[image is by Andy Warhol © 2015 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York]

So the other day, folks in the comments were talking about leggings. I’m pretty agnostic about leggings, but the whole discussion (which centered on the fact that it can be *really* hard to look good in leggings) got me thinking about the pervasive idea that women owe it to onlookers to maintain a certain standard of decorativeness.

Now, this may seem strange from someone who writes about pretty dresses (mostly) every day, but: You Don’t Have to Be Pretty. You don’t owe prettiness to anyone. Not to your boyfriend/spouse/partner, not to your co-workers, especially not to random men on the street. You don’t owe it to your mother, you don’t owe it to your children, you don’t owe it to civilization in general. Prettiness is not a rent you pay for occupying a space marked “female”.

I’m not saying that you SHOULDN’T be pretty if you want to. (You don’t owe UN-prettiness to feminism, in other words.) Pretty is pleasant, and fun, and satisfying, and makes people smile, often even at you. But in the hierarchy of importance, pretty stands several rungs down from happy, is way below healthy, and if done as a penance, or an obligation, can be so far away from independent that you may have to squint really hard to see it in the haze.

But what does you-don’t-have-to-be-pretty mean in practical, everyday terms? It means that you don’t have to apologize for wearing things that are held to be “unflattering” or “unfashionable” — especially if, in fact, they make you happy on some level deeper than just being pretty does. So what if your favorite color isn’t a “good” color on you? So what if you are “too fat” (by some arbitrary measure) for a sleeveless top? If you are clean, are covered enough to avoid a citation for public indecency, and have bandaged any open wounds, you can wear any color or style you please, if it makes you happy.

I was going to make a handy prettiness decision tree, but pretty much the end of every branch was a bubble that said “tell complainers to go to hell” so it wasn’t much of a tool.

Pretty, it’s sad to say, can have a shelf life. It’s so tied up with youth that, at some point (if you’re lucky), you’re going to have to graduate from pretty. Sometimes (as in the case with Diana Vreeland, above, you can go so far past pretty that you end up in stylish, or even striking (or the fashion-y term jolie laide) before you know it. But you won’t get there if you think you have to follow all the signs that say “this way to Pretty.” You get there by traveling the route you find most interesting. (And to hell with the naysayers who say “But that’s not PRETTY”!)

Laura sent me this — thank you, Laura! I love the neckline, and I'm totally stealing the pockets-in-the-middle-of-the-skirt idea. So easy!

This is from seller BootyVintage on etsy.com (obviously, I don't spend enough time on etsy, as I didn't realize people were selling patterns there now). The pattern is $20, plus shipping, but look at the size — B39, hard to find!

I don't know if I'd piece the back the way it is in this pattern — perhaps I wouldn't feel the need for a horizontal line running the full width of my rear end — but it'd be easy enough to take out. Or keep, and add BACK pockets?

I'm slightly concerned about the woman in the print version in this illustration, though. Doesn't she look as if she is awaiting instructions from the mothership? One possibly helmed by Ming the Merciless? Oh, well, at least she's dressed appropriately for world domination. Can't take over a damn thing with no pockets!

Isn't this a great dress? Wait — it gets better:

It's convertible! Diane kindly re-sent me these images after I managed to lose them somehow in the charnel house that is my email inbox, sparked by the discussion of "day-to-evening" overskirts in yesterday's comments.

Oh, and check out the detail …

So neat! So efficient! So … button-y! Thanks, Diane!

[Sorry for the late posting; I'm now in Camden, Maine, where I'm talking at the Pop!Tech conference this weekend. If you want to see me pontificate about stuff that has *nothing whatsoever* to do with dresses, you can watch the whole conference live at live.poptech.org. You can even ask questions of the presenters through the site! Good times.]

Thanks go to Nora, who sent this my way. Isn't it cute? (And it's also B34, and a BuyItNow at $6.50, or it was when I posted this.)

I love that the waist looks more than a bit like an old stand-up collar. And the welty pockets on the orange version (oh, how I love orange) are divine.

Whenever I think I've seen every possible vintage pattern, along comes another one to surprise and delight. Often in orange, with pockets.

I get a LOT of link requests. I mean, a LOT. And I do try to look at all of the sites, and I do have a list that I will get around to linking when I have five free minutes to edit that sidebar over there. But do you know who I *won't* be linking to? Any of those bitchy sites that exist just so people can make $1.53 in advertising revenue by dissing celebrities and what they're wearing.

Yeah, yeah, I know I link to Go Fug Yourself, but first, they're ACTUALLY FUNNY, and second, they, in the main, limit their criticism to clothes, shoes, jewelry (and, to a lesser extent, hair)–things the celebrities have (or should have) control over. I don't see them spending the bulk of their time ragging on people's bodies, and they go out of their way to compliment people when they can.

But some of the other sites (which I won't link to here; heaven forbid I send them any traffic) say things like "She's a horse!" or "And would you look at those hips, it's too wide for her age. It's like she gave birth already." WTF?

Some of these "critics" think that celebrities have signed up to be shredded by them. That "it's the price of fame." Yeah, well, who made you the collections agent for fame? Simple kindness towards a fellow human should preclude you from writing >90% of what is said on these sites. Do as you would be done by, and all that.

It's your right as a blogger to be as unfunny, cruel, and mercenary as you like. I can't stop you. But I won't link to you, and I won't read you, and I will hope against hope that you become reality-tv-style famous for just one day so that you can have the dubious pleasure of reading what carping and microhearted folks say about YOU and YOUR BODY on other blogs. Got it?

(Oh, and I'm not trying to imply that Elizabeth Taylor is bitchy — I just wanted a gorgeous celebrity in a perfect dress to grace the page.)

Did everybody see this on Yahoo News? Dee sent this link to me. It seems that a fairly-obsessive pastry chef in the Ukraine designed a pastry wedding gown for his bride, made of 1500 cream puffs and weighing twenty pounds.

What do you say to a guy that wants you to wear a dress made of pastry? "Oh, that's so sweet of you?"

"At first, it was even a little embarrassing," Viktoriya Shtefano said of the dress she wore to the couple's reception in August at Uzhhorod's 1,200-year-old castle. "Cameras, interviews, but after a couple of hours, I didn't even want to take it off."

Okay. She didn't want to remove a heavy, sticky, probably fly-covered (it was August, people) pastry dress? That's love. Or something equally insane.

Oh, well, at least her wedding dress didn't also serve as the wedding cake, which sounds like a scene from a Peter Greenaway movie.

Several folks (including Dee, and Emily, and at least one other person whose email went missing during what I am fondly calling the Moving House Interregnum of 2006) kindly sent me links to this exhibit of Queen Elizabeth II's dresses. More than 80 dresses are on display, and a goodly number of those are featured on the exhibition's website, in that neato super-zoomo-vision where you can increase the magnification level until you can check the spin on individual electrons of the atoms of the fabric. (Click on the picture to visit the site.)

This dress is a 1957 Norman Hartnell; some of the other dresses are even more elaborate, and have not-so-subtly coded messages. They have symbols embroidered on them (I knew of the thistle-Scotland connection but not the daffodil-Wales one) or are color-coordinated with the flag of Ethiopia, or whatnot. Me, I just want to make sure my cardigan matches my skirt — Queen Elizabeth II has to make sure her dress matches AN ENTIRE COUNTRY. (Luckily, she has a large staff. And probably a stylist, although I'm sure they don't call the Queen's stylist a stylist. She's probably a lady in waiting to the chancellor of the wardrobe, or some such. And I'm doubly sure that person is not Rachel Zoe. Thank god. )

It's definitely worth checking out — the dresses are quite nice, and it's refreshing to see lovely gowns made for someone of a, let's say, MATURE age and size. And her mother-of-the-bride dress (not the Queen Mother of the Bride Dress, that was a different one) for Princess Margaret's wedding is a gorgeous color.

Listen, I know it's October, and you're thinking about plaid. And corduroy. And probably velveteen. Lord knows I am. But Andrea sent me this lovely eyelet dress back when the weather was warm, and it promptly got lost in the bottomless pit that is my email inbox (Merlin Mann? I neeeeed your help!). That's not her fault, and besides, I wanted to show you how one little mistake can actually lead you to something better than what you set out to do. I'll let Andrea tell it:

I was seeing a lot of eyelet around this summer, and who doesn't love a shirtdress, right? So I put this one together, of course neglecting to modify the pattern for my bust because I'm antsy. Anyway, it was too small in the bust to close enough to overlap for proper buttonholes, so I did ribbon loops before I put the front edge facing in .. Then added ornamental buttons over the loops for an excessive button look that I think is kind of interesting and makes the meeting-at-center closure seem less, well, accidental? Then hook and eye closures to keep it closed at center. Thanks for looking at it …

A lot of people I talk to about sewing seem to think that if you didn't follow the pattern exactly, you failed. If it doesn't look like the illustration on the envelope (despite the fact that those figures are deliberately not in proportion, to make the clothes look better), you failed. I say, if you have a dress you like, it doesn't matter if you made it exactly to spec or not. You won! You have a dress! Wear it with pride!

It took me YEARS to stop saying "Oh, I messed up this tiny bit on the hem here …" to people who complimented something I made. (I still backslide and do it from time to time.) You know what? No one but you will notice. Also, it discourages people from trying to sew, if you start pointing out flaws that they didn't even see. "If she says SHE screwed up, what chance do I have?" they think. So don't do that! Say "I *decided* to change the buttons/add a zipper/applique on this flower" but don't add "because I made the buttonholes wrong/made it too small/accidentally cut into the fabric". It's not necessary. You made a dress! You won! Yay!

Check out this dress on eBay — it's a Suzy Perette with a pattern of squirrels and acorns. Yep, squirrels and acorns — how perfect for fall, right? But I can't say it any better than the seller does:

Do not tell yourself that you are uninterested in a dress with a squirrel and acorn print because you are clearly not being honest with yourself.

Sing it, sister!

The dress is B38/W26, and it's about $22 right now (that last is subject to change; this is eBay we're talking about). Just admit that you want it. Be honest.

Thanks to Lisa for the link!

Holly suggested this dress to me … what dress, you ask? The dress made from this fabric, which is listed here, by the eBay seller Aphrodite Eternal. Which is a fitting name for someone selling a dress made of heart-emblazoned fabric, isn't it?

I love that the hearts are yellow (and also blue, not seen in photo above). If the hearts were red and pink, I probably would have yawned and never even clicked on the thumbnail photo … I think that this desire for colors outside the traditional iconography maybe be a pervasive part of my psychological makeup. It goes with the blue flowers obsession and my constant search for marimba/xylophone covers of most of the major pop songs of the last four decades.

The dress itself is on the small side (W24) and fairly expensive (bidding started at US$99) but if neither of those things deter you, click on the picture and take a look.