This dress will, according to the ebay listing:

Protect pregnant women from miscarriage and potential birth defects caused by electromagnetic radiation
Protect people working in a high electromagnetic radiation environment from potential physical and mental diseases
Filter 99.99% – The highest reduction rate available
Filter within 1MHz ~ 1GHz – The widest frequency spectrum available

I hate that people are selling this nonsense and preying on hormonally unbalanced people. (At five months along I woke up in the middle of the night and nearly talked my husband into taking me to the emergency room RIGHT THEN to get a lead exposure blood test. It can get crazy. I know.) I mean, sure, don't let your fetus talk on the cell and keep yourself away from kryptonite, but really, this is a bit nuts.

Look! ACTUAL TIN FOIL! And you thought it was just the Power of Plaid that protected the Unborn!

The free tinfoil hat is a secret special offer. You need to use the special code "RUKIDDING" to get it. Don't forget!

(By the way, this is the kind of thing you get when you search for "computer dress". And I was really hoping for either 1) a dress for a computer or 2) a dress made with a computer print. And this is what I get. Sigh.)

Frankly, I'm only showing you the top of this dress because that's all you need to know. The skirt could be finished with blaze-orange pom-pom trim, and you should still want this dress. (I exaggerate only slightly.) Click on the image to go to this dress's listing on http://www.fashiondig.com, which is archaeological in the best possible way. In that "omg we found King Tut's tomb!1!!!1" way. Without any pesky curses (so far). Anyway, check it out. (The site had six pages of 1950s dresses alone!)

This particular one is B38/W30 and $75. It's hard to find a good black vintage dress in top condition — obviously, because if it's flattering at all, whoever owned it first probably wore the hell out of it. I have one that I treasure, made of a fabric so stiff it can stand on its own in Chicago winds, with velvet-trimmed pockets. I imagine that the first owner died unexpectedly immediately after purchasing it (perhaps even on the way home from the shop), and that her distraught husband kept everything exactly as she had left it for, oh, fifty-five years. Which is patently untrue, and actually kind of creepy, but that's what I like to think.

I'm sure nothing like that is involved in the backstory of this dress. I'm sure it was a freak landslide in the middle of the night that buried Miss Tammy's Frock Nook, preserving all the clothes inside perfectly until the construction of a new highway bypass brought them to the attention of FashionDig. Absolutely.

It will probably surprise no one that Roberto Cavalli wouldn't ever make my list of favorite designers. In fact, he might not even make my list of designers. Maybe if I kept a list of embellishers, he'd be on it. Or possibly a list of vandals.

Take (please!) this horrific dress, which puts the lie to "too much is never enough." "Too much" passed "enough" about three miles back, with this one. There are only three excuses for wearing this dress, and two of them involve Guantanamo Bay. The other is if you've legally changed your name to "Arabella Moonbeam Wolfchild" and insist that people call you that.

I couldn't bring myself to run the picture at full size, so if you're wearing protective glasses, click on it to go to the original site. The original retail price was $670, now on special offer for $423!

This dress is featured (for only $85!) at Glorious Vintage (click on the image to visit and see more pics of this dress). Despite having an appalling website (and I've made some appalling websites in my time, don't think I haven't), Gloria has some good stuff, like this dress, and is well worth your time. Also, she takes good pictures, which makes up for bad navigation any day of the week.

This dress is full-length, with lovely pleats and a downright antidepressant print. I almost bought some very similar, slightly-less-bright fabric last week, myself. Perhaps I can feel autumn creeping up, and am trying to hold on tight to summer with both hands? Nah, that couldn't be it. (It's too damn hot, for one thing.)

Things I love about this dress (besides the fabric): the deep vee neck; the midriff band; the long skirt; and the foofy cuffs (you'll have to go to the site to see those last two). If I were only a few inches taller, I'd pull the trigger and buy this one.

From Overstock.com, a dress that I'm on the fence about. On the plus side, really cute print; waistband; full skirt. On the minus, linen-rayon mix with actetate lining; the armholes look revealingly deep; that particular headless mannequin gives me the creeps somehow (maybe because the tight neck cords makes me think it's straining to find its head!); won't that print be way over by next summer?

Click on the link if your pluses outweigh my minuses. (I've never bought anything from Overstock.com, although I've not heard anything spine-curdling about them or their internet business practices.)

Many thanks to flea, who suggested this title! No quotation, just the very nice cover. If you click on the image you'll see the Amazon page. (I'm sure that's a HUGE surprise!)

Added to the list of things I might, someday, perhaps, when I get around to it, sew: this dress (or one very much like it, considering I don't own this pattern and instead googled for something to use as an example of the kind of thing I'm talking about.) Click on the image to go to the site, sensibility.com, which has a lot of lovely pattern images.

Anyway, you might ask, what brought this on? I bought a couple yards of grass green cotton satin fabric yesterday, that's what, down at Paron's on 40th St. They often have bolt-ends that they sell at $2/yard, and I am constitutionally incapable of passing up $2/yard fabric. I'm also invariably drawn to grass green, so my owning this fabric was more or less foreordained. I don't like to spend a lot on cotton satin, because it shows every little spot and I'm the kind of person who gestures wildly with a fork to make some Very Important Point about something or other and spatters myself with salad dressing. So there are a lot of little spots to show. This stuff is niiiiiice (it's leftovers from a Chaiken collection) and I was thinking (since I didn't have a enough for a circle skirt, more's the pity) that it would make up well as a chinoiserie-ish dress with (probably) pink satin collar piping.

The only downside of a dress like this one is NO POCKETS. The first person to solve this issue for me will receive the Dress A Day Pocket Prize for Service to Humanity.

This is what I think of when I think "1930s evening gown." The sleeves! The covered buttons! The ribbon along the bottom of the bolero! Even, I must admit, the butt-bow! (Somehow the butt-bow here isn't as shudder-inducing as it should be; this must be the source from which ten thousand unfortunate bridesmaids dresses mutated and began shuffling across the dress landscape like polyester zombies.)

Never mind that I, personally, would look like I was in (bad, fraternity-pledge-hazing) drag if I wore this — the excellence of this as an objet d'art trumps any petty concerns of mere suitability for my phenotype.

And this dress has the added thrill of being a realio-trulio mystery dress! Yes, the Drexel University Historic Costume Collection (click on the image to go there) is looking for help in sourcing this dress. Do you know who the designer is? Email them. Tell them A Dress a Day sent you. They'll have no idea what that means, but it sounds good.

Unless your personal aesthetic demands that you look like a large, slightly discolored and inexplicably gift-wrapped eggplant, I don't think this 1932 Augusta Bernard dress quite lives up to the standard of elegance that one expects from a 1930s evening gown. It's good to remember that "vintage" doesn't automatically equal "pretty."

Click on the image to visit the Francesca Galloway site, which does have some actually pretty dresses for sale. (It looks like a gallery or an auction house, not quite sure which, based in Jermyn Street.)

Lately I've been looking in vain for a dress that I know exists — a court presentation gown made by Callot Soeurs, with ludicrously extravagant ribbon embroidery. And panniers. I know it's in the Met's collection, but I can't find an image or a link online. (It's a dress I often think of when I'm feeling a bit low and want to be reminded that things can't really be that bad if that dress exists in the world. Of course, now that I CAN'T FIND IT, perhaps things really are that bad!)If anyone knows what I'm talking about, please leave a comment …

It's only a matter of time before I break down and buy a pattern from The Blue Gardenia. Sure, their patterns are a little on the pricey side, but when you want something exquisite, like this dress, and you want to be sure that all the pieces are there, you have to pay a little extra. (Blue Gardenia counts all the pattern pieces AND tells you if they've been altered.)

Check out this dress with the tucks sewn all around the skirt AND on the bodice front. This is hours and hours of tricky, tricky sewing, not to mention that it would really, I think, have to be made in silk organza, which is pricey (the pattern alone is $45!). But — doesn't it look worth it?