Dress: This is a boat-neck, Empire-waisted maxi dress with a high slit and long frilled sleeves. The fabric is kin to chiffon and in metallic gold polka-dotted fuchsia/coral/orange/black print that falls squarely in the psychedelic art deco camp. The dress is not even only a couple of years old, so not vintage by any reasonable measure, but it feels like a circa-1970 something that might have ended up in my dress-up chest when I was little. A relic of Mom’s college formals or (as a kid, I ran around in several flavors of cast off in several varieties of Mom’s discarded orange/fuchsia tulle and organdy), or maybe something released from Nana’s walk-in storage closet with the high rack of evening gowns, whose hems floated over me as I dreamed myself into them as a little girl.
I bought this dress off a website in summer of 2022 with the intention of wearing it to my yet-unborn nephew’s elaborate baby shower. I felt like that event would likely involve a lot of baby blue gift swaddles, pastel balloons, and highly appropriate, likely gender-essentialist petit-fors, and as such, someone would need to bring the gin and her Auntie Mame A-game, even if I couldn’t accessorize with a cigarette holder. I liked the overdressed for late summer maxi dress vibes, as well as the slit that just dared someone to call it a muumuu.
But as the shower approached and the late July temperatures coasted into a Hell’s Waiting Room, I realized I would be spending the shower outside, during the warmest part of the day and perhaps long-sleeved chiffon would leave me a sweaty puddle and/or make me lose the remaining shards of my will to live. So, I went with option B, a less glamorous sundress, conventionally pastel, but printed in what looked like a New Yorker cartoonists version of the Amalfi Coast. So that was something. Also there was a hat. A hat just large enough I believed it might qualify as camp. So mission accomplished
This dress however went back in the closet, as I tried to find an event to justify it. I wore it to my birthday party in February of 2023, which was close, but not quite. But then I found myself invited to a gala with a black and white dress code. I don’t with dress codes. I never have with dress codes. This predates high school. It feels ingrained into my DNA. Maybe it’s some kind of inherited thing. I mean, science now supports the idea that ancestral trauma might, like, have a part in my health make-up. Did a great-great-great grandmother’s famine survival explain why I was never able to fit in those 1989 era skinny jeans? Cool, then it was maybe a distant fashionable forefather’s brazen flouting of sumptuary laws (and subsequent punishment for it) that informs why I’m wearing hot pink sequins and feathers to your white linen party, Denise.
Shoes: Sometimes in the darkest month of the darkest year of a global pandemic that leaves you stuck in your house for untold months of lonely longing for things like parties and seeing people’s noses in the wild, you get served an Instagram ad for straight up open-toe gold disco platforms and you think, well, shit, I wish I could wear those but I’m sure they’re uncomfortable. And then you not that they are made by a comfort shoe brand you associate with middle aged middle-management pumps, and then you realize you have become sort of a middle-aged, middle-management pumps sort of person no matter how badly you kind of want to dress like you’re in “Desperately Seeking Susan” all the time, and actually these shoes might be the exact thing you need. So you order them. Then they sit in your closet for almost three years.
Turn out, they are, in fact, comfortable. And evidently, I have enough muscle memory from the last time I wore platform shoes all the time (93-99, roughly) that I can still convey my unwieldy self around on them. The shoes put me over six feet. I used to feel weird about being so much bigger—both height and width– than other people, and other women in particular. Like, I was some grotesque giant, clumsy and awkward, towering over boys, struggling over my own mass, and not at all the graceful, delicate fairy princess I associated with all things feminine. The platform revival of the earl nineties sort of helped me get over myself. And given that I am foiled by gravity, I did okay with the bonus five inches or so (even if I did take a few infamous tumbles. Down the chapel stairs. Up a couple of fire escapes. All the way down the marble stairs in the lobby of the Boston MFA on Black Friday 1997). I sustained only minor injuries (mostly to my pride), but I think I looked fabulous.
Earrings: A favorite boutique in Asheville—Minx—keeps an ever-changing selection of inexpensive earrings on a shuttered door propped up on the wall beside the cash register. I am nearly incapable of leaving the store without a pair. I have an old leather-bound copy of The Golden Bough I retrieved from my grandfather’s library shelf after Nana died. These earrings look like the gilt decoration on the cover.
Outfit: I believe this outfit was an unqualified success. I breezed around the fundraiser bidding on things. My favorite was the $25 Surprise Wine Bag (the surprise was that it was a bottle of vodka). I spent a lot of time laughing with my fellow table mates and trying not to make eye contact with the guitar player in the cover band, who kept running up on people with his wireless guitar. Money was raised for an extremely good cause. I managed to keep the shoes on until the afterparty. I will absolutely 100% wear it all again.
Dress: The Odells, 2002
Shoes: Aerosoles, 2021
Earrings: Minx, Asheville, 2017ish
Tiny Commotions 