’s been gone,” Montgomery Barron writes in a caption accompanying a photo of a Chester Weinberg fur coat in that book, “I’ve taken to curling up beneath my mother’s fur coat; it comforts me. Her name is embroidered inside, ‘Ellie M.,’ so it could easily be identified at a party filled with fur-wearing women. Sometimes I take naps with the coat as a blanket and am transported by the mixture of smells and a lingering odor of a perfume no longer in existence.” The woman who wore the scent of Norell’s (above) is gone, but this visual portrait remains an enduring tribute to the breadth and joy of a mother’s life — and to the depth and gratitude of a daughter’s love.