Piper Weiss’ fascination with mom’s stylish heydays lands her a book deal

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The founder of My Mom, the Style Icon, a blog that’s dedicated to retro fashions and the everyday women wearing them, recently signed on with Chronicle Books. The book is slated to be published in 2011. The New Yorker’s website features enviable mod frocks along with fabulous bouffants and beehives. Viewers can browse by decade, get that look or hair-story.

Piper Weiss, 31, first began regularly updating the website in October. Now she receives more than 100 submissions a month.

Unlike other photo-driven blogs that have landed book deals, such as Regretsy, whose tagline is “Handmade? Looks like you made it with your feet,” My Mom, the Style Icon celebrates individuals rather than poking fun at them.

Weiss credits much of the blog’s success to its positive nature. She also says the idea of moms as icons is refreshing and easy to relate to.

“I hate to say it but I’m kind of sick of Audrey Hepburn or Grace Kelly as a style icon.... Even models of today, I don’t care and I don’t understand how I’m supposed to be like that,” Weiss says. But, she explains, she is going to rifle through her mom’s closet.

Part of the draw to the blog, Weiss explains, is the realization that comes in your 20s and 30s: that even though during your teenage years you wanted nothing to do with your mother, now your parents are not that bad. Actually they are kind of cool.

“It’s an interesting life turning point,” Weiss says.

One favorite submission is a photograph of a mom doing the twist at a dance party in 1967 Moscow. The image was taken when Western music was outlawed in the Soviet Union, so teenagers had to go to an underground party to do the twist. The daughter, Dasha Oganezov, writes: “The clothes are typical, but it’s worth noting that both the shirt and the skirt were handmade by my grandma.’

The blog spans all decades with submissions from all over the world.

“I’ve gotten a bunch of really good memorial tributes, you know, beautiful moms… where the focus is of celebrating what she was like as a person and not even as a mom but as someone who was stylish and had fun, and lived a really full life,” Weiss says.

There’s also a section called Not your father, which features moms with what Weiss refers to as “the unidentified male.” The images are often gangly men looking dotingly at the stylish lady next to them.

What have the subjects thought of their Internet presence?

“Surprisingly, the moms that have been posted on there love it. I’ve only gotten, ‘My mom’s a huge fan,’” Weiss says.

But her biggest fan, and muse, remains Weiss’ own stylish mother Marilyn.

--Sophia Kercher