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As a kid obsessed with superheroes, ANTHONY MARRA never imagined he’d see one in person.

- Anthony Marra

Who is your hero, and why?” I often find myself thinking about that question, which was first posed to me in a sixth-grade English class. Back then, I had a stacked roster to choose from: Superman, Batman, Spider-Man; any nerdy kid who’d been bitten by a radioactive bug received my unvarnished admiration. This was before Christopher Nolan and Joss Whedon turned superheroes into billion-dollar tent-pole franchises, before Alessandro Michele made geeks chic, before a generation of tech bros followed Mark Zuckerberg to Silicon Valley, back when eyeglasses were still just one notch more fashionable than hearing aids.

The contemporaneous photos still sleeved in Ritz Camera envelopes in my parents’ suburban Maryland basement depict an eleven-year-old walking prayer for early-onset puberty. It pains me to admit this in the pages of Vogue, but my signature look consisted of black Airwalk Void sneakers, cargo shorts that fell to mid-shin, and a shirt purchased in the husky department of Hecht’s (“In my day, they called it the portly section!” a salesclerk once helpfully remarked). Then there was the hair. These were the dark days when Home Improvement’s Jonathan Taylor Thomas reigned. I secretly admired his hairstyle on the covers of Tiger Beat and Bop that lined the CVS counter where I picked up my monthly regimen of allergy medicine. To mimic the JTT look, I divided my hair straight down the center. Even though I shellacked it in mousse each morning, the two halves would lift within hours. My dad, who was not particularly interested in matters of style, kindly suggested I sleep with one of my mom’s panty-hose legs pulled over my head to keep the part. Which I did, every night, for weeks.