FashBlog.com

By Christina VanGinkel

Every woman wants at some time in her life the perfect little black dress! Yeah, right! Watching a sitcom the other evening based around this whole subject made me try to remember if this item was ever on my most wanted list of clothing items. While not a clothes hound in any sense of the phrase, I tried to recall if at anytime I had coveted the proverbial little black dress. I had not been able to remember so, but when I mentioned this subject to my daughter, she recalled a time when she was about seven or eight years old, and sat on my bed watching me get ready for an evening out with her father.

She said I took everything, piece by piece, outfit by outfit, out of my closet trying things on. I would pull on one, stand in front of the mirror, and ask her in all her seven or eight year old wisdom if it looked ok. After doing this for quite a bit of time, I finally responded that what I really needed was a little black dress! I do not remember this at all. She said that she remembers it vividly, as she wondered why a black dress would work, if no other dresses were good enough, oh, the wisdom of a child.

Somewhere ingrained in each of us, male or female, is a desire for our clothing to look not only passable, but knock down gorgeous. The evening my daughter remembers must have been for an anniversary dinner, or maybe an evening out for my husband's birthday or mine. Those were the few times a year that we went all out, getting dressed up, and going out to dinner, other than the annual Christmas party for work, but I always wore something a bit more festive than black for those. We were never the couple who would get all dressed up just to go out. There had to be, and still does have to be, an occasion worthy of the effort. Do not get me wrong; I see nothing wrong with getting dressed up to go out, it just does not fit very well with the rural, very rustic type of lifestyle we have always led.

I still have times that, I wish a little black dress would work some magic on me, but I have grown to be even more conservative in my clothing styles through the years, if that is at all possible. My idea of getting dressed up now, means not wearing my ripped jeans, and a jacket other than my fleece lined jean jacket, or at the least, getting out of my fuzzy slippers sometime before noon. I honestly do not even remember getting all fancied up in the past year except for the annual Christmas party. Maybe a black dress (notice I removed the word little!) is exactly what I do need. Something to remind me that dressing up can be fun. That showing my spouse that there is more to me than a pair of jeans or sweats sitting at the computer. Then again, his idea of getting dressed up means finding a pair of jeans that look relatively new, and putting on a camouflage shirt that he has yet to wear hunting! Hmm, I wonder if there is an alternative to the little black dress for men.