I am Joan. No, I'm definitely Betty. Wait, no, there's no way I'm not Peggy. No. Definitely Joan. If you have never watched Mad Men, perhaps the coolest show in the history of television, you probably have no idea what I'm talking about. For you, I'll skip the lecture where I insist that you must rent Season One and begin watching it immediately, because I assume you've already heard it from someone else at some point in the past 2½ years. Just trust that someone else and do it already. Enough said.

If you have watched Mad Men, and are therefore as addicted to it as Angelina is to orphans, then you understand my conflict. Am I Joan, Betty or Peggy? If you ask yourself these questions or similar ones (yes, I am talking about you wanna-be Don Drapers, Duck Phillipses and Roger Sterlings), then you know that I am facing this identity crisis during many moments of my life, but no more so than each morning when I am standing in front of my gaping closet door figuring out what to wear.

You wouldn't think it would be so hard to choose a Mad Men-style alter ego, or at least to narrow it down a bit. The women on the show are a triad of sharply contrasting archetypes, not at all easily confused with one another. Joan, the ad agency office manager, owns every room she enters with a sharp turn of phrase and a soft turn of boucle sheath clad hip. Betty, Don Draper's Bryn Mawr-bred wife, is consistently wrapped in crinoline and organza in eye-popping prints, a perfect cover for the gilded cage she inhabits. Peggy, a young copywriter walking a tightrope between personifying the feminist revolution and beating a hasty retreat to the confessional, has evolved in her style as she has tried desperately to become one of the boys, awkward bows and plaid making way for smartly fitted work dresses.

I love all of these women, and I love all their disparate wardrobes. I also want to be all of them.

The feminine triumvirate of Mad Men bear their respective styles like billboards, oversized murals that scream "This is who I am" in various shades of pink font. And therein likes my problem. Some days I'm an ambitious working girl and after-hours martini sipper. Others, I'm a full-time college student overeager to please her teachers and to look minimally ancient to her impossibly young classmates. And every single day I'm a

mom and soon-to-be wife, albeit one who strives for a little more warmth than that which emanates from the tip of a lit cigarette. (Sorry, Betty, I do realize that you are a product of your times!)

I can't help but indulge in some of the trends that have trickled from the gloriously styled Mad Men onto the racks of my favorite stores. I now own pencil skirts, vintage brooches, clunky pumps and, best of all, a belt so wide as to turn any old top into a figure-hugging sausage casing that would make Joan proud.

But mostly my closet is home to jeans and boots and sweaters and gym clothes. My real life requires that I put on these more practical things most of the time, even as my inner Betty is screaming for me to apply a deep scarlet lipstick.

While the women of Mad Men are fictitious characters, they embody qualities that most woman can identify with: an intermittent vulnerability, poise when faced with extreme sexism and, yes, familiarity with incredibly uncomfortable undergarments.

Like real-life women

But these women are also perfect representations of the real-life women of their era, women with singular roles to play and a steadfast commitment to those roles, for better or worse. The clothes they wore were not the costumes of their stations, but were more like psychic projections of that commitment, second skins donned automatically.

The clothes of the early 1960s provided armor against certain harassment, a welcoming greeting to a work-weary husband, a celebration of the uneasy comfort created by a mass cultural hypnosis. The fashions were expressions of who these women desired to be, or how they desired to be seen by others, and somehow they seemed completely uncontrived. (next page »)