“The piece I most love wearing is Mother's gold brocade cocktail dress with matching jacket... It's 'flip and flirty,' as my mother prescribed. It's crisp yet splendid. It makes me feel I've put on made-to-order armor. My mother's armor. Armor that helped shield me from exclusion. Armor that helped shield me from inferiority.”

American writer and academic

Margo Jefferson is an American writer, academic, and journalist known for her criticism. She was writing for The New York Times from 1993 and received the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 1995. Her work has also appeared in Vogue, New York Magazine, The Nation, and Guernica. She is known for cultural criticism and essays that move across literature, art, and public life.