Okay, which one of you folks sent this link to me? It obviously worked, I bought this pattern (how could I not?) but I can't find your name in my email. Probably because searching on "pattern" "ebay" "midriff" returns about eleventy-billion results.

Of course, if I were trying to design a dress that included all my current fave elements (midriff band, contrast banding, kimono sleeves, full skirt) I would never have come up with anything as great at this.

My only question now (besides who to thank for pointing it out to me) is: what fabric? I kinda want something with a nap or a right-side/wrong-side contrast so I can make the banding only slightly different. (Although, knowing me, I'd cut it out the wrong way twice before figuring it out. I'm not good with "directional" fabric.) Ooh — maybe stripes! That would be easy to keep straight. Okay, that's it. Stripes. Now, what colors? Suggestions gratefully appreciated.

And if you sent this link to me, step up and take your bow!

Ann sent me a link to her blog, She Wears Shwe Shwe, where she posts pictures of women in South Africa wearing traditional shwe shwe fabric.

Needless to say, I love this project. Not just because I love the dresses and the gorgeous fabrics (I do) but also because Ann seems to be going about this in such a lovely and respectful way. She asks permission to photograph the wearers. She gets their mailing addresses so that she can send them a copy of the photo. She asks them questions about their dresses. Who made it? What design decisions did they make? What do they want to tell her about it? If she can (she's often driving when she spots women in shwe shwe) she offers the women rides.

There's a difference between photographic exploitation and photographic celebration, and I get a more celebratory feel from this site. I hope you do too.

This shwe shwe wearer is Rachel. She made this dress herself, out of two complementary prints. Look at the pockets!

You know, I've never really gotten the Neiman Marcus Christmas Book before (that's both a literal and a figurative gotten). I'm much more of an Heifer International catalog kind of person. Who really needs a gold-plated Hummer or a week's holiday in an undersea hotel, when you could have a no-maintenance water buffalo, instead? (And I bet the sheets at the undersea hotel are clammy.) But Ann S. (thank you, Ann!) sent me a link to this NM holiday item, and now — now I get it.

What is it? Well, I'll let the copywriters explain:

… the only archival record of the House of Fath. This museum-quality collection includes 26 volumes of original sketchbooks from 1948 through 1956, with more than 3,400 couture designs. The collection also includes three exquisite Fath haute couture dresses, each with its accompanying sketch. With this archive, the possibilities are monumental. Endow a wing of your favorite museum with a comprehensive overview of fashion history or launch your own research center to inspire the Faths of tomorrow.

How much, you ask? Only (only!) $3.5M. That's a three, a five, and five zeros (plus two more after the decimal point, for you sticklers out there). I'm sure I can pull that together if I remember to check under all the couch cushions.

TWENTY-SIX volumes of sketchbooks! 3400 designs! The only question would be, would you neither sleep nor eat until you'd looked at everything, or would you ration the books over some long-drawn-out period of time, so as to make it last longer?

(I'm not so sure about the "endow a wing of MY favorite museum" part, though. I mean, I'd be worried about the mustard getting on the clothes.)

But I do hope someone buys this and gives it to the Costume Institute at the Met, or to the Costume Museum in Bath, or to FIT, or some other place that will keep it safe and accessible to researchers, and who will mount an exhibit so that folks like us can check out every one of those 3400 designs (web site? please?).

Of course, being NM, it will probably be bought by some Texas oilman as a present for his spoiled teen daughter designer wanna-be. (He'll get the gold-plated Hummer for his wife.) But I'm not going to think about that now! I'm just going to go write a quick note to Santa.

Now, y'all know just how much I love Claire McCardell, but even if I didn't already worship her, this dress would have made me an acolyte, even if being said acolyte involved wearing unflattering white robes and holding stinky candles through hours of chanting.

It's difficult to make bows seem sophisticated (of course, it helps to do them in black — this dress in pink might cause tooth decay) but these are without even a whiff of the sub-deb set.

I'm also impressed by the shirring of the shoulder seam. So luxurious! It's from Dorothea's Closet Vintage and is rayon faille, near-mint, B36 (and fairly expensive at $625, but for McCardell, if you were looking to splurge, this would be the best combination of whimsy and wearability that you could find).

Isn't this an interesting image? It's from the National Archives of Canada, and it's "Mrs. Ritchie, who here portrays Chess in a black costume with red and white checkered inserts, and a necklace and coronet made of chess pieces."

This dress comes to you because I was driving home from the airport late last night, and the iPod served up Travis Morrison's "Checkers and Chess", which has the lyrics:

Checkers and chess
I like your dress
Your dress likes me
It's all workin' out

At least, that's what *I* think the lyrics are. I could be mondegreening.

I think a Black Queen Chess Dress costume would be great for Halloween. Long black dress, pointy hat, forbidding expression, rapid yet stealthy movement at all times — you're done! And you can be warm, instead of freezing to death in something like this:

I mean, sure, if you want to be the queen of the jungle, hey, knock yourself out — just carry a sweater or something, okay? Do you have money for a cab? You know I worry about you.

I know I managed to talk about this (at great length) before–the problem I've had with the Duro-dress shape is that it somehow demands new shoes for the new proportion. I had found summer shoes, but, if you hadn't noticed, summer has slipped away. It has already *snowed* here in Chicago!

The new shoes I found are the ones at left, which satisfy my stringent shoe requirements (not too high a heel, ankle strap, round toe) and have the added benefit of making a lovely resonant clomping sound if you really stomp. (I swear, I'm perpetually six years old.) Plus the platform wedge makes you a lot taller without the concomitant foot pain of "real" heels.

I also managed to track them down in brown. I was tempted by the red ones — who isn't tempted by red ones? — but I haven't managed to successfully wear red shoes since eighth grade. Buy them, yes. Manage to leave the house in them? No.

I have these perpetual dreams of becoming (at this late stage) one of those elegant minimalists; somebody who buys two of everything, one black and one brown (or red, or cream) and eases through life effortlessly coordinated, slippery as an eel. This, as you might imagine, remains only a dream. Every time I work towards this ideal (which in my head is occasionally called the "live like a stereotypical architect project"), perhaps by making five identical skirts in dull colors, I am distracted by something shiny and whoops, I'm off again in some wild print, leaving the poor dark-brown skirt moping in the closet.

The closest I ever get to that blissful minimalist state is by managing to sew a series of wild prints in a similar color family, so at least I can get by with a few pairs of monochrome tights and a couple of cardigans. And two pairs of shoes, one black, and one brown. If I'm lucky, and I don't get distracted by patterned tights and sweaters, this mostly works.

Does anyone here have the expert-recommended two- or three-color closet? How do you do it?

[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.