Never feel weird in a wedding fit again
"Dress up" Concorde style
Concorde is a bimonthly edition of the sletter where Erin takes the lead. You could call it a women’s vertical, but the insights, intel and “cute swag information” transcend gender. The full Concorde archive lives here…
“Dressing up” — so many of us get flummoxed and frazzled by the prospect.
We’ve amassed wardrobes that, as far as daily driver-type pieces go, have a familiar, coherent internal logic: We feel confident about what our favorite pieces say to the world, how they link & build with other beloved clothes we wear, and how they speak to our bodies and our personalities in ways that bring out the best of both. But that confidence can drop away VERTIGINOUSLY when it comes to the “hero pieces” and “statement fits” required for special events — clothes that, by definition, we haven’t worn much / ever.
And the vertigo is especially high during wedding season, now upon us!
It’s easy to get into your own head about what to wear as a wedding guest. The wedding industry is one of the most prolific and pervasive image-generating behemoths on the planet, built on a mindf**k foundation of romantic fantasy and consumerist predation. This creates all kinds of expectations — real and imaginary, but where’s the line?? — of what we “should” look like attending one. At a given wedding you might feel simultaneously 1. like you’re at a high school reunion (“that evil b**ch Tina from 10th grade is gonna be there, judging me and all my life choices as reflected by my shoes??”) 2. like you’re at a red-carpet gala (“this s**t is going to be heavily flicked up by professional photographers and my drunk friends!!”) 3. like you’ve entered an alternate dimension whose dress codes are governed by deranged paradox (“what the f**k am I supposed to do with ‘Funky-Glam Hayride’??”)
If assembling an outfit is like “writing a sentence about yourself,” assembling a wedding outfit can make you feel like you’re trying to write a sonnet about yourself in iambic pentameter … in a foreign language… where the only phrase you know is Where is the library?
We get questions regularly about wedding fits in the Spytalk chat room. And today I’m going to go deep on the topic, via an exchange I had with SpyFriend Leigh Patterson, who created the excellent Moon Lists journals. Figuring out how to dress for an upcoming wedding was spiraling her into an “existential crisis,” so she hit me up to talk it through. Our conversation helped me realize that the best way to free yourself from the fear of dressing for a “special occasion” is, at bottom, to figure out how to lean into the idea of a costume. That way, you start to see the event not as an obligation you’ve got to contort yourself into unnaturally, but rather as an opportunity to play a character you were born to play.
After all, your everyday wardrobe is full of costumes. It’s just that, at their best, they’re costumes that express and enhance things you like about yourself. As a culture, we’ve become increasingly accustomed to talking about outfits in terms of performance, and I often get dressed with characters in mind: Today I’m “giving” Katherine Hepburn at the skate park; today I’m “giving” yé-yé girl goes mushroom foraging. Just think of weddings as chances to inhabit even more elaborate / outré / glamorous roles.
I asked Leigh, who gives great prompts in her journals, to give me some lively wedding-fit prompts to start with. She came through with brilliance, and I used her prompts to devise a handful of wedding-guest moodboards that will not only “work” but feel fun at virtually any special event. (If the context is more or less formal, you could basically just modulate the length of the dress and accessories accordingly.) I also picked pieces with enough versatility that you can use them well after the wedding in question.
VERY IMPORTANTLY, as hard as it sounds, don’t dress for images you imagine will outlive the event — dress for how you want to feel in the moment. What’s better? Pics of you looking stiff and uncomfortable, having a bad time? Or pics of you looking blissfully unselfconscious, beaming like a joyous swaggy goof among the people you love ??
And please share your own prompts with us too : )
1. “Gelato In A Silver Coupe”
Think: Sophisticated creamy colors — this ain’t no rainbow sherbet. The shock of cool silver on your tongue. Elegant tank dresses and metallic flashes.
