This blog request was actually for me to “Describe the perfect dress,” but I’m altering it slightly. Why I like a dress is something impacted by many different things: body image, socio-economic class, generational styles, ethnicity. So, my perfect dress isn’t likely to be someone else’s.
Still, yes, it’s a full-skirted dress in a nice, breathable fabric like cotton or linen, with the waist tight at about belly-button height and the hem just below the knee, so that I can comfortably sit without my bare thighs touching the seat, with pockets. Oh, in a bright color or fun pattern.
Exhibit A, The TammyW Dress in Cherries, size XL (US 12-ish? 32-inch waist), by Bernie Dexter.
(Bernie Dexter’s stuff almost NEVER goes on sale. Which is why I only have two of her dresses, this one and the rocketship print one. Consider donating to my feeding the stalkers fund to help me buy more!)
I have “a look” these days. I’ve even been complimented on “branding” myself well, but it wasn’t a conscious branding choice, it was simply the clothes I felt most comfortable in.
This all starts with being teased mercilessly. I was teased for my clothes all through my childhood. Called “Goodwill girl” or simply told I didn’t know how to dress.
I was also constantly told I was fat, despite, well, not being fat? Especially in high school. Gosh, I was something like 130 pounds? I wore a size 8? Yet all the bullies at school and my dad and my older sister constantly told me how ENORMOUS I was. I considered dressing in loose clothes to hide my hdeous body, but when I did that, I thought it made me look fatter. The only solution I could see were full skirts to hide my butt and hips, which were the most obvious origin of my hugeness, being the only part of me actually on the big side. So I naturally leaned toward fit-and-flare types of clothes.
I had yet to find fit-and-flare dresses, however. Though I was more comfortable in skirts, I primarily wore blue jeans and t-shirts for lack of other options. I was teased for my clothes into my early professional life. I was told I dressed too “blue collar” too “casual” and “not professional enough.” I went to Sears and spent money I didn’t have on suit-dresses I didn’t like. This didn’t stop the criticism. I was miserable, uncomfortable in the polyester fabrics, and still getting scolded for wearing the wrong shoes or daring to wear socks instead of hose.
(I could write a whole other blog post on Why I Wear Socks, but the more I think about it, this is also a class issue. I come from a background of Only One Pair of Shoes, and if you wear the same shoes every day, socks are just good hygiene.)
Working as an IT technician, my co-workers all wore jeans and polo shirts. My co-workers were all men. When I wore jeans, I was told it wasn’t professional enough. When I wore skirts, I was asked how I could do my job in them.
By the time I’d reached 40, it felt like there simply wasn’t a way I could ever dress and be taken seriously. But two glorious things happened at once to free me: I got a better job, and I discovered ModCloth.
When I started working as a software developer, suddenly I had a private cubicle and fewer people were talking about how I dressed. (I still got pulled aside by my boss a couple times about hem length neckline height, easy things to correct for.) I was making decent money, and so when I found an online company that was selling really cute dresses, I was able to afford taking a chance on them.
And the dresses FIT. And looked cute! I decided that, since no one would ever approve of the way I dressed no matter how hard I tried, I’d start to dress just to please me.
For the first time in my life, I was shopping for clothes not because “ugh I have no pants I need to buy a pair” but because I wanted to. It was hard at first. I’d been raised not to buy things for myself. One dress a year, I told myself, or one when I sell a short story. Or a novel.
Then, of course, I got comfortable spending money on myself and there’s been no turning back.
The crown jewel of my collection is my vintage 1950s nylon petticoat, which I purchased at The Cleveland Flea for $45. I dithered at the time. That’s a lot of money for USED CLOTHING, but my husband pointed out, “Really, it’s a bargain; you’ll get so much use out of it!”
He wasn’t wrong. I wear that thing CONSTANTLY, and now when I shop for dresses, I am particularly looking for ones that will fit with my petticoat. And having the vintage petticoat and the vintage-style dresses, of course I picked up cats-eye glasses, vintage hats, and gloves! Oh, how I love a nice pair of kid gloves. I became That Vintage Gal. (Vlog)
I ended up with quite the closet. It helps that I haven’t changed size too much, all in all, ignoring those two years or so I was a stick because of Crohn’s disease. (I packed a lot of my clothes away those years in hope, and mostly wore hand-me-downs from my mother-in-law.)
Now my problem is I have to STOP MYSELF from buying all the fit-and-flare retro 50s dresses I see. It’s bad for the planet, and I have to admit there’s a time limit on how much use I’ll get out of any dress these days. I’m not 100% sure how this will all look on grey-haired me.
But there you have it. Somehow, a lifetime of criticism and body-shaming have crammed me into the New Look, and I couldn’t be happier here.
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