“I have a particular look,” Peter Nolis, 70, said about his style. He then revealed the shirt beneath his puffer jackets, which was yellow with red, horizontal stripes. “I have a huge selection,” he said. He gets them from Saint James, a brand known for its French sailor shirts. “They’re always striped,” he added.
His red puffer and red-striped shirt suggested that he might favor that color. But he characterized the shade of his jacket as coincidental. “I needed a warm coat,” he said. When he walked into a Saks Off Fifth store to buy one, he added, “the only coats that were available at the time were red.”
Sylvie Zurstrassen, 63, who was with him when our paths crossed in Lower Manhattan on a Thursday in January, then chimed in to say that he had a coffee machine and a milk frother that were also red. She added that her red Freitag bag was a gift for her 50th birthday from an older sister.
Mr. Nolis and Ms. Zurstrassen live an ocean apart — he in New York, she in Liège, Belgium — but once were much closer. “We were married for 20 years,” he said.
She corrected him: “21 years.”
These days, she comes to New York annually, he added, “and we do our usual rounds.” What has helped them to sustain their relationship? “Living 3,000 miles away from each other helps,” he said. They both laughed. “We’ve always gotten along very well,” he added.
Simbarashe Cha is a Times photographer and visual columnist documenting style and fashion around the world.
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