Wardrobe Cure Interview - Volume One

And now for something (almost) completely different.

Wende's Wardrobe Cure is off to a smashing start. Here's the first installment of my interview.

Favorites

Candidate for "Best Dressed," real or fictional. Bette Davis in All About Eve; Gwynneth Paltrow in Posession. Scarlett Johansson in real life, in honor of her refusal to wait until she's 45 to start dressing like a real, live grownup. And a certain woman I once worked with who was completely disagreeable in every way except for her fashion sense, for which she became my professional role model.

Favorite garment/outfit EVER. I can’t believe I’m writing this, and it can't possibly be the actual, literally accurate answer to this question, but... I keep coming back to my prom dress. Extra-dark emerald green (God's gift to redheads), fit like it was custom made for me, and styled in such a way that it would suit me completely and look absolutely current if I put it on right now, yet didn't make me look dowdy at 16. And it was on sale - $50 in the mid-90s at some independent bridal shop in the East Bay.

Current favorite garment. This is hard. Maybe...the brown shirt dress, the green shirt dress, the purple cashmere sweater, the black round-toe pumps, the brown leather blazer. Or possibly the utterly fabulous brown and teal dress bought on clearance and later spotted, incongruously, in an article about "how to dress sexy for a hot date when you're over 40." For the record, I'm 28, and I've mostly been wearing the dress to church...

Favorite thing to wear, if reality weren't an issue in any way, shape, or form. Wrap dresses. I love the look, and I love what they do for me…except that they’re usually designed around a differently proportioned torso than mine, and end up being unworkably immodest without major renovations. (As in, I’d be showing off less if I were a in a Victoria’s Secret photo shoot, and safety pins don't even start to help.) I'm sure there's some version out there that would work for me, but I haven't found it yet, and I've looked a lot.

Favorite store, given unlimited wealth. Honestly, all I can think of is Ann Taylor. There are many more thrilling options, but that’s the one that consistently has on offer the largest selection of things I would actually want.

Favorite fashion faux-pas story to tell, now that the scars have healed. Well, I was out clothes-shopping a few years ago, and, unbeknownst to me, I was wearing a Velveteen Rabbit in an advanced stage of reality. It was a cute little shirt given to me by a friend during high school that I was still wearing quite happily at age 24 or so. I took some things to the dressing room, and when I took off my shirt to try them on, it basically fell apart at the seams. It was just enough intact that I could make it back to the car without shoplifting or being arrested for indecency.

More to come...