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CLOTHES MAKE THE WOMAN, AND A PARTY DRESS IS MADE TO BE WORN OUT

November 19th, 2011 Leave a comment Go to comments

The beautiful pink silk party dress is a delightful memory. It didn’t last long, two or three outings at the most. A pen forgotten in a shirt pocket at the dry cleaner burst open and ruined it, leaving me without the dress that was made for me.

I had found it at Horne’s one holiday season when I was in full-frantic search mode for a new dress for the office Christmas party. It was the last one in my size and it was on sale. I think I used up about five years of real good shopping luck finding it. Today, I don’t remember that party or any of the other ones I went to wearing the dress. I just remember how pretty it made me feel and part of that feeling was because my husband adored it, too.

“Oh boy,” he’ll say, always with a smile, when we talk about it. “Was that dress ever made for you.” My dad said the same thing some 40 years ago about a party dress he bought for my mom.

They were living in Washington, D.C., and Mom says the dress was bought partly as kind of a pick-me-up for her after her second pregnancy. She and Dad went to Garfinkel’s couturier room, picked out a few dresses for Mom to try on and when she put on the blue dress, Dad’s eyes lit up. “That’s the one,” he said.

They paid an outrageous price for it, Mom remembers. Like $75. It’s a beautiful dress, with a deep blue paisley design on a black background. It has slim shoulder straps, fits snug at the waist and flares out in a swirly, gored skirt. A black crinkle slip attached to the lining gives the skirt a flirty lift.

Mom says she wore the dress to a few dances, and probably to a New Year’s Day reception given by the commanding officer at Walter Reed Medical Center. I bet she looked fabulous in it. Mom has great legs and it’s just the kind of style that would show them off. Later, she got a small jacket, black with matching blue lining, to wear with the dress on cool evenings.

That pretty memory-maker is hanging in my closet now. Mom’s having the house she and my dad lived in for 24 years remodeled extensively, so she’s moved out for the summer. That meant storing furniture and sifting through attic and closet, rediscovering the accumulations of a lifetime of marriage and raising children. Baby clothes and old sewing patterns, photographs and home movies, Dad’s favorite ties and his old, cracked doctor’s bag. Lots of things were said goodbye to, lots of things were kept. The blue dress was not to be parted with, so Mom gave it to me.

I haven’t tried it on yet, so I don’t know if it fits. I hope it does, though, because I’d like to wear it to a party someday. If it doesn’t fit, I will love having it anyway. I look at it and imagine my parents, Mom in the blue dress and Dad maybe in his rarely worn Army dress blues, out on an evening in the 1950s for a dance or a cocktail party. She says she doesn’t really remember any particular evening that she wore it, just that she loved it because it was pretty. And because Dad loved it on her, too.  

With the addition of the blue dress, my party frock collection I think has become overstocked. I just don’t go to enough of them, but sometimes you see a dress and you just have to have it. That practical inner voice that’s supposed to say, “Where in the world are you going to wear it?” never speaks up in the presence of some fluffy glad rag draped invitingly on a department store mannequin or extolled in deep purple prose in the J. Peterman catalog.

Too many party dresses is not a crisis of any kind. But, if you believe that things you own should be used according to their purpose – otherwise it’s kind of silly to have them – then maybe it’s time for me to learn to throw an elegant party, or for my husband to take me out to swanky places a lot more often. That way, my dresses can get out more.

I think I’ll make him take me out more often. Throwing an elegant party seems a little intimidating. We saw quite the fashion show on our most recent date, actually. We were having a drink at the Westin William Penn last Friday when pretty girls in piled-up hairdos and long dresses started floating in for their high school prom.

I was surprised to see so many of them dressed in white, like brides going to their weddings. Maybe the prom is a practice-run for some girls.

One unusual girl in sequined red blazed by; another girl, very tall, wore a sparkly gold dress with lots of straps and a long slit in back. She looked uncomfortable, I thought, standing with her shoulders slightly hunched and shifting constantly on her high heels.

Also in the lobby was a gaggle of younger girls, still in that long-legged, coltish stage and utterly enthralled by these proceedings. It was almost as much fun watching them giggle and whisper at the prom parade as it was watching the big girls glide past.

Still, the golden girl’s embarrassed posture explained perfectly to me why sometimes a dress you don’t plan for, one you find by serendipity, is always going to be the more memorable one. My sense is that buying a prom dress is like picking a swimsuit for a beauty pageant. It’s too competitive, too much something other people are going to judge you on. (I should confess to a little prom envy, I suppose. I never went to one. My husband drove home 150 miles after a track meet to go to his, though, and he’s told me many times I really didn’t miss anything.)

Mom also remembers that once or twice a year, her mother would make the trip from Oakmont to Duquesne to spend a week making dresses for her own mother. The dress pattern was always the same, demure with long sleeves, snug collar and a belt of the same fabric as the dress. Great-grandma favored lavender and pink; she also had one black silk dress to wear to church, since she was a widow.

There were no party clothes. But the dresses had long, useful lives. When they became thin from wearing and washing, they were cut up and the pieces made into quilts. Mom found a few of those old quilts, too, in her attic. Time hasn’t treated them quite as kindly as it has the blue dress. There are water and rust spots and holes and torn stitches. But they still have that magic feel of the fabric of memory.

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