100 Years Old

Inside the mind and closet of a centenarian New Yorker.

By CECE KING
Photographer MAISY LEWIS

Audrey Lou Sevin, born January 11, 1926, is exactly 75 years and 10 days older than I am. We met last fall, when I was charged with writing a book about her life to celebrate her 100th birthday.

The first time I rang the doorbell of her prewar Park Avenue apartment, a four-foot-something woman opened the door and met me with a discerning half-glance. Her bristly attitude endeared her to me immediately. Audrey was a woman with a story worth guarding.

Months later, returning to the apartment to discuss her century in fashion, I was again struck by the way Audrey is unencumbered by the noise of time passing. From Flatbush to Forest Hills, then Great Neck to Park Avenue, this New Yorker has never conformed to the tags and trends that have come and gone over the past century.

As we walk through her five closets—one upholstered in a nostalgic floral ikat, two double-decker, one triple-decker, and one just for hats—I am immersed in an emporium of handmade, designer, and secondhand garments. When I ask how she sees herself reflected in the wardrobe, she pauses, struck by the absurd headiness of the question. “I am Audrey. I am me,” she replies. If she loves it, she wears it. Identity, as Audrey knows, can’t be commodified.

Audrey found her greatest sartorial collaborator in Thom Parker, whom she met in the 1960s at a little shop on 8th Street that sold “unusual things.” Theirs was a love born of shared inspiration. Using everything from feathers to fur to silk organza, they designed pieces that reflected Audrey completely. When Thom was diagnosed with AIDS during the earliest stages of the epidemic, Audrey sat by his hospital bed until the end. Her closets now preserve his legacy.

Audrey slips into a white proto-Issey Miyake suit with practiced ease. As she holds the crepe pleats in her velveteen wrinkles, she muses, “[The suit] is exquisite when the right body goes into it, not my body now.” I felt the urge to push back: No, no, your body is and always will be the right body! But my internal dialogue was a naive misread of her reality. Audrey holds no judgement toward herself. “Age,” she says, “doesn’t really have any meaning. I don’t know what 100 is other than that I can’t run around the corner anymore.”