Dress: This is an A-line rusty/tan jumper/sleeveless dress. These days people call this material vegan leather, which is a fancy name for pleather, kin to vinyl. I’m not snooty about artificial materials. I live in 2023. I’m not a homesteader. I can’t sew shit on shit, I’m not made of money, and I’m easily seduced by things that sparkle. It’s safe to say most of my wardrobe (rayon, nylon, acrylic, viscose, spandex, et al) has roots in a lab, and would happily to sidle up to young Dustin Hoffman at a party and have just one word for him. And it’s not just clothes either. For many years, I had a naugahyde sofa. 1 I used to say, do you know how many innocent naugas had to die to make this sofa?2 And someone would quiet and sad imagining a decimated herds of naugas until I explained the joke.
On the bonus, the dress feels a lot better than the sofa. The material is soft and supple, sitting in the shadowy borderlands between uncanny valley, unsettling mesa, and titillation glen, and printed with a faux-leather design I have now spent hours trying to work out. Is supposed to be ostrich? Alligator? Sleestak? Truly, we live in an age of mysteries.
The first time I saw the dress I was nursing a mild hangover and trying to summon up a dress for a forthcoming Christmas cocktail that didn’t look like it was trying to coax the sister wives into going out for prairie burlesque. I was comforted by the texture but also alarmed, as if I was somehow committing a crime or defying the natural order of things by touching it. Obviously, I tried it on.
The saleswoman, a trim seventy-something in leather pants, told me she thought it was flattering and looked great with my hair. “And I love things that are just a little out of the ordinary. I can tell you’re the same way.” She looked like she’d arrived in Durham, North Carolina via Witness Protection, but still held on to a list of everyone she’d done a line with in the Max’s Kansas City bathroom in summer 1973. I was flattered, even if she was just working on commission.
Blouse: This is a black jersey button-up. I don’t really like jersey button ups, unless they are pajama tops, in which case I have four (seasonal). They remind me of the stretchy button-ups of the late nineties favored by office ladies and greasy dudes in buckle shoes at Afghan Whigs shows. I had several of those (the shirts, not the dudes). My favorite was a black one from Ann Taylor, purchased for me by my mother when she decided I needed office wear. But I always wore it with vintage black polyester Wranglers and a navy suede jacket. In my head, I looked like Justine from Elastica, until a late night clerk at the fancy deli up the street from my apartment watched me swagger in one night for cigarettes and said, “Holy mother of Christmas, it’s fat lesbian Johnny Cash.” They didn’t say it like they meant it as an insult and maybe it wasn’t. (I mean, I would take it as a compliment now). But this was early 2001. I was still young enough to crumble at a judgmental sigh. And no matter how good my “Ring of Fire” joke was when I checked out, my self-confidence had been shaken. I retired the outfit.
I didn’t buy any more stretchy black button down until early 2023 when I decided to roll the dice on an online mystery box deal. I’ve struggled internally every time I try to wear since, it wondering if I look like a worst-possible version of drag Johnny Cash or a worst possible version of an Afghan Whigs fan.
Shoes: Double-strapped, stack-heeled mary janes. And because I’m old and I have destroyed my stupid body doing all the things that now require exercise and then exercising until I hurt so I’ll feel better about all the things I’ve done to myself, I can’t really wear heels anymore. These are now roughly stilettos for me.
Earrings: Molded, acrylic hexagonal hoops that cheat pale jade in the light, but are closer to the color of glow in the dark stars we stuck to the ceiling at Dad’s apartment when my parents divorced. I found these earrings at ALC, a boutique in Edinburgh on Thistle Street back in October of 2019. They were the last thing I bought on that trip (after spending much of the day looking for a very particular Parisian gin I’d been tasked with finding for a friend back in Carrboro). I saw them in the window and, for what was neither the first nor likely the last time, misread the 9 on the price tag as a 4 and by the time I figured it out (or calculated the exchange rate) I’d already handed the cashier a credit card. I’m not mad about how much I paid. These are literally among my three or four favorite pairs of earrings. When I wear them I have nothing but good memories of skittering around Edinburgh on a cool breeze through a fading October twilight.
The Outfit: I don’t know if this look gives whimsical employee of a toyshop run by a Lovecraftian abomination or “The Sound of Music: Berlin Edition,” but I like it. I liked it enough that I didn’t end up changing clothes for an art opening/holiday party on Friday night at a friend’s gallery. Would/will wear again.
· Dress: Melloday, Nordstrom, Current (Winter 2023)
· Shirt: Universal Standard, Elbe Liquid Jersey Shirt Classic
· Shoes: Madewell, Nettie Heeled Mary Jane
· Earrings: ALC, Edinburgh (October 2019)
· Tights: Sheertex, Classic Sheer Rip Resist Tights
Courtesy of Nana. Or more particularly, Nana’s bridge-playing neighbor Jocelyn, from whom I received it in 1997. Prior to that, it had lived in her Roanoke, VA basement rec room since the Eisenhower Administration. As relic of the Cold War, I’m pretty sure it had been engineered to survive nuclear Armageddon. It was an indestructible midcentury bastard that weighed approximately two blue whales, six elephants, and a live, chonky brontosaurus, which every sorry soul who ever offered to help me move it (approximately six times, about 23 flights of stairs total) through 2004-ish will attest. It ended up at a UNC fraternity house, where, unless it was burned on Franklin Street after a Duke game (and I am not at all sure you could burn that thing) it likely still remains.
The upholstery was a grayed-out mauve/taupe with a texture that stopped about five galaxies far, far away from anything resembling “found in nature.” If you sat on it with legs you’d rise to find its burn scar-adjacent pattern branded into your skin. I once fell asleep on it and the left side of my face looked like the Phantom of the Opera’s for just long enough that I considered investing in a pipe organ. But who am I kidding? When have I not considered investing in a pipe organ?
Tiny Commotions 