This article from The New York Times (free registration needed to view the web site - sometimes).
Warm temps in the US means we are seeing many dressed in the new spring styles.-Andee
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http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/24/fashion/24DRESSES.html
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April 24, 2008
Fashion Diary
Long Live the Dress (for Now)
By GUY TREBAY
ANYONE who pays attention to fashion may want to know that those in charge of deciding these things have pronounced doom on the dress. They, meaning mainly fashion editors and designers, claim the dress is dead. Kaput. Three years of women in dresses is enough.
“The eye is looking for something new, and so is the psyche,” Anne Slowey, the fashion news director of Elle magazine, said last week from the set of “Fashionista,” a new fashion reality show in which she will play herself, a fashion editor, only meaner. “The dress has been done to death,” Ms. Slowey added, “not to sound really cliché.”
Now, Ms. Slowey added — meaning not now, exactly, but months from now, in September — the thing it will be necessary to own in order to appear fashionable will be “the pant.” That is the singular form commonly used in the garment trade to describe what everywhere else is called trousers.
“The first hint of chill in the air, and the full-legged, pleated high- and low-waisted legions will be out in the urban jungle,” said Ms. Slowey, already so adapted to her new television role that she speaks in thought bubbles. The expiration date for the dress, she claimed, “is end of August.”
This prediction will come as a surprise, perhaps, to retail analysts like the folks at NPD Group, who not long ago termed 2007 the year of the dress, pointing to sales of more than $5 billion in the 12 months that ended last April, and a rate of growth in dress sales fully 30 percent higher than the year before.
It may also come as unwelcome news to the female members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, whose wildly anachronistic Laura Ingalls Wilder frocks, Skechers and wave-pool hairdos have become as much an obsession in certain Manhattan circles as their polygamist habits and 416 children.
It is also, for what it’s worth, unwelcome news to me.
That is because, unlike Ms. Slowey, I am not eager for women to become “a little more hard-core, a little more androgynous, a little more butch.” Yes, gender play is fun, and trousers are a useful wardrobe default for the woman in business. But unless you are Thomas McGuane and find nothing sexier than a woman with crow’s feet, tight Wranglers and suede chaps, you will have to concede that, for flattering a woman’s body, nothing is quite like a dress.
Irwin Shaw covered all this is in his classic story “The Girls in Their Summer Dresses,” the tale that secured him a permanent place in anthologies if not exactly a perch on literary Olympus. And for all the creakiness of this warhorse about the fragile dynamics of love and desire, there remains in Shaw’s descriptions of the women on the streets of Manhattan, in their ripe young multitudes, something unexpectedly fresh and also recognizable.
Shaw wrote the story decades ago, in the era that directly preceded the feminist one that first killed off the dress, a time when women wore them all the time and not with irony. When, as Shaw wrote, “the warm weather comes” and the streets of the city were filled with women in shifts and shirtwaists and tunics and baby-dolls and sheaths, arms and legs bared, the effect they had on the urban landscape was a glorious thing.
This was true in Shaw’s day and became true again a few years ago when, as Stephanie Solomon, the fashion director of Bloomingdale’s, said, “All of a sudden the dress was the ‘it’ item.”
So long out of favor, the dress was discovered by a generation that had never worn one and for which the garment was like some rare and exotic find.
“Your mother wore the dress, and you wore the jeans when I was growing up,” Ms. Solomon said. “She was in the Jackie O sheath, and you were in denim bell-bottoms.” By the time Ms. Solomon had entered the work force, however, “every woman had to have a long men’s wear blazer worn with pants and a bow blouse,” she said. “It was the worst. And then it morphed.”
Women, young and not so young, became aware again of what David Wolfe, the creative director of the Doneger Group, which forecasts fashion and retail trends, termed the “beauty of so many options.” A woman could wear, he said, “a sheath, or a dirndl shape, or a baby-doll or something close to the body or something that moved away from the body.” From a “retro” and “Mad Men” garment, the dress was transformed into a wardrobe staple, to the benefit of women and those who get pleasure from gazing at them.
“It’s my anti-mommy-blob outfit,” said Lesley Hartnett, who was out shopping one warm noontime last week and looking lean and sleek in a Diane Von Furstenberg wrap dress. “I feel glamorous in a dress, and it’s easy.” This view was shared, it would seem, by a lot of women stopped that day by a reporter on the street.
“I’m a girlie girl,” said Jacqueline Kelly, whose flowered dress was bought for her, she said, by her mother, a tiny blond bombshell. “I find that dresses are slimming, and they cover all the problem areas and highlight all the curves.”
The dress, Jennifer Emory, another midday shopper, said: “is very easy and very flattering — a no-brainer, really. It’s comfortable, and you can easily go from day to night. And guys like it because it’s so feminine.”
In a way, said Julie Gilhart, the fashion director of Barneys New York, “the dress is like the ultimate piece of clothing,” to suit the velocity of contemporary life. While she was once a person who approached her closet the way a D.J. might, Ms. Gilhart said, she now “throws on a dress, and when I go traveling I put in five dresses, a long cardigan and a coat.”
Certainly it’s much more efficient. “Instead of spending days thinking about your wardrobe,” she said, “you can concentrate on who you’re voting for for president.”
You might, that is, if the fashion elect, that cabal of malnourished sibyls and self-styled followers of Cruella De Vil, had not decided that the dress is dead, that what they like to call “the direction” for fall will turn women back, in a sense, toward men’s closets, encouraging them to outfit themselves in tough leather “statement” jackets, tight shirts and the trousers that, as Ms. Slowey of Elle put it, “make it easier to cross your legs.”
The cycle is turning, Ms. Solomon said, but it has not happened yet. And so, for those of us who take pleasure in the sight of a woman in a summer dress walking along Fifth Avenue, her dress caught in a faint breeze, a vision that calls to mind a Guy Wiggins painting or the famous bit of dialogue spoken by the actor Everett Sloane in “Citizen Kane,” there is still time.
“A fellow will remember a lot of things you wouldn’t think he’d remember,” said Sloane, in the role of Mr. Bernstein, the hard-bitten business manager for Charles Foster Kane.
Sloane spoke for a lot of us in recollecting a long-ago day and a girl he had seen on a ferry for barely an instant. “A white dress she had on,” he said.
“She didn’t see me at all,” he said, “but I’ll bet a month hasn’t gone by since that I haven’t thought of that girl.”
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Photo Essay:
http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2008/04/23/style/20080424dresses_index.html
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