Vintage Chiffon

Dress: Vintage. Circle Skirt. Bow at top of zipper. V-neck. Slightly oversized. Circle skirt.
Label: None
Fiber Content: Chiffon, Taffetta
Year purchased: 1989
Purchase price: $15
Store: I don’t remember (I suspect it was at Keep ‘Em Flying, my favorite vintage store in Portland, which is located near Cinema 21, the cool arty movie theatre.)
Additional information/Oddities: This looks exactly like the dress worn by Sinead O’Connor in the Emperor’s New Clothes video.
How I wear it: I remember standing in the hallway of my freshman dormitory without anything but a black t-shirt and blue underpants underneath this dress and my various dorm-mates telling me that it was just too sheer to wear that way. So I have worn it with black tights and a camisole (which isn’t as revealing as it sounds) or, when I have felt more demure, with a black vintage slip.

I wore this dress a lot in college. In fact, I think this would have qualified as my favorite dress, my dress-up dress, and I suspect I was wearing this dress to 70% of the dress-up opportunities I had between the ages of 17 and 21. This is another dress infused with love and memory.

I wore this dress with a red hat and short black crocheted gloves to the wedding of Bosco (one of my British cousins) and Angela in 1990. I got tons of compliments, even had a few people ask me if I was a model back in the States. Which is hilarious given that I am only 5’3” on a good day, but flattering nevertheless.

At the end of September 2001, Fred and I went to London to see Roddy Frame perform at Queen Elizabeth Hall. We took a train to Loughborough to visit Bosco, Angela, and their daughters, Lauren and Rachel. Bosco then drove us to see his parents and siblings in Birmingham and then to another brother’s in Reading. Everyone wanted to talk to us about the recent attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center, in part because the events had just occurred and in part because we were American. Everyone, that is, except Lauren and Rachel who wanted to talk to us about Britney Spears and The Jungle Book. I am so happy that we took this trip as it gave Fred an opportunity to meet Bosco and Angela and we both got a chance to meet their girls. We visited them, again, in December 2002. Bosco had been diagnosed with kidney cancer in the spring of 2002 and it had metastasized to his brain by the fall. My mother thought it would be great if we all went there for Christmas. It was the last time we saw him. He died in the summer of 2004 at the age of 45.


This is the dress I was wearing the first time I met Fred. It was the night before I was to go back to Portland to begin my junior year of college and I had been dating Michael for three weeks. We went back to his apartment and his roommate, Fred, was there with some other women, including Fred’s recently ex-girlfriend, Nancy. They were trying to decide where to go dancing and I made some suggestions (which was funny because I was nineteen and could only get into a limited number of clubs when they had an all ages night.) I remember that Nancy was extremely rude to me, though I don’t remember how, and I remember thinking she looked old and ugly and how sad it must be to be that bitter. The group soon left and I think I asked Michael why he was even friends with Nancy (he had been the one who fixed up that harpy with Fred in the first place.) Michael excused her behavior saying that I looked “so young.” As if that is an excuse for rudeness. In retrospect, I should have dumped Michael then, instead of waiting until the following March. However, I went back to school and conducted a long distance relationship. Which meant I spent a lot of time of the telephone. Which meant I ended up talking a lot with his roommate if Michael wasn’t home. So Fred and I became friends and two-and-a-half years after we met (and close to two years after breaking up with Michael) Fred and I kissed at my New Year’s Eve party, on the cusp between 1993 and 1994. (I was wearing a different black dress that night, a black stretch cotton mini-dress which I donated to Salvation Army in July 2004.) What is odd is that I am now older than Nancy was when I met her and yet I still think she was a shriveled hag then and while I am still a spring chicken.


I wore this dress on my twenty-first birthday when my parents took me to Charlie Trotter’s. I remember that was the first time I ever really understood what it meant for a wine to compliment a meal. I recall telling Maria about the dinner in excruciating details (reconstructing each course) and I am pretty sure a copy of the menu is in a box at my parent’s house. After the dinner, I went to a party with Maria and Jenny Stewart at a coop near University of Chicago and I wore a black hat with fake flowers pinned to the brim. There was a guy there who I had a crush on, but he was uninterested in me. There was another guy I liked there, a guy who I had actually gone for coffee with over the course of my five week winter break, who lived in the coop and, at one point in the evening, he said to me, “since you are going back to Portland tomorrow, I was wondering if you wanted to go back to my room for a ten minute smooching session.” While I don’t believe there is such a thing as a “good line,” anyone can understand how disastrous a bad line can be where these things are concerned. I managed to keep a straight face and not say anything snarky as a declined and found Maria and Jenny and left. The next day, I flew back to Portland to complete my senior year and write my thesis.