A dressing down

ANYONE who pays attention to fashion may want to know that those in charge of deciding these things have pronounced doom on the dress. They, meaning mainly fashion editors and designers, claim the dress is dead. Kaput.

“The eye is looking for something new, and so is the psyche,” Anne Slowey, the fashion news director of Elle magazine, said last week from the set of Fashionista, a new fashion reality show in which she will play herself, a fashion editor, only meaner.

Now, Slowey added—meaning not now, exactly, but months from now, in September—the thing it will be necessary to own in order to appear fashionable will be “the pant.” “The first hint of chill in the air, and the full-legged, pleated high- and low-waisted legions will be out in the urban jungle,” said Slowey. The expiration date for the dress, she claimed, “is end of August.”

It is also, for what it’s worth, unwelcome news to me. That is because, unlike Slowey, I am not eager for women to become “a little more hard-core, a little more androgynous, a little more butch.” Yes, gender play is fun, and trousers are a useful wardrobe default for the woman in business. But you will have to concede that for flattering a woman’s body nothing is quite like a dress.

The cycle is turning, Solomon said, but it has not happened yet. And so, for those of us who take pleasure in the sight of a woman in a summer dress walking along, her dress caught in a faint breeze, there is still time.

Or as actor Everett Sloane said in Citizen Kane, “A fellow will remember a lot of things you wouldn’t think he’d remember.” Sloane spoke for a lot of us in recollecting a long-ago day and a girl he had seen on a ferry for barely an instant. “A white dress she had on,” he said. “She didn’t see me at all, I’ll bet a month hasn’t gone by since that I haven’t thought of that girl.”
- GUY TREBAY (NYT)