Some women learn style from magazines. Others learn it from the women whose closets they were allowed to play in. Fashion icon Anne Hathaway happens to be one of the latter, and the story she shared with WWD made me sit a little longer with my second cup of coffee.

Inside the publication, The Devil Wears Prada 2 star talked about the first fashion piece she ever fell in love with. It wasn’t something she shopped for or saved up to buy. It was a Diane von Furstenberg wrap dress covered in tulips, and it came to her the way the best fashion memories usually do, by way of her mother. “My mom likes clothes and I have two incredibly chic grandmothers,” she told the magazine. When her mother was finished wearing an outfit, it didn’t go to the back of the closet. It went into Anne’s playbox. That tulip-printed DVF wrap dress was the one she remembers most.

There is something about that detail I cannot let go of. A little girl, wrapping herself up in her mother’s worn-in silk jersey, learning what femininity feels like before she even has the words for it. That is how style is actually passed down. Not in lectures about what looks expensive or what is on trend, but in the casual generosity of a mother who lets her daughter try on the dress. We borrow our first sense of self from the women who raised us.

Anne’s next big fashion memory came from a different kind of doorway. After she landed her first movie, “The Princess Diaries,” she bought herself a pair of leather pants from Diesel. The costume designer took her to the 3rd Street Promenade, and Anne said she had been scouting those pants for the longest time. The reason was very specific. She was, in her own words, the world’s biggest Angelina Jolie fan, and Angelina always wore leather pants. When she signed the contract on her first film, the leather pants were the reward. I love the honesty of that. Not a designer bag, but the exact thing a teenage girl had been quietly coveting because her favorite star wore it.

The longest-tenured piece in her closet came a few years later, after she wrapped “The Devil Wears Prada.” She bought herself a Rick Owens leather jacket as a quiet little ceremony, a way of marking the moment. The detail that got me is what she said next. She recently met Rick Owens in person and told him that his jacket had stayed with her all these years, and she cried. That is the part most fashion stories leave out. The clothes we keep the longest are almost never the ones we bought because they were trendy. They are the ones tied to a season of becoming. We remember who we were when we put them on.

I think about that a lot in my own closet. There are the pearls my mother handed down, and the Tory Burch flats I wore until the soles told me to retire them. Clothes hold story like few other possessions can. They sit against our skin, and they absorb the chapters we are living through quietly.

What I appreciate most about Anne’s interview is how unbothered she is by the idea of guilty pleasures. She admitted she owns more black boots than she probably needs, and when asked for a confession, she simply shrugged it off. “Nope, I just enjoy it.” There is a kind of grown-woman confidence in that line. A refusal to feel embarrassed by what brings her joy. That is the energy I want to carry into my own dressing room. The row of black tops because they make me feel like the best version of myself, and the pencil skirts because once upon a time my mother let me wear hers, and I’ll never forgot how it felt to be that little and that loved.

Style passes down in moments most of us are not even paying attention to. The way our grandmothers smelled when they hugged us. The way our mothers stood at the mirror clipping on an earring. If you are the kind of woman a little girl looks up to, let her into your closet. Put the dress in the playbox. She will remember.