I’m in the middle of Patti Smith’s memoir Just Kids, about her early days in New York City. She manages to bring the era of Andy Warhol, Janis Joplin, the Chelsea Hotel, and the New Wave to pulsating life.

She and her boyfriend, Robert Mapplethorpe, are broke (yet striving) artists, living in lofts without toilets and debating whether to eat dinner that night or buy art supplies. When they want to get away from it all, they take the subway to Coney Island for a day of hot dogs, freaks, and photo booths.

And through it all, she describes her outfits in keen, proud detail. She is so effortlessly cool, that I wanted to see if her outfits could translate to today. I think they totally do.

This is what she’s wearing (her East of Eden outfit) when she stumbles into her local bar to find Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane, and their respective bands sitting at tables, all on their way to Woodstock. “At that moment I was still a gangly twenty-two-year-old book clerk, struggling simultaneously with several unfinished poems.”

She has a few uniforms that she wears to Max’s, a bar where Andy Warhol’s Factory artists hang out in a cozy back room. I thought the stripe shirt and red scarf would be a little too on point, so I added a patterned scarf instead.

“My take on Audrey Hepburn in Funny Face…” included a black sweater, tights, white socks, and black Capezios.  “Whatever the scenario, I usually needed about ten minutes to get ready.”

On an Indian summer day, she sets out from the Chelsea Hotel to do laundry wearing “an old cotton dress, wool stockings, and a thick sweater, and headed toward Eighth Avenue.”

To her first black tie affair, she scraps a floor length dress in order to look like “a tennis player in mourning.”

At the party, Fernando “took my hand and immediately led me to the dance floor. Being from South Jersey, I was now in my element. The dance floor was mine.”

Don’t you kind of want to recreate all of these?