Today, a lot of those clothes are Prada, Marc Jacobs. She holds on to old pieces, too, “like Jil Sander—from when Jil was designing,” she adds pointedly. Her look is and always has been classic, gutsy, impeccable. “I don’t like fancy. I love glamour, but glamour in my estimation may not be someone else’s. I gravitate toward what I feel comfortable in and what looks good on me.
“I love fabrics, and I love well-made clothes,” she continues. “I want to wear something that’s great. It’s time well spent, and it costs more money.” Still, though, she speaks Gap. She’s in fact wearing the Gap jeans from that Peter Lindbergh ad. She has a look at my own cream canvas jeans (“Let me see that waistband”), and we talk about creative director Patrick Robinson and how talented he is. We talk bathing suits, too: “A disaster, the dressing rooms.” She recently ordered a successful one-piece from L.L. Bean. “Always a black maillot. And I love a classic Speedo,” she says.
Part of living such a fit, spirited life naturally has to do with what, and how, she eats. “Polly was strict about her clothing and her diet,” remembers a former assistant who is now a major fashion editor in her own right. “Lunch was always cottage cheese and fruit.”
“Yes, I did do that,” says Mellen, nodding, when I bring it up, although now her lunch is usually “a good sharp Cheddar cheese wrapped in greens, no dressing. And soup.” This afternoon, she’s made corn chowder.
“My husband cooks very good food,” she says. “We cook together, but he does most of it. All fresh, all organic. Last night was my night to cook: I made pasta with a sauce of olives, artichoke, sour cream, broth, and a lot of herbs.” Mellen doesn’t worry about the sour cream, she says, as she doesn’t snack between meals. Her weakness, though, is late night. “All my cravings have to do with bread and butter. Bread, delicious bread. I don’t go in for sweets.”
Over the course of her more than 50 years in fashion, Mellen has observed her share of troubling diet and eating habits. “I’ve always been interested in good health, good skin, and bright eyes,” she says. Whenever she thought a model was getting too thin or too concerned with her weight, when she could detect “a certain energy zapped out,” if she felt her skin was losing that “certain luster,” she would talk to her. “But that also happens with age.” She gets reflective. “It’s a fighting battle, but I refuse to think of it as a losing battle. I’m a positive thinker. I don’t believe in failure.”
