This week's Carnival of the Couture is hosted by Style Graduate, and the question is:

For this week's Carnivale, I want to know what runway look you would wear as a Halloween costume. And no cheating; it has to be an outfit actually sent down a runway by a designer! So go forth, fashion bloggers, and find photos of your costumes!

I checked the rules VERY carefully, and nothing says you can't use Alexander McHenry! (Or Galliano, either, that would make it much too difficult.) So, I present to you my runway outfit/costume for Halloween: Quarterback in the Lingerie Bowl, in a uniform designed by the Rev. Howard Finster.

This is the Pink Team's uniform, of course. If you click on the image you'll find what the Blue Team's uniform looks like, too.

It's a shame this was from the Spring 2005 show and is no longer in production, because I would TOTALLY wear this for Halloween. It would certainly top my previous favorite Halloween costume, which was "Bond Girl" — I made a silver satin mod-style dress and carried a toy M-16 spray-painted silver. (That was also the year Mr. Dress A Day went as J. Edgar Hoover — he had a brush cut, and he wore wingtips, hornrims, a fedora, and … an orange polka-dot dress. Genius.)

My next choice was "Mad Max Beyond Glasgow":

It's the duck's guts!

I thought the deer-head print dress was going to be the weirdest print we'd see for a while, but then Lisa sent me this one yesterday. This is just a cute little halter dress with matching bolero (I'm showing the bolero picture, because the buttons are so adorable), right?

Check out the close-up view of the pattern:

This would be the perfect dress to wear to a cryptozoology conference, don't you think? Imagine the fun you could have — people could have Bigfoot sightings while they were talking to you! (If actual cryptozoologists want to jump in here and let me know which unattested hominid species this fabric might be portraying, I'd be interested to hear your theories.)

There must be a lost episode of "In Search of …" that deals with these fun guys, right? I'm sure it was slotted to run right between the ones on Jack the Ripper and Loch Ness. Lots of stock footage of Pacific islands, shot from the air, while Nimoy's voiceover intimates that IF these guys existed, THIS would be EXACTLY the kind of island they'd be running amuck over.

The dress itself has some slight flaws, but nothing like what you'd expect, considering the original owner probably had to flee the island in terror. Click on the image to check out the eBay auction. It's 34/28/40, and has a BIN price of $199. Well, a price in dollars of $199 — what price you will pay for angering the ancient gods by wearing this has yet to be determined.

I don't usually start out by showing you the back of a dress, but the back of this dress is the whole point. Look at that–I don't even know what to call it! Tail? Peplum? Bustle? Whatever it is, it's 100% pure drama, and not the bad online-journal kind.

Even better, this dress is up for auction by HousingWorks (thanks, Margaret, for the link!) the NYC charity that works to provide housing and services for homeless people living with HIV and AIDS. They have several thrift stores in NY, and run the Housing Works Used Bookstore and Cafe (where, incidentally, I will be June 11th for the Literary Magazine Festival–show up to browse the hundreds of literary magazines on sale for $2, all proceeds go to Housing Works! Wear a dress and I'll give you a free pen.)

Back to the dress. The label is "Bernard Perris, Paris" and its measurements are given as "28 waist, 32 shoulders, 32 bust, 38 hips, 35 length" which seems suspiciously small in the bust for a dolman-sleeved dress, especially compared to the hip measurement (you'd expect at least at 34 or 36 inch bust) but stranger things have happened. Bidding right now is at $116.50, not at all bad for a dress this interesting! Go click on the image to see the front of the dress and views of the cuffs and underside of the peplum.

I have to say I'm fascinated by this design element, and I am not even a big fan of the sheath-and-overskirt look. It just seems so fun to wear! I can see someone in this dress at a crowded party, laughing, drink in hand, and every time she moves that peplum flares out and flashes white. Can't you? Is it going to BE you?

I'm sorry, did I not say that loud enough? I said, NO CULOTTES! I swear, culottes are the work of the Devil. And I don't want to hear any guff about riding bicycles or horses or whatnot — a real lady can ride a bicycle in an actual skirt, not some bastardized waste of fabric designed to bunch where things shouldn't bunch and split where things shouldn't split.

I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but someday I think we'll find out that the same secret Trilateral Commission/Knights Templar/Elks Club-type group is responsible for culottes, carob, that guy you always think is Bill Paxton but isn't, corn syrup, David Blaine, and the vice-presidency, and that only by refusing to wear culottes will we manage to thwart their evil plan. And you know it's evil if it involves culottes.

In fact, I'm wondering if some misguided misogynist too chicken to show off his spindly shanks in a Utilikilt (guys: if you have the legs for this, it is a "do"–except not the leather one, eeewwww), in some fit of rage, designed the culotte. "If I can't wear a skirt, no one can!" (Cue evil laughter, the kind that ends up in an asthmatic coughing fit, and a "no, no, really, I'm okay, I just need a sip of water.")

You know, the lesson of the culotte is this: be what you are. If you're a skirt, embrace the skirtiness of your essential being. If you're a pair of pants — deal with it. Don't be straddling that pants/skirt fence. Don't be a sartorial mugwump. Choose a side, dammit! (The culotte does not have a side. It is all middle.)

(I'm very tempted to buy this pattern from eBay, just to make sure no one makes it. Like those police programs where they trade baseball tickets for guns. And, did you notice how none of the women in the illustrations have a direct gaze? Do you know why? Shame over being forced to wear culottes, that's why. Shame.)

So, one more time for the cheap seats: NO CULOTTES!

Herewith another dress from the annals of advertising, this one sent by Rose (not a vegetable, a flower!) from the NYT. (Click on the image to read the story.) Seems that Wishbone salad dressing wanted dresses made from … salad, and Chris March, a costume designer, made their wish(bone) come true. (Let's leave aside, for the moment, that the product being promoted is a SPRAY SALAD DRESSING. I hope it works like spray paint, not just looks like spray paint, because the idea of kids buying salad dressing to use for tagging just makes me so happy I can't stand it.)

I have to say, this is much much better than the Celestial Seasonings dress, and, if I had access to, say, several hundred pounds of discarded silk vegetables? I would be making something similar. (C'mon, do you think someone who gushed over this dress would balk at taking it to the next level?)

I love the overlapping lettuce leaves on the skirt — the bodice, I'm more "eh" on. Also, I don't think you should mix velvet and lettuce … charmeuse would have been a better choice. Velvet is a winter fabric, and vegetables are definitely summer.

Actually, I'd love to make a turnip dress, with a frilly green collar, deep red-purple at the shoulders, and shading to white at the bottom. And then I would walk around all day holding my breath, waiting for someone to "get it". Do people even eat turnips anymore? I mean, aside from effete baby ones? Me, I love a good turnip.

Okay, to sum up: Promotional dresses are good press and make nice blog entries. Don't mix velvet and lettuce. Question: Who eats turnips?

This is from La Redoute, which I haven't checked for a while. I went there because I was starved for a summer dress that wasn't completely sleeveless, and I figured–aha! The French, they would understand that the woman of a certain age, ahem, perhaps would want a dress of a more mature sensibility, without sacrificing any allure.

This one isn't entirely besleeved, and it has about a football field's worth of décolleté in the front, but, c'mon, you have to admit it's really gorgeous — not "cute," but gorgeous. It also comes in black, but I think it's more unexpected in this deep blue. I think you could wear it with cream-colored wedge espadrilles, or nice flat brown leather sandals, and be chic either way. I don't like the ribbon around her neck, and I do understand that the picture makes it seem as if the guy behind her is frog-marching her to what must be either an amusement park or an interrogation chamber (not clear from the look on her face). I like the voile trim around the neck, and the fact that it seems to be a generous wrap, not a stingy one. There's nothing worse than a stingy wrap.

Did I mention that it's $39.99? No? Well, it is. And to maximize your shipping dollar, La Redoute also has really cute shoes.

I was sent two books to review a couple of weeks ago, which is not that unusual, really — I'm often sent books for review, it's just that they have titles like Situations and Individuals, not like Some Like It Haute. (Although, Colleen from MIT, if you are reading this, I really am planning to review Situations and Individuals, mostly because I desperately want to know what "His subsequent argumentation provides a unified semantics for the donkey anaphoric and bound and referential uses of pronouns" means.)

Ahem. So, as I was saying, I was sent two books to review. The first was Some Like It Haute , which I was looking forward to — it's about a fashion writer! in Paris! for the shows! — but which I was disappointed by. I was hoping for something like a fashion Dick Francis, one of my fave mystery writers. Although Francis was a jockey and all his books have something, more or less, to do with racing, he made a point of researching other things (like wineselling, small plane piloting, and glassblowing) and having his stories develop naturally from what he learned about those things. You read one of those and you ingest an awful lot of fascinating facts, painlessly. (Plus all of his heroes are Competent Calm Men, which I have a weakness for.) Unfortunately, Haute's author, Julie K.L. Dam, is no Dick Francis. Her fashion references could have been made with anyone with access to six months' of Harper's Bazaar, and the plot has all the emotional resonance of an episode of Scooby-Doo, and about the same amount of "wacky" coincidences. Plus, the heroine blows off her work for a guy! I know, I know, the focus of chick lit is not the job of the chick, but if you are going to make the entire setup of the meet-cute the chick's job, you might want to have her take it SERIOUSLY.

So it was with some trepidation that I took up
Finishing Touches, another example of the genre. That trepidation was entirely unwarranted. Finishing Touches is a touching, real story–a good old-fashioned STORY story, one that doesn't rely on the wacky, or the dropping of brand names so relentlessly that you expect Jimmy Choo to share the copyright. I have so little time for pleasure reading that I want to spend my book time with the same sort of people that I'd like to spend real time with–interesting, human people, not people who might as well be Pez dispensers, full of barely-flavored sugar with interchangeable heads. Finishing Touches is full of multidimensional people you'd like to know, especially the heroine, Jesse, who grows and changes in ways that don't involve her closet. There's real sorrow in this book, and real happiness, and neither comes in the way you expect it to. Certainly worth reading, and I'll probably look up Deanna Kizis's earlier book, How to Meet Cute Boys.

So without stopping to choose my way, in the sure and certain knowledge that it will find itself–or if not it will not matter–I begin: the first memory.

This was of red and purple flowers on a black ground–my mother's dress: and she was sitting either in a train or in an omnibus, and I was on her lap. I therefore saw the flowers she was wearing very close; and can still see purple and red and blue, I think, against the black; they must have been anemones, I suppose. Perhaps we were going to St Ives; more probably, for from the slant of the light it must have been evening, we were coming back to London. But it is more convenient artistically that we were going to St Ives, for that will lead to my other memory, which also seems to be my first memory.

From "A Sketch of the Past", by Virginia Woolf. In The Virginia Woolf Reader.

Jilli sends this stunner our way, with the caveat that it doesn't play nicely with petticoats. If this makes no sense to you, understand that Jilli is the proprietress of Gothic Charm School.

Obviously, what this dress *is* suitable for is riding on Vespas–but then, what isn't? If I had a Vespa I would ride it INDOORS. I would live in a warehouse just so I could ride it from my bedroom to the kitchen and back. Forget that "when I am old I shall wear purple" nonsense; I figure that as soon as my odds of having a ministroke top my odds of being in an unfortunate Vespa accident, a Vespa I shall have.

I suppose the Vespa here is some kind of semiotic shorthand for "I am La Bella Italienne! See, I wear the fabric of brown to set off my skin of olive!" but the problem with using a Vespa in fashion ads is that NOTHING is as cool as a Vespa, so people think, "oh, yeah, nice dress but–LOOK AT THAT VESPA!"

Anyway, this dress is on clearance (well, $99, reduced from $198) at Barrie Pace, a catalog I have not seen much of since I left the Southland. There are lots of other things on clearance that all seem very wedding-friendly, not only for guests but for bridesmaids-sans-butt-bow and mothers of brides and grooms. In fact, there were a couple other dresses that I liked a bit more than this one. Why don't they get pictured? No Vespa.

Thanks to La BellaDonna, it looks as if I will have to run out to the fabric store tonight and pick this up — McCall's 5137. I'm pretty sure, though, that I'll have to make it in a size much smaller than my usual one, because the online catalog gives the finished bust measurement at a size 6 as 44 inches. There's a difference between "easy and flowy" and "Barnum & Bailey", you know.

I'd also lengthen the sleeves in view C and shorten the skirt. You know, god forbid I make up a pattern the way the drafters intended. I'd totally never be confirmed as a Supreme Court justice, at this rate. (Get it? "strict constructionist"? Oh, Supreme Court humor, why don't you ever work?)

Also, the neck bands do not continue to the back (chintzy!) and there are (in my opinion) completely superfluous back center seams — I'd get rid of those by cutting those pieces on the fold.

Anyway: product cycle time. I first posted about Duro Olowu on 11 November 2005; this pattern was probably released in the last few weeks, so a six-month turnaround time isn't too bad! So, McCall's, if you're listening, by November of this year I want a pattern for a pencil skirt with a very wide, reinforced waistband. No front seaming, no fancy hems, just skirt + waistband. Front scoop pockets okay. (I know I could draft it, but I'm lazy! And anyway, don't you want my $5?) Kthxbye!