I'd love to pull off Dior New Look, but I don't have enough curves. My measurements are all within a few inches of each other. Yet I keep trying to make it work, and I wonder why it doesn't. The measurements haven't changed. Duh.

For those of you who don't follow the Dress A Day blog, this was the dress that had me contemplating radical plastic surgery.

I want this one.

[link]

Again, I'd need to carve off whole chunks of myself. But it's pink velvet! [link]

H'rm, ita, I'm not totally sure. My knowledge is cobbled together from a number of sources, though I'm sure there are some history-of-fashion omnibus volumes that have all the info in one place. In googling about, it looks like there are a few history of the corset sites that give you some idea of the shifts in the ideal shape, and I have a basic history of clothing book at home that scampers from the Dark Ages straight through to the 80s or 90s, but my brain is too sick-fogged to remember the name.

My totally ex cloaca 20th century body silhouette history goes roughly like this:

Aughts to teens: Pigeon-breasted - big emphasis on the bust, tiny waist (but photos of the time were usually retouched at the waist, so it wasn't quite as bad as it look), ass also appreciated (the bustle was fading but not quite gone).

Mid-teens to 20s: Getting lankier, less breasty, less hippy (influenced partly by the women's suffrage movements in England and the US, but likely also by the Great War -- clothing generally gets less foofy in wartime, due to both Bigger Things At Stake and worker/material shortages), ending in the flapper androgyne look, with outerwear bulking way the hell out around the time of Prohibition, both because it facilitated booze-smuggling and because if you were a hip edgy young person wishing to piss off all the grownups, what better way to do it than by looking like a smuggler? The gangsta look is so nothing new.

30s: A bit curvier than the flappers, but still slim, lanky, athletic.

40s: Curvier still, big shoulders (faux military styles cropping up, again with the wartime influence).

50s: Full-on hourglass, slightly more tolerance of big lush figures (as long as there was still a little tiny waist - that's a miserable constant).

60s: Back to the skinny flat ideal, except tilting more waiflike than dangerously androgynous (cf. the ascendance of the wee, elfin and absurdly perfect Audrey Hepburn, the big late-60s mad love for Twiggy).

70s: The fuck. I have no idea.

80s: See 70s, except with shoulder pads and preppies and stoners and drama geeks and the beginning of a general fragmentation of What We're All Supposed To Look Like. There was probably some one big look that the fashion gods in New York and Paris wanted everyone to aspire to, but everyone was starting to grab whatever they liked and drift off in a billion different directions.

When I get home I'll look up the titles of the actual, you know, books.

You know, people, somewhere out there, there's a guy waiting for a call back from the help desk, and y'all aren't helping him to get it any sooner because your PRETTY PRETTY DRESS LINKS are so much more fun.

I will keeel you for that one, Empress.

But first I'd have to keeel myself in the gym. I haven't seen a 27 inch waist since I last played with a Barbie doll.

Ok, between JZ's seamstress, my new one, and Jilli's, there should be a way for all of us (that want one - I know it's improbable that everyone wants ons one) to have a pink velvet circle dress.

Those dresses are gorgeous. I'm having trouble deciding between them, though Aimee's is winning out, I think.

They're both making the J. Jill catalog look like chopped liver on stale toast.

Ok, between JZ's seamstress, my new one, and Jilli's, there should be a way for all of us (that want one - I know it's improbable that everyone wants ons one) to have a pink velvet circle dress.

Believe me, I am saving the pictures of it to show to Jay the WonderSeamstress. The trick will be finding fabric of comparable quality.