Dress: I like to tell a joke about how my mother, when I was a child, told me that I could be anything I wanted to be when I grew up so long as I worked hard enough. And so I said, “I want to be the Queen of England.” And she said, “Except that.” And I said, “All right, so how about Pope.”
I’m here all week. Try the veal. Tip your bartenders.
Up until the pope line, this story is true. My mother did believe in the gospel of free to be whatever you want to be and I absolutely believed I wanted to be the Queen of England, from roughly age 3 until age 9, when I decided I was either going to be a Pirate Captain or Editor of the New York Times. Then I hit adolescence and the writing thing just sort of felt like the path of least resistance. My family had been telling me I would be a writer since I was approximately old enough to remember being told anything. I liked to make up stories, sometimes even more than I liked to read them. Also words. Words are cool. I don’t remember ever thinking to myself, god, I love to write (in fact, I often felt/feel precisely the opposite). Somehow the thing you do becomes the thing you do, and it’s not like the other options—Law school? Buy a record store? History PhD?—were significantly more compelling or practical.
But there is always the road not taken. The older I get the more I think my road not taken had something to do with costume. The other half of my childhood, the other part of my life, that’s not words and books and records and puns is the dresses. I mean, look where we are. I spent so many hours drawer dresses as a child, tracing paper dolls to make clothes for them, disappearing into the hems of gowns on shopping racks, and checking out basically every book in the library on the history of clothes. When I was eleven years old, my first visit to the Metropolitan Museum, I went into the gift shop at came out with a copy of R. Turner Wilcox’s The Mode in Costume, and read it cover to cover, no less than fifty times. I drew the dresses. I imagined their construction. I wrote stories so characters would have an excuse to wear them.
The local step here would have been for me to learn to sew. This did not happen. Don’t cry for me, Balenciaga. I was an overcommitted, both over- and under-achieving adolescent who had more than enough extracurriculars to fill her hobby notebook to keep a carpool in a constant state of flow. I’m also not a perfectionist. It’s why I’m a better cook than a baker. I’d rather riff on a recipe then follow the instructions to the letter. I don’t think I have ever written a single thing in my life without at least one typo. Having to sew an even seam might just undo me.
But the part of my brain that still paws through party dresses and draws skirts in the margins of meeting notes, even now is the part of my brain that went full psychedelic love fest upon first seeing this dress. It is every dress I ever drew as a child. My grandmother even had a version of this dress made for me to play dress up in when I was five. Also this is hands down one of my all-time favorite colors.
Now I know this is where my months long tirade against the ruffles and puff sleeves starts crashing down on me. This dress is all of that taken to preposterous extreme. It is a doll dress made for human adults. It is hugely impractical. It is possibly embarrassing and infantilizing to wear this sort of thing as a woman nearing fifty. And I can’t even claim to have bought this on sale or at clearance or secondhand. I paid full price. I knew what I was getting into. Am I a hypocrite? Of course. I literally co-founded the Hypcrite’s Club at my high school. But in this dress I feel like a fucking princess.
The Outfit: The second day of our trip to Richmond began as many good days do: with trying to fit into coffins and pet the cats (not at the same time) at the Edgar Allen Poe House. We did a little wander past some street art, took in some vintage shoppin in Carytown, and managed to avoid an unfortunately timed Trump rally by going to meet my cousin, his wife, and their adorable dog at a pastoral brewery in an office park. This put us back at the hotel in just enough time to grab a quick float in the hotel pool and dress for dinner at L’Opposum, arguably my favorite restaurant south of New York City.
I was quite overdressed for dinner, but isn’t the point of a birthday dinner with a few of your best friends to be overdressed. I drank Laura Palmers (cherries, gin and vermouth in a plastic-wrapped collins glass), ate oysters (among other things), and got served a flaming Le Petit Mort as a dessert. Sublime stuff.
The next morning I felt well and truly contented and relaxed for the first time in something like six months. It wouldn’t last. It won’t last. But, like, every now and then you need to remember that you can feel a way again. Sated. Happy. Floating on a cerulean sea of ruffles.
Dress: Batsheva, 2024
Sweater: Alice+Olivia, 2022
Shoes: Madewell, 2023
Tiny Commotions 