Editor’s Note: Julia Reed’s new book, The House on First Street, is now available! Click here to check it out.

I have a whole rack in my closet full of clothes I do not wear — mostly they serve as reproaches because I can no longer fit into them. One pair of Anne Klein (yes! Anne Klein from the Donna Karan/Louis Dell’Olio days) cognac silk pants I haven’t put on my body since I was maybe 22, but I keep thinking, "one day …"

But there are a few I simply can’t part with: First, a thin, thin cotton floral-print Cacharel dress with a tight bodice, a back cut to the waist and a mid-calf knife-pleated skirt. It is still so chic I can’t stand it. I bought it when I was 13 and working at Hafter’s department store in downtown Greenville, MS, sweeping the floor in the "receiving room," recording all the clothes "in the book" as they came in and then putting the price tags on them. (I never answered the question about the best job I ever had, but this was unquestionably it.) The most stylish woman I have ever known ran the place — her name was Lib and she was tall and angular and she wore Detchema as her scent and shoes from the great old Henri Bendel shoe department and Cartier brooches on her lapel and she smoked Tareytons from a tortoiseshell holder. Anyway, I was going to the wedding of a man on whom I had a mad crush (I was 12 when crush came over me and he was 22) and I really wanted to make him sorry and Lib advised me to buy this dress. So I spent my entire summer’s wages and then she helped me get some Charles Jourdan snakeskin sandals (sent on the bus from her shoe man at Neiman Marcus in Dallas) and I’m pretty sure the man in question didn’t notice me, but I heard grown women admiring my getup and I am pretty sure I haven’t looked that good since. So the dress hangs as a shrine of sorts.

So does a blue and pale yellow madras shirt that belonged to the first man I actually fell in love with (as opposed to having a crush on). I was 16 and he was almost twice as old (this is why I hope my mother doesn’t read these answers) and drove a yellow Volkswagen bus and had lived in Jamaica and that shirt still reminds me so palpably of him that I can see him in it like he’s actually standing in front of me, which might well be dangerous.

There is also a Bill Blass coat made of a Brunschwig and Fils cotton leopard-print upholstery fabric that I wore every day for a year over black leggings and a black cashmere sweater. The shoulders are too wide now and it looks as worn as it was, but it reminds me of Bill and how much I adored him. The last time I saw Pat Buckley before she died, we both talked about how much we loved that coat.