"Dress shabbily, and they remember the dress. Dress impeccably, and they remember the woman." Coco Chanel
I had been composing this post in my head, when I looked at Google News and saw that fashion designer Lilly Pulitzer died today. She was famous for her way-too-expensive-for-Susan, but very beautiful dresses in riotous colors and flowery prints. What a coincidence. Or not.
Most of my wardrobe is dresses and skirts, because I really, really love them. They express who I am. When I wear them to work, I make sure the cut of the skirt is something I can move around in easily and still have a sense of modesty. There is a lot of bending and lifting and reaching involved in what I do in my day to day. Of course, I wear slacks, too, but if I had my druthers, I druther wear something more feminine. When I first began working at my store, most of the women wore dark colored pants every day; black, gray, brown, navy blue. I would show up in my skirt with tights underneath, and this new girl would get some strange looks. One of the younger women one day wore a dress with tights, and she walked up to me beaming. She said, "I thought since you wear skirts a lot, it would be okay." It was interesting because our dress code prohibits certain types of clothing (no blue jeans and no tank tops, for example) but she had thought since no one wore skirts, perhaps we weren't allowed. As the months went on, more of my colleagues began to wear dresses and skirts occasionally as well.
In America, it seems most women wear pants a majority of the time. And that's a good thing, if it expresses who they are. Certainly pants can be a very smart look on a woman. Jeans are part of the casual uniform of lots of women, and I have two pairs of jeans myself. I don't wear dresses and skirts to be different or to stand out, but that's often the result anyway. I am good with that. Maybe there is someone out there who needs encouragement to express herself more fully with her wardrobe, and maybe she'll be like my coworker, who thought that since I did it, it would be okay. Because it is.
Susan
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Just as most women will admit to strong preferences about what kinds of men's dress they like to see, I have strong preferences for women's dress. I like to see women in skirts and I love women in dresses. Which is not to say there aren't exceptions. It's hard for me to imagine, for example, Katherine Hepburn or Lauren Bacall (two women from the age of traditional fashion) in dresses more often than occasionally—their slightly challenging early adoption of pantsuits was an assertion of who they were as people, just as your choices express who you are. Maybe when you get down to it, the best look for any person is the look that says she knows who she is, and she's smart enough to know how to express it in style.
ReplyDeleteI like what you say here, Kevan.
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