Mirror Ball

Dressopotamia is a bit like Zeno's Paradox for me, in that the closer I get to the end, the harder it is for me to finish.

But finish I will, as my closet is finite. (I once read an article comparing Sex & the City to a superhero franchise: instead of a cyborg whose punches have the power of kicks—





we have four women with endlessly varied designer wardrobes and magical closets that expand to fit them, fulfilling, well-paid jobs that leave them with enough free time to go on a million dates a week and discuss them at brunch, force fields that leave them impervious to STIs, and, of course, the ability to pull appropriately dirty puns out of thin air. I might even envy the pun thing more than the wardrobe thing.)

Mirror Ball is almost cacophonous in its melding of cut and pattern. Mostly a simple silhouette, it has a few grace notes near the neckline, which is of course the most important place to have them.

Remember: the further it is from your face, the less it matters.

It's a little hard to tell because of all the different motifs going on in the pattern, but the piece that creates the high neck comes down to a "V" where it meets the bodice.

Can you see it?

Another detail that Mirror Ball throws in for the heck of it is the ruching of the bodice along the shoulders. I was going to say "where it meets the yoke," but that mirror-ball-on-black-background bit you see is of a piece with the back of the dress.

And we've also got that tried and true standby, that mark of quality:

Fabric-covered buttons! And fabric-covered button loops! Be still my heart.

Now, does the pattern on Mirror Ball work as well as it could? That's up for debate. There's a lot going on, and it doesn't seem to fit together in an especially coherent or sensical way.

We've got these big blue arches on the bodice, which for some reason remind me of movie palaces. Or maybe organs.

Then they run into motifs both floral and geometric that appear to be struggling for dominance over at the right shoulder.

The skirt throws some random stripes into the mix, and transforms those geometric motifs into Xmas tree ornaments/disco mirror balls.

Trust me, I've looked for some kind of unifying principle at work here. It's like a precocious sixth-grader was making a collage out of construction paper—or three collages—but got bored halfway through and left all the scrap paper and half-thought-out visual ideas on the kitchen table for her dad to clean up. For some reason, dads hate that.

The back is equally haphazard, but repeats almost immediately, making it clear that there is a pattern at work here, no matter how nonsensical it may be.

Same arches, same competing themes up top, same funnels, same disco balls on the bottom.

So. In some ways, Mirror Ball is kind of a mess.

And it doesn't even remind me of volcanoes, or cats wearing pearls, or times when I stayed out way later than I should have, or Halloweens past, or modern medicine's dangerous overreliance on antibiotics.

But: it is very well made (fabric-covered buttons), and perfectly suitable for the cooler weather, and requires basically no special treatment. You can have Mirror Ball when you wrench it from my cold dead paws...

Let's hope Sandy doesn't help you out with that.


All photos by Claire Loeb!