When I was little, I had Barbie dolls that I could dress. I also had paper dolls, which were always given to me by my grandmother. I can’t remember when I last saw a little girl with paper dolls. Like origami, are paper dolls one of those lost amusements of the 1970s?
I have some. I bought them for Iz. Really, I did!
Has she played with them yet? No. But, she can…when she’s 42 and won't rip them!
Anyway, when I grew up, I realized how much more fun it was to dress myself than a doll. Like paper dolls, I found that “dress up” wasn’t just for little girls. You could be a big girl and enjoy it just as much, especially with old clothes out of someone else’s closet or attic (read “vintage”)!
Clothes are inevitable. They are nothing less than the furniture of the mind made visible.
~James Laver, Style in Costume
As you all know from yesterday’s post, I am in a bit of a quandary over what to wear to my 30th high school reunion. As I said to one friend, the problem is not that “I have nothing to wear!” The dilemma is that I have to many dresses that I could wear.
When in doubt, wear red.
~Bill Blass
I was talking to Melissa today. She came up with the idea of asking you, my readers, which dress you thought I should wear. While I felt it was a good idea, I also felt that I had to take one of her blog suggestions sooner or later.
She last suggested I write a blog about some dude who spends all day pushing a rock up a hill only to have it roll back down, so he has to do it all over again the next day. Of course, I like to think I can make anything interesting like inanimate objects wearing pearls. I had complained about picking up the house, and she thought the rock dude story could morph into something about how it feels to pick up other people’s messes day after day (read “motherhood”).
Dresses for breakfasts, and dinners, and balls;
Dresses to sit in, and stand in, and walk in;
Dresses to dance in, and flirt in, and talk in;
Dresses in which to do nothing at all;
Dresses for Winter, Spring, Summer, and Fall.
~William Allen Butler, "Nothing to Wear"
So, let’s begin. Pretend I’m your paper doll, although the only place I’m really flat is in my chest! Ponder the outfits below, which are shown with coordinating shoes and purse, and then vote (scroll down to the very bottom of my blog) for the dress you think I should wear. And, I have more dresses to choose from, but I choose not to tell you how many more! ♥
Our clothes are too much a part of us for most of us ever to be entirely indifferent to their condition: it is as though the fabric were indeed a natural extension of the body, or even of the soul.
~Quentin Bell
China Girl
On the subject of dress almost no one, for one or another reason, feels truly indifferent: if their own clothes do not concern them, somebody else's do.
~Elizabeth Bowen
The Rose
Fashion is architecture: it is a matter of proportions.
~Coco Chanel
Black or White
All women's dresses, in every age and country, are merely variations on the eternal struggle between the admitted desire to dress and the unadmitted desire to undress.
~Lin Yutang
Black Velvet
Where's the man could ease a heart
Like a satin gown?
~Dorothy Parker, "The Satin Dress"
Gold Digger
The dress must not hang on the body but follow its lines. It must accompany its wearer and when a woman smiles the dress must smile with her.
~Madeleine Vionnet
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