Erin McKean - The Hundred Dresses

Text 2013 by Erin McKean

Illustrations 2013 by Donna Mehalko

Excerpt from Marcel Prousts Remembrance of Things Past (trans. Charles Kenneth Scott-Moncrieff).

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

Published by Bloomsbury Publishing, London, New Delhi, New York, Sydney

Bloomsbury USA, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010

Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 50 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DP

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

McKean, Erin.

The hundred dresses : the most iconic styles of our time / Erin McKean ; illustrated by Donna Mehalko.

p. cm.

eISBN: 978-1-60819-979-2

1. Dresses. 2. Womens clothing. 3. Fashion design. I. Title.

GT2060.M35 2013

391.472dc23

2012043594

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

eISBN: 978-1-47253-585-6

First edition published in Great Britain and the United States in 2013

Electronic edition published in June 2013

Book design by Kimberly Glyder

www.bloomsbury.com

For all the readers of www.dressaday.com all over the world, who have left insightful comments, sent intriguing links,
enabled my fabric-buying habit to a shameful degree,
and shared my passion for Airship Hostess dresses
this book is especially for you.

s

I n the classic childrens book The Hundred Dresses , by Eleanor Estes, Wanda Petronski is bullied for saying she has a hundred dressesall lined up in my closet. The book is supposed to be about bullying (published in 1944, the book makes Wandas poverty and Polish last name an issue as well), but when I first read it, all I could think of waswhat did the dresses look like? Theres mention of a pale blue one with cerise-colored trimmings and a brilliant jungle green with a red sash, but the other ninety-eight are left to the readers imagination.

Wanda is persecuted by the other girls for saying she has a hundred dressesno one could ever have a hundred dresses, they thinkuntil they realize that Wandas imagination (bigger than any closet) could hold a hundred dresses and more.

All of our imaginations can hold a hundred dresses or morenot just variations of color and fabric and trimmings, shape and line, but distinct species of dresses that we recognize and distinguish as easily as we differentiate between daisies and daffodils. We can say Thats a June Cleaver dress or She was wearing a kind of Flamenco-y thing and feel confident well be understood.

And its not just when were talking about these dresseswe know (or think we know) what were saying with them when we wear them. We are different women, almost, in a Garden Party dress than we are in the Siren (even if were wearing them with all the same people who have known us forever). We know whats being communicated by a Marilyn halter versus a Mary Quant mini, what people read into a Bandage dress or a Dirndl.

Im sure other garments have their semiotics as well (there must be at least a dissertation, if not a book, on the subtle distinctions between plus-fours, knickers, and pantaloons), but dresses, being inherently feminine, are somehow more expressive. Dresses, perhaps because they are the only outer garment exclusively identified with women, are somehow more emphatic in their communication. Dresses seem to have a wider vocabulary in which to express all the things that women can be, and they are exuberant in that expressiveness. Dresses roll their sartorial rs when speaking the language of clothes.

These dresses also have storiesall good archetypes do, even if the details of those stories have been blurred by time. By wearing these dresses you insert yourself into the narratives they inhabit. The story of someone wearing the Siren dress is a different story altogether from that of the wearer of the Japanese Fashion, but both wearers are hoping for some kind of happy ending.

The hundred dresses here arent all the dress archetypes in the world, by a long shot, but theyre ones that are referenced frequently and worn consistently. Some are seen more frequently and consistently than otherson days when I see one of the rarer examples (its not every day you see someone togged out in a Fortuny or a J. Lo) I feel like a bird-watcher whos just added an entry to her life listbut all of them have significance, the kind that T-shirts and jeans just cant match.

In addition to calling out these dresses as archetypes, Ive tried to include where applicable the appropriate accessories and notable wearers, as well as the (ir)responsible designers. The lists of wearers and designers are meant to be suggestive rather than exhaustivea list of everyone semifamous whos ever worn a Cheongsam or a Slip dress would run the length of the phone book, if people had phone books anymore.

You can use this book as a field guide, to help you spot dress tropes; you can use it as an instruction manual, to help you decide what stories you want to em-body; or you can use it (as the labels on everything fun say) for entertainment purposes only.

Whether you save dresses for special occasions or wear them every day, I hope this field guide to frocks helps you become even more fluent in the language of clothes.

weve all seen the 1986 video: Robert Palmer, in a simple white shirt and black tie, clutches a microphone for dear life while five terrifying women in high-necked, long-sleeved (and slightly sheer, much to the delight of MTV-watching teenage boys everywhere) black minidresses surround him and dance robotically while pretending to play instruments.

The Addicted to Love dress is any dress that essentially sets out to turn you into a prop, a backdrop, stage dressing, or scenery, especially if it does so in a hypersexualized way. Modern rap videos employ the same methods (only with much less fabric), and it can be argued that the bridesmaids dress is a tamer version of this phenomenon.

The Addicted to Love differs from a uniforma uniform is intended to encourage team spirit and fellow feeling in addition to providing a consistent appearance to outsiders. The Addicted to Love, in all its variants, is concerned with the audience only. No one seems to be worried about a unit cohesion problem among backup dancers.

When youre wearing the Addicted to Love, either by choice or by coercion, its best to give yourself fully over to it. Wear it like a costume (which, of course, it is) and throw yourself into the role, whether its fembot, handmaiden, conference-booth staffer, or video vixen. If you can cultivate a fine appreciation of absurdity, that will help tremendously.