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I've been watching a lot of the TV show "Mad Men" lately. It's a drama series set in the early '60s at an advertising agency in New York City. The time period is portrayed not only by rampant sexism, but a near-fetishization of drinking and smoking. I haven't had a cigarette in years, but watching all those actors exhaling enormous, sensuous plumes of smoke kind of made me wish I was 17 again and sneaking a lung-searing clove with my fellow hair-dyed high school misfits before English class.

What I really love about the show, though, are the fashions. Oh, those outfits -- the nipped waistlines, the flouncy dresses, the crisp dark suits. Hats! Gloves! Heels! Lush red lipstick, complicated updos, cat's-eye glasses ... even the Brylcreem coating the men's hair fascinates me.

Click here to read more about Linda's fashion obsession -- and see pictures of her attempts.


I think I'm attracted to these clothes because I spend so much of my life wearing their polar opposites: comfy, loose-fitting things for the hours I spend with my kids. Yoga pants and T-shirts that can withstand being spit up on, jeans for when I finally leave the house but need to be able to chase an unruly three-year-old while schlepping a baby on one hip.

I tend to make an attempt at dressing up a bit for my office job, because it's such a novelty to wear things that aren't fished from the top of the dirty clothes hamper. Yet nothing I own is on par with the lovely, tailored dresses the ladies at Sterling Cooper wear.

Sadly, Old Navy doesn't seem to sell this sort of vintage fashion -- which is too bad, because I want to look like Joan Holloway. I too want to sail around my office like a glorious ship, my pointy-bra'd rack entering the room a full five seconds ahead of the rest of my body. Sure, my jeans-wearing software-coding co-workers might look at me oddly, and it's true I probably wouldn't be able guzzle as many Diet Cokes as I normally do throughout the day without exploding from my girdle in a deadly hail of elastic and hooks, but, by God, I would be glamorous.

Tell us: Do vintage clothes appeal to you, or are you mostly relieved no one dresses like that anymore?