Easily duped
This is no time to send in the clones:
In order to help our nation’s leaders avoid critical fashion faux pas, DressRegistry.com recently sent letters to U.S. Senators urging them to register evening gowns they planned on wearing to upcoming inaugural balls.
Yes, there’s a reason for this:
DressRegistry.com was created to help women avoid what happened to First Lady Laura Bush in December 2006 when she and three other women wore the same Oscar de la Renta to a White House gala and then had the event immortalized on the evening news.
And it makes perfect sense to E. M. Zanotti:
I understand this problem, as starlets, drag queens and First Ladies alike have all dealt with the inevitable dress duplicate who not only looks better in the dress, but who also paid less for it upfront, but I tend to think this particular effort is aimed at helping Michelle Obama avoid an Inauguration night disaster wherein a closet Senatorial sci-fi fanatic decides to repeat Michelle’s election night triumph by wearing the Alien birth “after” dress to a low-level function.
You surely remember that triumph, perhaps not fondly.
And those fears, I am convinced, are legitimate: around the Senate these days, everything that isn’t science fiction is fantasy.
fillyjonk »
8 January 2009 · 7:34 am
Showing up at some function in the same dress as someone else is a “tragedy” I understand on an intellectual level (I can see how it might be damaging to a woman’s self-esteem if her “twin” looked better in the dress than she did), but I have to say it is one thing about which I never have actually worried.
I suppose part of it is that I depend more on my intelligence and personality than on my looks to make my way in the world, but another part of it may be that I’ve never exactly cared that much about fashion, so I’d probably be likely to be wearing last year’s dress or somesuch to that sort of a thing. Or if I had loads of money? I’d hire a dressmaker to work out something individual that was particularly flattering to my own set of body-challenges.
But alas, I missed the Beaux-Arts Ball, and what is twice as sad, I was never at a party that honored Noel Coward, so perhaps my lack of concern over the issue has to do with the fact that I really don’t go anywhere all that “formal”
Kay Dennison »
8 January 2009 · 9:27 am
I suppose if one travels in such social circles, I suppose that wearing the same dress as someone else is a tragedy. I’m not into that. I go to two formal occasions a year and a dozen or so semi-formal things. I have a fine collection of “Audrey Hepburn” type black dresses of varyied hem lengths that have become my signature. It works. I alway get compliments.
I’m with you on Michelle. I’m betting the dress in question was bought in a hurry and that it coordinated with her daughters’ dresses was a factor. Mothers do stuff like that. Usually she wears clothes that suit her well.
Dan B »
8 January 2009 · 5:19 pm
Both of my wife’s grandmothers showed up at our wedding wearing the same dress. One was trying to pass it off as a custom-job (whatever the clothing equivalent is called), until the other one showed up bragging about the great deal she got on it at JcPenney. I don’t think they ever spoke again.
McGehee »
9 January 2009 · 6:10 am
Dan, the first one’s name isn’t Hyacinth, by any chance?
Dan B »
10 January 2009 · 10:02 am
No, but you’re on the right track. Someone in the 1920s gave a daughter the first and middle names Magnolia Flower. And yes, they were from the South.