A Dress and a Song, episode 4: St. Louis Blues

Sorry this is late – I meant to post yesterday, I really did, but teaching four hours of section kinda knocked the wind out of me.  I’m happy to report, though, that I think my students this year are going to be really great – they’re all freshmen who haven’t learned how to not do their homework, so they all showed up to the first day of school having done all of their reading, a veritable miracle.  Anyhow.  Look at this dress!

(from B and Lu)

I love this dress.  I love this dress so much that I bought it.  Sadly, you are not going to get a self-portrait of me in this dress because it is currently at the tailor because it is too long and gave me a bad case of the Stumpy Leg.  One of the perennial problems I have with fat girl clothes is that so many of them are clearly designed for fat girls who are also statuesque amazons, and the last time I checked, statuesque was not an adjective that is easily applicable to yours truly, even when I am wearing Very Significant Shoes.  And yes, shortening a dress is normally something I could easily do myself, but because of the fancy decorative bit at the hem, I wanted to keep the bottom edge, which meant the dress would have to be shortened at the waistline, so I decided to entrust this job to a professional.  I will admit right here that my sewing methods tend to be pretty sloppy and haphazard because they are based largely on trial and error (and I would like to take this opportunity to bemoan the loss of home ec in high schools.  I never got to take home ec.  I don’t know how commonplace home ec is in high schools anymore, but I think that at the very least basic hemming is a skill that every teenager, be they boy, girl, or magical unicorn child, should be taught), so they really aren’t suitable for use on anything that I don’t want to accidentally ruin.  (And this is why I buy all my fabric at two bucks a pound at the Michael Levine Loft in the textile district.)  I was all set to try this job myself, and had the dress all pinned up and ready to go, but then suffered an enormous crisis of self-confidence and decided that it was not the job for me, and thus my dress has been sent away to sleepaway camp, and hopefully will come back a better person.

But anyhow.  I love this dress because of the vintage detailing combined with a pretty contemporary color scheme.  I bought it in black and red, but it was a tough call because the dove grey is really lovely as well.  And I WOULD HAVE gotten the purple, except that they hadn’t released it in purple yet when I ordered, jerks.  The one qualm I had about this dress is that it’s vintage pedigree is kind of ambiguous – I think it looks sort of late 1920s, early 1930s flapper-y, but there’s also something about it that is ever so slightly 1980s-ish, which is generally a sartorial period that I prefer to avoid.  But I’ve made the cognitive leap and I’ve put that out of my mind, because I still really love this dress.  I can imagine one of the great early blues women, like Bessie Smith or Lucille Bogan, on stage in this dress.  This dress is also one of the rare occasions where I really appreciate jersey fabric, which I normally sort of hate because of how stretched out and shapeless it can be.  Here, though, because it’s such a high quality jersey, it has an amazing sheen and drapes amazingly well.  So it’s like a fancy dress made actually wearable because when I spill my lunch on it (inevitable) I can just throw it in the wash.

And for a dress that makes me think of the blues, what better than the indomitable, hard-drinking, beautiful Miss Bessie Smith, with St. Louis Blues?

This clip makes me want to wear my hair like the women sitting at those tables – all swept to the side in the front and pinned back.  They look so dignified and glamorous.

And because I like to give props to my fellow Canadians whenever I can, I think you should go listen to Little Miss Higgins.  I saw her at Summerfolk a year ago, I think?  And she was lovely, and there’s a wonderful version of St. Louis Blues on her album.  If you paired today’s dress with a pair of cowboy boots (which I obviously am going to do as soon as I get it back) and then taught it to sing, it would sound like Little Miss Higgins.