Coach creative director Reed Krakoff, an authority on accessories design, enlisted my help in writing the foreword to "American Accessories," a glossy tome produced by the CFDA and published by Assouline.

Project Text

Despite their name, accessories are essentials—necessary to hold up a pair of pants, cover the head, ward off the elements—and this makes good sense to a Yankee sensibility steeped in practicality. American accessories, rooted in function, pay tribute to our national pragmatism. We take the stalwarts of everyday life—the backpack, the baseball cap, the work boot, the messenger bag—and appropriate them into the world of fashion. They are reimagined, reworked and reconstructed into new forms influenced by the fine and decorative arts, media, street life, film: culture high and low. This is the melting pot. This is the American way.