Summer Dresses

 Summer dresses tend to have shorter lifetimes than cooler weather dresses. Sweat and frequent laundering tend to be hard on fabric.

Earlier this morning I was steaming the creases out of a batch of dresses and,  it seemed to me like a good subject for a post.

The fabric for this dress is Marimekko. The fabric had had a previous life as a tablecloth used by the fabulous and chic Sharri who passed away just as Covid hit New York. Sharri's chic and fabulous daughter gave me bags and bags of wonderful textiles that had belonged to her mother. I cut this dress along the lines of the dress I had knocked off of a Norma Kamali dress. I wore this dress to my nephew's wedding and have made a couple of variations since. 

One of the things that I love about the black and white dress is that although I didn't match the pattern at the center seamlines, they are perfectly matched at the side seams.  Another thing that I love about the dress is that it reminds me of both Sharri and my mother each time i wear it. The dress evokes the kind of woman who wore Marimekko dresses in the summer in the 1960s and 70s and that moment of change and possibility.

I purchased a bolt remnant of this fabric at my local thrift. while it evoked the same moment in time as the Marimekko the fabric had a country club vibe. The fabric looks like linen but it is a mystery synthetic. I can't wear it when it is really hot out. The first time I wore the dress to synagogue (with giant pearls) my friend Vivian who grew up in the county club adjacent suburbs of Philadelphia immediately got that this dress was a joke---a send-up of the fancy ladies that our mothers aspired to be. I turned the rest of the fabric on the bolt into a table cloth. I will occasionally wear the dress on Friday nights when that cloth is on the table. You can read whatever commentary on feminine domesticity into that choice.

 This dress is about a constellation of errors. The fabric also came my way via dead old lady. I don't know the original owner of the fabric. It is Indian batik cotton that is in a colorway that was popular in the late 1960s and early 1970s. When the fabrics were new, the two oranges were the same color. many washes later the border fabric is a true orange and the fabric in the main body of the dress is now a salmon color. 

When I first made this dress the bodice was too small so I pieced a bit more fabric  into the back seam. I had somehow put in the zipper both off center and crooked. The waistline was in an awkward place. I loved the fabric so I did what most  of my sewing friends would do. I wadded it up and put it away. After a couple of years I pulled the dress out of wadder-land tried it on and reevaluated. The problems that had seemed insurmountable a few years ago now seemed like an easy fix. I removed the zipper,  reinstalled it and while the dress is technically imperfect it actually looks pretty good on with a belt and garners lots of compliments every time I wear it.

I had once gotten a length of khaki linen in a mystery bundle of fabric. I turned it into an Eileen Fisher/ Flaxx style tank dress with a bit of embellishment at the neck. For some reason it had seemed like a disaster when I had first made it and it too resided in wadder-land for a couple of years. I pulled it out of purgatory and tried it on at the beginning of the summer and either little elves did their magic while I wasn't looking or perhaps all the dress needed was for me to drop a few pounds. I can't always bear wearing this color but for the right moment it is a nice dress to wear when it is hot and muggy out.

This dress isn't technically a summer dress  I wear it all year round. It is a dress that looks awful on the hanger. But on the body and belted I have never not felt great in this dress.  I bought the fabric from Kashi at Metro. I loved the creased striped knit so much that I purchased it in two other colors ( grey and green) and all three dresses are worn often. 

I loved the fabric so much that I purchased the coordinating sweater knit. I made one failed attempt to make a dress out of the far too floppy sweater knit and turned some of the failure into a shrug.

Like summer, summer dresses are momentary. After a season or two they will be residing in the rag bag.