Searching for a ballgown

Fifi told me she knew a good couturier who could help make my dress. We planned to meet on Monday to go look at fabric stores together.* What I didn’t realize beforehand but was most pleased to discover was that the dressmaker was coming to be my personal shopping assistant. All I needed was a little dog in a handbag to round out the scene.

We started by going to her studio, (Atelier de Hippie, which Neela and I found amusing), to look at some examples of her work. Adèle tried to get me to try on a tiny gold dress she had made for a friend of hers. I stepped behind the curtain, pulled it up to my hips and called out that it ah, wasn’t going to work. Incredulous, she stepped back to assist – here, try it from above, wait, just hold still – and gave up when, with one of my arms in and one out, the fabric refused to wiggle over my ribs and we started laughing. Then Fifi tried and it fit like a glove and she stepped out looking stunning. Please though, I’m American. The comparison just isn’t fair.

Adèle took us from shop to shop, greeting her friends behind the counter and introducing me to all the luscious fabrics that could be wrapped all around my body. In one shop were a bunch of colorful African and Indian batik prints, patterns and colors that made me feel like I was in a candy store and instantly imbued me with visual ADD. In another was a little girl singing songs to herself and jumping around with a doll. Her mother, the saleswoman, told her to hush but I hoped she wouldn’t because her voice was almost as cute as her bashful two-foot high smile. In the last one we visited we were helped by an Arab woman who spoke a very nice English and French and laid out soft and shimmery fabrics that glided just so over our fingers.

As I gushed over fabric at the final store and told Fifi “There are so many pretty things!” she dryly responded, “Then which one do you want?” I got the message - they’d had enough. Some might call my indecision exhausting, but I like to think of it as careful deliberation which (usually) leads to a wise and well-informed course of action. But you say tomato, and so after two hours and with a fistful of samples to consider overnight, I let them go. I spent the rest of the afternoon browsing Anthropologie and Nordstrom.com and wrote Hannah to find inspiration.

And sitting there mid-search, it donged on me that here I was, liberated. Having a dress made means I can indulge in complete creative license. With the maker right there at my disposal, anything I could imagine is possible, along with a lot of things I can’t. Torn asunder from the rules of fashion and cultural conformities that pinch us in the shape and size of the moment! No going into the store and having to choose among racks of redundant designs that everyone and their mother wears for me! Right here in my grasp: ultimate freedom, the chance to make and own something totally unique. I turn my back on the bland, I refuse to settle for what’s in season, I outright defy the style du jour. What did I do next?

I went with the simplest design possible. Full circle, came I. By scrutinizing bushels of pictures and pawing through armfuls of fancy fabrics, I either got scared and retreated back to my first option or felt like the first one was just more and more validated. I mean, of course, it was definitely the latter.

I went to the market the next day with Livy to pick out a classic yet classy African fabric. We swept past the unidentifiable and nauseating smells at the entrance, past the distended-belly babies and the legless men with collection cups, past the stands with a 12-foot high assortment of foreign condiments and straight into the canopies of color. There, unavoidably, we disappeared into the narrow aisle, feasting our eyes up and down either wall of us to scan all the possibilities against a soundtrack of “Hey sista, this one very pretty!”

I felt like I was in a paper store, surrounded by pretty things and not really having a use for them but wanting to scoop them all up, take them home, and be happy in the fact of having so much prettiness in my possession. I ended up with a black fabric with large bold abstract flowers (or petals, I’m not really sure) in red and yellow. I talked the seller down from $20 to $15 and gave him $16. I thought Adèle would kill me when I showed up and said I had chosen something entirely apart from the dozens of fabrics we saw yesterday (and I didn’t dare mention that I found it in a quarter of the time). She smiled, understood, and went to taking my new measurements. I realize I really enjoy having measurements taken.

I pick it up on Halloween to wear to the Marine Ball on Saturday. If anybody from home wants something made and can send me measurements and a request, I’d be delighted to go shopping for you!

*Sidenote: Monday was a holiday to commemorate a massacre of schoolchildren that took place in 1993. The assassination of then President Ndadaye occurred the day before as a signal for the killing to start. These events precluded the quick descent into genocide and a decade-long civil war.