You know how some women KNOW they are in relationships with sucky men, but they keep making the lamest excuses? Like, "I know he never calls when he says he will, and he can't seem to remember that I'm deathly allergic to shellfish, and he insulted my mother at my father's funeral, but … but … he likes puppies! He can't be a monster." That's a little bit how I feel about this dress from Temperley London.

I mean, I know those sleeves are hideous, and it's got sequins AND metallic I-wanna-be-Napoleon embroidery on a dress clearly intended for daytime wear, and it's freakin' $1835 (!) at Saks (click on the picture if you don't believe me) for RAYON/ACETATE but … it's not really showing to its best advantage on a model this thin, and … it's got pockets! And … this silhouette (with shorter, narrower sleeves) is the one that's on my mind for fall. Vee-neck, midriff band, fullish skirt …

Okay, okay. I know this dress isn't perfect. But it's trying! It *wants* to be a better dress. It just needs a good woman to believe in it.

Mauricio Parra, the producer and emcee of the Cherry Pop Burlesque show in Madison, Wisconsin, asks:

I have been scouring the web for a silky/shiny fabric with cherries on a black background that would be suitable for making a tie/bow-tie/pocket square etc. I bought a cherry tie online that turned out to be made from a cotton print that wasn't very saturated and just looks — crappy. In fact, cotton prints are the only cherry fabrics I've been able to find so far. Heck, I'd be willing to cut up some silky cherry pajamas if I could find them. One of our cast members has some but won't let me near them. 😉

Any ideas?

Cherry fabric is very near to my heart — I must have yards, but it's all cotton prints, not the shiny silky fabric you'd need to make a great tie.

You really have two options: call around, or DIY. I'd call the big fabric stores first: Vogue Fabrics in Chicago, Britex in San Francisco (I ordered some very nice cherry print from them five or six years ago, but it was cotton on a white background) or G Street in Rockville, Maryland. You might also want to grab a copy of Threads magazine and start calling the stores that advertise in that mag … I'd start by asking if they have any of the cherry-print black silk that Nicole Miller put out a few years ago. I'm still kicking myself for not buying some of that.

Of course you also want to set up an eBay search alert that will email you whenever someone lists silk cherry fabric.

As for DIY, if you know a good graphic artist, you could get a cherry print made just for you, and fabric either silkscreened locally or printed up at www.my-fabrics.com. (If you use my-fabrics, let me know, I've been dying to try them out.)

Also, Dharma Trading Co. sells silk tie blanks, pocket square blanks, etc. that could be painted!

Any Dress A Day readers have leads, or want to part with some of their stash?

By the way, the picture is for some black cherry-print denim, on sale on eBay for the next several days. Click on the pic to go to the listing. Note: the coin in the photo is a QUARTER. Those cherries are HUGE! Happy bidding!

I got yelled at a while back for assuming everyone reads the Sunday New York Times, so if you've already seen this lovely article about Alber Elbaz of Lanvin, don't you yell at me too!

This is my favorite part:

"Geisha are perfect," Elbaz said, now at work in his atelier, "and perfection is never interesting to me, but the search for perfection, which all women feel, is interesting. That's a timeless struggle, so why not provide women with a solution? For years, men have had uniforms, and a dress works like a uniform. You don't have to think – you zip in and zip out. And then clothes become about simplicity and form and function."

And that's a total lie, of course: you absolutely have to think about a dress, at least until you put it on, at which point you should not be thinking much beyond "I'm so glad I wore this today." If a dress is a uniform, then it's for a job that changes constantly. But I have no problem with why Elbaz said what he said, because anything that justifies dress-wearing is fine by me.

I think I've posted dresses by Lanvin before, but here's another one, just because. One of the reasons Lanvin is so great? This dress would actually look better on a curvier model.

You'd think this Boden "Chic" dress would be more attainable than yesterday's designer frock, wouldn't you? But you'd be wrong — most of the sizes have an eight-week wait. (Ebay didn't turn up any, either.) Sigh.

If you don't mind this dress showing up after Thanksgiving (warning to Canadians: I mean US Thanksgiving), by which time you probably will have forgotten you ordered it, go ahead and click on the picture. It's $128. This particular colorway has a name so English it seems nearly self-parodying: Treacle Tara Spot. I mean, that's practically the name of a show dog, isn't it?

So regular reader and perspicacious commenter Madelene emailed me last week, with a link to a designer at Style.com. I was traveling, and then I was catching up from traveling, and it took me a while to get to a time and place where I could check out the link and now … I want. Sleeves, neckline, waist, skirt: all perfect. This is me, huddling over here in a little breathless ball of pure throbbing desire.

Of course, I want it in red, or sky blue, or possibly bright grass green, and not this moonstone color, but still. Want.

The worst part is that, as beautiful as this is, it probably wouldn't even make the top five of impossible-to-have things I've wanted in the last week. How sad is that?

I was at the dentist yesterday, and part of my "wait for the numbness to wear off" routine is to wander through Lord & Taylor. Not that I picked my dentist because the office is above L&T, mind you — it's just a happy coincidence.

There I saw the dress that I wanted to show you today — Hugo Boss, hammered satin, beautiful neckline, short-sleeved, in the most exquisite moss green color. Really, it was the ideal winter party dress, AND a faultless excuse to buy green shoes, so it could not have been more perfect.

"Aha!" I thought. "Tomorrow's dress! The all-benevolent Internet shall provide a picture, and all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well."

Stoopid Internet. No picture! This is why I really do need a digital camera, I guess. Although trying to explain to the L&T people that I NEEDED to take a picture of the dress for my BLOG, where I talk about dresses "you know, JUST LIKE THIS ONE," would have probably been highly comedic.

Anyway, that dress was not like this one at all. (Warning, page very slow to load.)

Sometimes a pattern arrests me with the illustration, not the design, especially when it is supposed to show the glamorous life you will lead in whatever dress it is that you will be making. This one looks like a still from a bad movie, but I can't decide what the hell that guy is saying! Help me out — is he saying:

"Miss Monroe, you look simply ravishing. And, as you well know, my … tastes … lie in a different direction."

"Don't look now, but that's my ex-wife and her greasy gigolo — I said, DON'T LOOK!"

"After tonight, you'll never have to go back to the typing pool ever again!"

"See that man? I'm going to have him killed. No, not him, the one on the left."

"I really enjoy standing in for Mr. Brosnan. What is Ms. Zimbalist like?"

"Look, there's another woman wearing the same dress! Vogue 1066, right?"

"No, you're right, the ice sculpture is definitely supposed to be 'Guernica.'"

I'm not sure what he's saying, exactly, but something is making this poor woman freeze like a deer in the headlights. Maybe she left a pin in a seam, and has just found it? Maybe she realized too late that her glittery and bare evening-y dress is just not suitable in broad daylight, at what is evidently a business function?

There's another pic of it here, which shows that the weird front top panel of the skirt becomes a sash in back. Why? Because it can. Anyway, if all this speculation has made you fall in love with this Molyneaux pattern, you can buy it from the Blue Gardenia for $35. It's B34.

Check out this adorable dress on the adorable Alyson Hannigan. She wore it to the Emmy awards, which she attended with the adorable Alexis Denisov. (It's like that woman just floats in a CLOUD of adorability.) I did a desultory google but couldn't figure out who designed it. Any ideas? (Or better Google-fu?)

Anyway, I love it because it seems Liberty-ish, and I'm in a huge Liberty-print phase right now (the fabric of the other day was Liberty, and I desperately want about four yards of this):

I really wish there were a better way to buy Liberty fabric in the US other than off eBay. I mean, eBay works, but occasionally you want to buy a certain number of yards, not just whatever they happen to have cut. And they tend to concentrate on the classic florals and not the wacked-out modern stuff I am drooling over. Oh, my first-world problems, how difficult and intractable they are!

Dress A Day reader jrochest let me know that if you must own a Bjork swan dress (not the one from the Oscars but a "highly superior pearl-encrusted" version from her Vespertine tour) you can do so by going here.

There are a lot of other interesting (by which I mean "largely unwearable") clothes up for auction as well, most of them at very reasonable starting bids (although all the auctions still have five-plus days to run).

The auction benefits Oxfam and, jrochest points out, "You can also buy and donate goats, camels and trees. A goat costs much less than Bjork's dress, and would certainly be more flattering on."

The picture I'm showing you (I couldn't bear to inflict the swan dress on you, and besides, it had a bad "arty" photo that was all shadow) is of another dress in the auction, described as a "sky blue hand-painted swallow print short-sleeved dress designed and donated by Belgian designer Dirk Van Saene. The dress has blue knitted collar and cuffs and button front detailing. The dress is taken from Dirk Van Saene’s Summer 2005 collection and has never been worn." Usually I am very much against hand-painted clothes, but this one is so very cute, and not at all artist-y, at least not that I can see from the picture. And it's for a very good cause …

That's the fabric that I promised I would post, the fabric that was last Monday's dress. (Not the dress pictured, the dress described.)

The dress I made it into is this one, which I thought I had posted before, but no.

I made the one with sleeves, but without the white revers collar. I've also made this dress in pink/multicolor striped seersucker, which I bought in two separate colorways — pastel and bright. (Still haven't done anything with the bright one, but I figure around about next March it will start to call to me.)

Man, I am completely undercaffeinated today. Bear with me.