My alter-ego is a ballerina, I’m sure of it. I’m often making lofty, although never really real, resolutions to attend an open ballet class at my city’s beautiful ballet company school, where I was lucky to take lessons for a few very short years as a very young child, as many of you may have done in childhood years. All I can remember from those lessons is a whole lot of running around with scarves, dancing like we were “trees” in a “forest,” and pointing and flexing our toes (endlessly it seemed to my 7 year old self.)

I’m still enchanted by everything ballet-related. So I absolutely love shoots like the one this sketch is taken from, from a J. Crew catalog a few years back, in which they travelled to Russia and photographed dozens of Russian ballerinas in a woody studio clad in snowy tutus and warmly-hued, sumptuous cashmere sweaters. Magical!