This photo of my grandmother, Nina Popova Kapanadze, was taken in Sukhumi, the capital of what is now considered the Republic of Abkhazia, on the eastern coast of the Black Sea, around 1954. Grandma Nina’s style has always been classic and tailored, and she’s only worn clothing that suits her perfectly. I love how happy and relaxed she looks in this picture, as she poses seaside in a polished gingham dress and walking sandals. It must have been a good day.
Grandma, now 92, has never worn anything off the rack. She’s either made her own clothes (a great skill to have during war rationing) or altered store-bought ones. In the 1940s, when trench coats were all the rage, she stayed up all night making herself one to wear to the premier of a traveling circus show the following night. Grandma and Grandpa were lead dancers in the city’s biggest dance troupe, so they never had a problem securing the best tickets to any show in town. Needles to say, no other woman at the premier was wearing a trench coat.
Nina was also meticulous about her grooming. When skinny eyebrows came into fashion, she plucked her own so fastidiously that they never quite grew back—and although she had to draw them in for the rest of her life, she never complained. I have never seen her in slippers, even at home or during her stay in the hospital, or wearing her glasses in public. And she stopped wearing high heels only recently.
I remember once, when I was a young girl, I got out of bed one weekend morning and shuffled out to the kitchen in my pajamas. My grandmother and my mother were sitting at the table drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes, fully dressed for the day. The way they looked at me, as if I were from another planet because I wasn’t equally decked out, suggested that showing up to breakfast with messy hair and PJs was unthinkable. Apparently the Kapanadze style gene has skipped a generation, but I admire and appreciate the elegance and upkeep that mark the ladies in my family.
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