Three Dresses I Guess I'd Die For

First things first, I feel like it's important to tell you all that I am listening to Beethoven's Grosse Fuge and having an out of control tinnitus attack at the same time as I'm writing this, so all in all, it might end up being a pretty dark and intense post for being about dresses. 

I originally named this post "Three Dresses I'd Die For" sort of absently, but then on the subway to work I fell into a thinking needlessly deeply about things on the subway thought-zone about how creepy the concept of dying for a dress is. And then I was like, maybe I should make the post about how these three dresses are all dresses that I'd want to get buried in, in my coffin, and then I started thinking about how maybe that's the ultimate mark of whether a dress is Great or not, and then I thought it might be cool to ask a bunch of people what outfit they'd like to be buried in and then blog about it. So maybe I'll do that! 

I added the "I guess" to the title to chill it out. I just paused the Grosse Fuge and now I'm back to being my regular chill self again. The other night I was out drinking with my co-workers (s/o to my co-workers! I love them so much) and we were talking about which restaurants in the world we'd most like to work at and I said, "Someplace really chill!" and then I was like, "I honestly don't know if there's a restaurant in this world chill enough for me," and then I thought about it and said, "Maybe a fish shack on the beach in Australia," and now I can't get this idea of "Fish shack on the beach in Australia" as being my Ultimate Chillness Locaysh out of my head. You know how tacky women's mags are always trying to help you find looks that can transition from day to night? Well my version of that is, here's three fabulous dresses that can transition from getting drunk at a fish shack in Australia to being buried in a coffin at your own funeral. 

-LJ

1. Gilbert Adrian evening dress from 1942

Lifelong pal-of-Strawberry Fields Whatever and co-proprietor of the wonderful (and this is coming from a person who thinks everything sucks) No One Can Sing The Blues Like No One Liina posted a link to this dress on my Facebook wall and now whenever I imagine myself doing anything cool in my head it's the dress I'm imagining myself wearing. Earlier today I was imagining myself, or a person in a story, being married to a concert violinist and living in Germany but really hating it and saying "Well I guess I'm going to go drink some fucking Riesling" while wearing this dress of course. Gorgeous. It's apropros of my life these days in that I've recently discovered that lamb is my favorite meat. I really like eating lambs. Dead lambs. (Grosse Fuge is back on!) A few weeks ago I was eating lunch with my mom at a Middle Eastern buffet yelling about how great Argo is while shovelling forkfuls of lamb into my face and it was a really beautiful moment in my life. I was like, "This is who I am." 

2. Bernhard Willhelm Jachooy dress

I don't know I guess if I really wanted this dress bad enough I could just buy it, since it's $132 on the Creatures of Comfort website and that's honestly not that bad of a price. It could be $232! $332! $432! I kind of wish it was. I fall in love with $432 dresses all the time but then forget about them really fast because there's no chance in the world that I could ever afford them so who even gives a shit. But $132 is such a weird amount of money. It represents all other potential prices somehow. I can afford it but I can't afford it. I could swing it if I really wanted but I'd definitely feel that $$$'s absence. I keep thinking about it like, "This Dress vs. 11 bottles of wine" and then I'm like "Well come on now Laura. That is SO MANY bottles of wine!" and the decision has already been made. I choose the wine.

3. The dress Gwen Stefani's wearing in the video for "Don't Speak"

A fun fact about my "process" is that while I was making this losery infographic out of 8000000 screen-caps I took of the "Don't Speak" video and kept x-ing rejected screen-caps, Photoshop would give me the option of "Save," "Cancel," or "Don't Save," and then I started singing "Don't Save" in my head to the tune of "Don't Speak," and it was soooooo stupid. I felt the same kind of low-impact embarrassed as I do when "You Sexy Thing" comes on at work and the restaurant's mostly empty and it's just me and one co-worker alone in a mostly empty restaurant listening to "You Sexy Thing." Ew. Certainly one of life's grosser moments.

Anyway, my major point about this dress is "Which woman's body wouldn't it flatter?" and the answer is "None of the above"- it's a trick question! It would flatter every woman's body. It's also the one out of the three that translates most coolly from fish shack on the beach to my own funeral. Also there's one part of the video where she's leaning over and you can see that the seam has burst down the side. It's pretty darling, and reminds you that Gwen Stefani used to be a chill normal person, and it kind of bums me out that she turned into this weird matriarch of her confusingly & seemingly aimed at nobody/gaudy/gold-sequinned L.A.M.B empire (the lamb and L.A.M.B of this post are a weird coincidence), because I feel like, had she been given the opportunity, she probably could have done a pretty cool job of being a chill normal person. I'll probably never write about Gwen Stefani again in my life so I just wanted to state for the official Gwen Stefani record of me that 1) Tony Kanal is a very beautiful man, 2) Kingston is a cooler name than Zuma, 3) I work out to "What You Waiting For" quite often and it really gets the job done & 4) Score for Gavin Rossdale that he married Gwen Stefani and now gets to just chillax and be a billionaire stay-at-home dad and do nothing but take Kingston and Zuma to the playground (they're ALWAYS at the playground) for the entire rest of his life. Gavin Rossdale's is the fish shack on a beach in Australia of lives.