A picture might be worth a thousand words, but Adena Halpern believes that clothes are worth even more. Her first book, Target Underwear and a Vera Wang Gown (Penguin, $25), is a collection of humorous vignettes about the clothes that shaped the woman she has become today. Expanding on the regular columns she wrote for Marie Claire magazine ("The Haute Life"), the book is filled with quips about how her diminutive height forced her to forever walk in 6-inch heels, how she was the original mastermind behind girls wearing men's boxer shorts, and how she once splurged on a $4,000 Vera Wang dress to comfort herself after a bad breakup. And it is that infamous gown that first sparked the idea for her columns, which then led to the memoir. "When I sold the gown, I regretted it to this day," says Halpern. "I decided to write about the sadness that I felt for having lost that dress and what it had meant to me. It gave me the idea to look at my closet, my friends' closets, and you know, falling in love with a boy because of a jacket he wore." Halpern, who grew up on the Main Line, says her favorite places to shop in the area were Suburban Square, South Street ("the coolest place") and Mooshka, in Ardmore; today, she likes upscale Rittenhouse boutique Plage Tahiti, where — until recently — she could never afford to shop. Although she holds a degree in screenwriting, she finds it "so much more technical than journalism. But if someone came to me and said, 'We'd like to make your book into a movie, would you like to write the screenplay?' — yeah, I'd be the first person to do it!" The book isn't just about a spoiled woman who complains that the six-carat diamond on her engagement ring is "too big" — it is infused with heartfelt moments of sorrow, tenderness and introspection. She says that her book is ultimately just "a love story," because "it's about the people I love and what they wore. And everyone can relate to that."