So this is from the new Garnet Hill catalog, from which I buy something once every three or so years, and from whom I receive a catalog roughly every three weeks. (I really, really need to get off some mailing lists.)
But it's also the kind of thing I'm thinking about for fall (more on that anon, if by "anon" you mean "in a few days, or maybe next week"). A deep-toned floral print, able to be worn alone or with a cardigan into early October, and then right on through November with tights (although I don't like the black tights they show with this; I'd want maroon or a deep rose, or maybe even camel, except that every time I wear camel-colored tights I think that someone, somewhere, is going to think I have a very, very odd tan).
This would be cute with loafers, and also with grannyish ankle boots, and even with lace-up oxfords, and flamboyantly gorgeous with a brown suede three-quarter-length coat tossed over it. (A coat WHICH I just happen to have, incidentally. And which I do not wear nearly as often as I should because it has no pockets, alas.)
Click on the image to visit the Garnet Hill site; I think this is about $138, plus shipping. It's available in up to an 18 (or up to a 14 petite).
A few housekeeping things: I'm thinking about redesigning the blog and perhaps — perhaps, I say — moving to WordPress. Does anyone have any suggestions? I think this would be a loooong-term project, so don't expect to see a new design next week.
I also missed doing anything for Sept 1, which I think we had tentatively decided would be International Dress Day (that is, a day for dresses around the world, not "International Dress" whatever that is). So I think perhaps we should declare September 15 "International Wear a Dress Day (observed)". What do you all think? (I did wear a dress yesterday, and I'll show you the picture of it tomorrow.)
A Dress A Day 
I confess I like the black tights, but then I wear black tights with all kinds of things. I’d totally wear that with boots, too.Now I feel like I need a couple of new fall dresses, even though fall won’t even hit here until, like, November. If we’re lucky. Sigh.
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Agh. I love that dress!September 15th? Done.
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I did not wear a dress yesterday – I went to the gym. but I did SEW a dress. I’ll definitely wear a dress Sept. 15.
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I still say dark tights with a paler dress/outfit is a ‘don’t’….
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WordPress is a cinch. I highly recommend it. If you find a theme you like that you don’t need to tweak, switching won’t be a long-term project at all. Let me know if you need any help!
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If you’re thinking about moving to a new blogging platform, I highly recommend Textpattern. It’s free and open source, there’s millions of themes and plugins for it, and you can do anything html, css, etc with your site and it just lets you get on with things. I’ve built about ten sites using it and it’s dead easy. If you fancy seeing what’s under the hood at fehrtrade.com, let me know, Erin.
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This dress is frump-tastic. The length, the smocking, the very-90s wide scoop neck, the pattern… all wrong. You’d have to pay me $138 to wear it!
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I wore a dress yesterday (snake print – apologies after the previous post – that I made myself, with a black patent belt and a yellow scarf and shoes). But I’d forgotten it was supposed to be Wear A Dress Day…I love the autumnal colours of that dress! I think it would look ace with green, bright pink or orange tights. (Erin – I thought of you this morning when I put on my new pair of orange tights – you’re obviously having some sort of influence over me…!)Dilly.
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Get rid of those catalogs by signing up at CatalogChoice.org They handle unsubscribing you from unwanted catalogs and it is FREE! Super service; they have definitely cut down on the amount of paper junk coming into our house.I am all for Sept. 15 dress day. Consider it done.
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I use wordpress a lot, I work with it for clients. I did want to mention the difference between WordPress.ORG (the stand-alone software you install on a webhost) and WordPress.COM (the hosted version similar to Blogger).The .COM does not allow advertising. You cannot edit your template, unless you get the CSS upgrade, and then you can modify the stylesheet. So.. that’s probably not what you want. :-/I would recommend for your site you go with WordPress.org and get webhosting etc.. or look into typepad if you really need it hosted for you.
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Oh, you disappointed me with the Dress Day a bit… because I didn’t forget. But I can easily wear a dress on the 15th as well. 🙂
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Andrea, thanks! I use my own hosting (pair.com, they are awesome) and I think they have wordpress installed …
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My wedding anniversary is September 15th so it would be quite an appropriate day to wear a dress, though not quite as dressy and flouncy as the one I wore 18 years ago!My sister has just changed her blog to wordpress.com, and she seems to know what she wants from a blog. Good luck with the re-design!
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When I was in high school during the mid 60’s this was the fashion. I was surprised to see this coming back. We also wore the tights with this empire waisted dress fashion (what we called it back then). Linda K.
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I love this dress, but the black tights, not so much.Speaking of wedding dresses: Erin, what’s your wedding dress look like? That would be an interesting blog entry.
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I also think the black tights are too dark for this dress (LOVE the print!)As it was a holiday and the only things I did outside my flat were wash the car and take a sweaty walk, I also did not wear( but did sew a dress yesterday). And surfing the ‘net for fall fashion ideas, I noticed that tights in all colors are back in so I thought of that stupid article that inspired the Dress Day but forgot the actual day.My bad.I’m on for the 15th.As for redesign/move, I will follow ADAD anywhere!
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The dress is certainly on the frumpy side. Unck.
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One more thing re September 15 Dress Day — someone should set up a Flickr set so we can see what’s been worn ’round the world during those 24 hours!
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Just penned in 9/15 to wear a dress! I’m in!
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I had a coat that I loved but didn’t wear often cuz of the pocket-issue. Eventually I sewed some pockets on the inside, then wore it to death!
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I missed out yesterday, so Sept 15 sounds great!It’s one thing to wear it the day after dresses are supposed to have died, but to wear it two weeks later shows dresses have staying power. 🙂 We’ll show them!
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It’s on the calendar.I didn’t wear a dress yesterday, but I did wear my bright yellow skirt I made from a 1974 pattern while going to a vintage textile/clothing show in Massachuesetts!
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i’m in for the 15th! but then again i’m in one pretty much daily :)are you a mac user? i tried my blog out on wordpress, and found it was easier for safari to work with blogger. and even easier for firefox.
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Garnet Hill is the worst for excessive catalog mailing, and stubborn about it; it took me nearly a year to get off all of their lists, including the appalling Garnet Hill Kids! They were worse than Williams-Sonoma for junk mail, and that’s saying something.The dress is clearly going for the Dylan Thomas’s girlfriend style that the Telegraph assures us is A Look for Fall. The Telegraph suggests wearing it with “textured socks”….hm, this isn’t letting me log in. —movingfinger
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I like the shape, but $138 for a dress with *smocking*?! Heck no!
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I’m in for a dress on the 15th! That gives me time to make plans for finishing a dress for next year. 8 PI don’t know anything about the webhosting but if possible I like to see the archives moved closer to the top. Easier to get to for us lazy folks who don’t want to use our middle finger for anything but naughty things. 8 P
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I like the print. I’d go for a deep rose colored, fine-wale corduroy jacket myself.I wish that fashion would lose the maternity dress look though. I’m 44. I ought to be done with maternity dresses. But no sooner had I given birth to my youngest the fashion world moved waistlines right up to the bra band and gave everyone poofy stomachs.I suppose I should have just kept the maternity clothing out instead of packing it into the attic.
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In best ditsy hackette tradition, I’ve no idea about the relative advantages of WordPress, though that’s the platform we (my partner and I) blog on over at the Knackered Hack. If partner (the knackered, technical one) isn’t too miffed at his preserve-panning here on DAD (even though I/he both asked for it), I’ll try to elicit some tips, Erin. I’m torn about this dress; the blue-stocking in me is drawn to it, but I couldn’t carry it off – I’d look like a twelve-year-old in that scoop neck, for starters, and not in a good way. Love the fabric, though: is it Liberty? Also intrigued by the pleating-cum-gathering around the waist; like it, but not to wear myself.My brushes with annual awareness events have taught me to proceed with caution. But, according to Wikipedia, September 15th is: International Day of Democracy (isn’t the right to make home-made dresses a half-decent symbol of democracy?); Battle of Britain commemoration in the UK (should hemlines be short or long for that, I wonder?); and Respect for the Aged Day in Japan (long hemlines, I’d have thought), so go for it! Flickr idea is a great one too, Lazy Milliner.
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Delurking to say I recently moved to WordPress and I’m very happy with it! Love your blog, by the way. LOVE it! 🙂
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Somebody beat me to plugging CatalogChoice.org, but I’ll plug it again. My neighbor gets hundreds of catalogs and I secretly (with her knowledge and permission) unsubscribe her when she goes out of town and I pick up her mail.I remembered that yesterday was International Dress Day, but I stayed in and sewed and therefore wasn’t wearing much of anything so I could do fittings more easily.
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I’m a wordpress advocate and use it for lots of clients. I suppose a lot depends on what you want to do with your blog, and whether the software you choose supports those things. Why do you want to switch from whatever it is you’re using now, I wonder? At any rate, I have found wordpress to be great, for both blogging and as a pretty strong general-purpose CMS as well.Also, for what it’s worth, about two years ago I installed WordPress on a site for a client whose hosting was with pair.com. I found it unusually difficult (wordpress’s 5-minute installation is usually a no-brainer), and had to comb through pair.com’s documentation to find some stuff about php permissions, as I recall, to tweak the installation. But that was a while ago, and perhaps pair has improved its wordpress installation procedure. pair.com is fine by me for other types of hosting, but I don’t use them for dynamic websites, I instead use site5.com most of the time, they’re pretty good.
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I love the print, but the shirring looks uncomfortable (shirring is SCRATCHY), and I am so over gathers falling from “the empire”. It’s just too pregnant-looking. I think your hosiery choices are inspired, Erin. And the American philosophy of matching clothing colours to the season is, as ever, just too cute for words. (I’m from NZ.)I wore a dress yesterday. I’m wearing one now. I’ll probably be wearing one on the 15th. It’s what I do.
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I think I want to go three-column and change up the template, which seems to be harder on Blogger than it ought to be. I would be happy to be proved wrong; I like the Blogger interface.Pair has emailed me to suggest that a different hosting plan would save me money, which is amazing imho.
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I guess I must be a frump then, because I bought an incredibly similar dress a while back and was looking forward to wearing it in autumn! Sept 1st is my wedding anniversary so would be the ultimate dress-wearing day for me, but needless to say I didn’t, yesterday. {hangs head in shame}
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I am so in for Sept. 15th to wear a dress…and hopefully I can shotgun a day dress pattern, because I don’t have any at the moment. :(And I am definitely not wearing my recently-finished purple silk cocktail dress. 🙂
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This is mildly off-topic, but did you see John McIntyre’s “Men’s fashion tips” on his blog? You gotta love those boe ties.
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This is mildly off-topic, but did you see John McIntyre’s “Men’s fashion tips” on his blog? You gotta love those boe ties.
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The dress is cute – but not on me – I would look pregnant and after 7 kids, pregnant is NOT the look I am after!But, I wear dresses/skirts every day anyway – because I don’t like how I look in trousers…so, I can wear a dress any day you ask!
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Wear a dress on Sept. 15? It’s on my calendar!
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I didn’t mind looking pregnant when I was pregnant, but not so much now that my children are grown up. I agree with those who are so over the empire look. Every time this season I made a dress that was NOT empire, I felt like a member of the Fashion Rebel Alliance. I won’t wear them and they can’t make me! I do like the print though and I love tights and boots. It’s too hot here for both just yet..but soon…
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I’m not fond of and cannot wear the baby doll/barefoot-and-pregnant look. Not many women can pull it off and NOT look pregnant. Seems to me I heard that this style is in cahoots w/ the moral majority/right wing folk, who DO want to keep us barefoot-and-pregnant. September 15th will be brighter with all of us in dresses: count me in!
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If I dare show my virtual face in these parts since the preserving pan episode, I would just say that I don’t think you’ll be disappointed by WP. I would expect that your hosting company would have one-click install of WordPress, and that makes upgrading very simple (WordPress is improving all the time.) There is a bewildering array of plug-ins. And it seems to me that most WordPress bloggers go three column, although we’ve preferred to stick with two for the time being. It has been a bit quirky with things like YouTube embeds, although there are fixes for that, and the latest version (which I’m not yet using) may have addressed that issue.
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This is a pretty dress, but at the same time, has a very 90’s feel to it, as someone before mentioned. I like the print but not the lines of the dress, so much.
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I forgot it was International Dress Day, but wore a dress anyway as it was our anniversary, and we took the chance to go out for dinner and a movie without the sprog. I will do my best to wear a dress on the 15th as well, although I am lucky to get out of my pajamas by noon right now. Maybe I can wear a nightgown?- Elizabeth
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I think pair.com now has a one-click install area for WordPress too.I’m pretty sure you can get 3 column templates for Blogger, but I think moving to WP woudl open up a whole lot more opportunities for the site.(and easier commenting, ugh I hate blogger’s comment system)
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I second the flickr group. I’d love to see everyone’s dresses!Terri
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Is someone setting up a flickr group for this? We should…Sept. 15, International Wear a Dress Day (Observed.)If I set it up, will you guys post to it?
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Kate in England: that’s a fantastic dress.Meanwhile, I’m covered for Sept. 15; I wear a dress every day, so it’s pretty easy to pull that one off.Also: I almost cried when I opened this post. My husband and I just cleared out our closet and deposited a car load full of clothes at Goodwill. Among the items was a very similar dress that I was feeling extremely torn about giving up because my mom bought it for me for when I was to start teaching a career I didn’t end up following since I’m terrible at yelling at people, so I just correct grammar behind the scenes now (this sentence is not an example of my exquisite skills in that area). He convinced me, but now I have an urge to go back to Goodwill and buy that dress back, then hide it somewhere.
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i forgot about september 1 being Dress Day! I wore pants that day, but have worn a skirt every other day this week. i’m all for september 15 being Dress Day!
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can fake Diane Vreeland twitter about IWADD(O) on Sunday so I don’t forget?
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