THE UGGS

“She slept in Velcro rollers five out of seven nights, for god’s sake…”

My mom went to sleep every night in her makeup but woke every morning blemish-free. Her scent was a mix of CKOne perfume and raw meatball, which was often stuck under the tips of her acrylic fingernails and wedged in the prongs of her wedding ring. She taught middle-school U.S. history and every new school year made it her policy to not smile in class the whole first week. In college, when I started dating a guy from Chicago, she told me, “If you move to Chicago, I will kill myself.” Actually, it was cancer that killed her. She died with $30,000 in credit-card debt, mostly due to her love of the Home Shopping Network.

The winter of my senior year, in 2003, she offered to buy me a pair of Uggs. This was startling. My mother was a traditional Italian-American woman for whom presentation was everything and beauty meant pain—not slouchy sheepskin a la Pamela Anderson. She slept in Velcro rollers five out of seven nights, for god’s sake, and always looked like she'd stepped straight out of a Bergdorf window, even if her outfit really came from Joyce Leslie. I still remembered how the cords in her neck had twitched when I begged for stretch pants in second grade. “You wear a dress,” she'd said, hands on hips, French manicure gleaming.

But maybe she’d started to loosen up now that she was on the other side of 50, retirement in sight, only child almost done with school. Maybe she’d finally come around to the idea that I could wear what I wanted. Or maybe it was just the power of Oprah putting Uggs on her Favorite Things list. Whatever it was, yes of course I wanted the boots.

I’ve worn them for 18 straight years since. They’ve moved from my childhood home in Westchester County to apartments all over New York City and back to Westchester again, where I now live with my husband and two kids. They’ve seen me through commutes to five different jobs, including those where I was so afraid of fashion-police judgment from anyone more senior (i.e. everyone) that I’d stop a few blocks short of the office to change out of them. They've seen me through the pandemic, when no one, senior or junior, could glimpse my feet at all. At some point I stopped noticing whether they were in or out of style.

Isn’t it crazy how good they still look? Clearly this was an exceptionally well-made generation of Uggs—no version I've bought since has been so stain-resistant or shape-insistent. My mom must have picked up on their high level of quality and craftsmanship; that had to have been part of her justification for shelling out $120 on something that violated all her aesthetic sensibilities.

What else was at play for her, though, I wonder. Did she feel a change coming? I don't mean sartorially speaking (even though, yes, this was a bit of a watershed moment in fashion history, when the idea of what we now call athleisure had just begun to take hold). I'm talking about a change inside her, some early internal detection of the cancer she would be diagnosed with on the heels of my graduation.

She may have given the side eye to the comfy velour tracksuits we picked out together for her to wear to chemo. She may have plainly declared inside Loehmann's, "I hate activewear." Yet she bought me these boots. Did she foresee that they’d need exactly two feet-expanding pregnancies to eventually fit me perfectly? Who can say. All I know is that when I look down at them, I like to think they helped my mother prove to herself it would be okay to let go.

—Jessica Silvester