Velvet and Leaves

Dress: Vintage dress with velvet detail and attached crinoline
Label: There is no label
Fiber Content: Wool, velvet
Year purchased: November, 2005
Purchase price: Traded for a knit item to be made at a later date.
Store: Kristen’s Vintage Trunk show
Additional information/Oddities: This dress is slightly large on me. Also, when I look at it in the light, I wonder if it is not balck at all, but a very deep navy blue.
How I wear it: With stockings and heels.

I wore this dress with vintage heels (which I found at Salvation Army) to Thanksgiving 2005. I was amazed at how well the shoes matched the dress.

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There was a girl who was in my year at college. Our freshman year, she only wore black, predominantly vintage dresses.

I was impressed by her wardrobe, but not overly impressed by her. She was mean. She was overly enamored of her own coolness. She used to always make a casual reference to her years as a teen model. She was smart, but no smarter than everyone else, but you could tell she thought she was smarter and prettier and just cooler in general than everyone else (though she was a good deal less goofy and silly than myself and probably handled the whole college transition better than I did, so maybe she just considered herself superior to me.)

She gained a lot of weight over the next couple of years. This made me extremely happy, though I am ashamed to admit this. I shouldn't weight gain in another person as a cause for celebration, no matter how smug and deserving teh recipient of teh extra pounds may have been. I am shallow and petty.

She stopped wearing black dresses.

She became very involved with the campus women’s (Womyn's, Wimmin's) group and seemed to stop wearing dresses entirely. She wrote articles for the school newspaper blaming men for the evils in the world and she seemed to always mention how she had an eating disorder in high school while modeling.

I only remembered her recently as I was working on this project. I keep thinking about how intimidating she was and about her wardrobe and I wonder if I have, in some way, become her. I am not the most friendly of people. Perhaps I, with my black dresses and prickly persona, make other people as uncomfortable as she made me.

Of course, I never was a teen model.