New dress
I seem to be moving out of my broomstick-skirt epoch toward an era of crinkle-rayon dresses.
At the State Street fair on Friday I found a couple of sleeveless crinkle-rayon dresses that I could wear. Chief criterion for “dress I can wear” being “dress that suitably hides bra straps.” Every time I wander State Street’s little boutiques, I see spaghetti-strap dresses going begging. Every time. I’m telling you. When are the merchandise-buyers for these places going to learn? Some of us really do need to wear bras!
Twenty bucks apiece; I picked up a couple. The kind of long, straight lines that just so happen to look good on me, and in swank colors, too.
I don’t know why designers seem to think that long, loose lines work on skinny-minnies. They don’t. Skinny minnies get lost in them, look insubstantial. Androgynous to boyish, which I suppose is fine if that’s what you’re after. But to look good in a loose, straight dress, your body needs to add some interest to it. Mine, it just so happens, does, despite its highly unfashionable heft.
You wouldn’t know from my coworkers, though, who haven’t so much as mentioned my new dress, though they’ll squeal for fifteen straight minutes over anything new any of them wears. To be fair, it may not be fat-phobia, though they are as fat-phobic as anyone I’ve ever known. It may simply be that they’ve categorized me out of the “interested in girly stuff” category, which I can live with.
’S okay, really. The handsomest woman in this office in my not-terribly-humble opinion is also the heaviest—and no, that’s not me; believe me, I don’t compare to this woman, she’s bloody gorgeous.
And when a friend of ours picked us up to take us to Pirates of the Caribbean (a film that’s much better than it should rightly have been), the first thing he said was “Wow! What a great dress!”
Which is only surpassed by my husband’s wide-eyed “You look beautiful!” when I first tried it on.