Outfitblogging: Abusing the Stevie Nicks Dress

I’ve told and retold this story several times now, but here it goes again: The morning I wore this above, I shut my dress in the back of my dress in the car door. And drove that way for several miles, until a nice gentleman in another car alerted me to it. I wish I could say that it was a beautiful sunny day and my skirt merely flapped gaily in the breeze, but instead is was snowing/sleeting/icing and the exposed bit of skirt was dragged along the pavement and thus soaked and covered in black filth. Also it developed a sizeable hole.

When I hurt my clothes in some way, I tend to panic about it a little bit – particularly when it’s an item I can’t readily replace, like the above dress, which has been discontinued. My panic typically leads me to occasionally-elaborate improvisational remedies; for the dress above, this meant rinsing the dirt out in the bathroom at work (and dealing with a wet hem for hours) and then later, at home, very carefully hand-stitching the rip closed. If I had greater or more reliable access to clothes I like, I might have said, “Eh, I may be able to fix it, but if not, no big deal.” As it is, my mind went something like “OH MY FUCKING GOD, I HAVE TO FIX THIS NOW NOW NOW, I HAVE NO REASON TO BELIEVE I WILL EVER FIND A DRESS LIKE THIS AGAIN, EXCLAMATION POINT.”

This, my friends, is a side effect of living with style scarcity.

Because I really don’t have any reason to believe I’d find something like the dress in question ever again. Now, no longer being in possession of a particular dress is not exactly a hardship; certainly not on the level of not having a place to live or enough to eat. But the panic bubbles up anyway, because I can’t just run to Antropologie or H&M or whereever the ladies several sizes down from me do their shopping and pick up another. Fat style is a scarce resource. So I allow myself a little leeway in my admittedly-irrational terror when a garment I love goes wrong.

And either way, it’s an awesome dress that deserves better than to be dragged through frozen mud. Am I right?

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