The new Vogues came out a few weeks ago. For the most part, I...yawn. Oh, what was I saying? Yes, the new Vogues. Ho hum for the most part, with a few standouts and and a few duds. My favorite head-scratcher was this Chado Ralph Rucci number that one Pattern Review forum member quite accurately pegged as perfect if you needed to outfit your own personal Mini-Me:
One of my personal faves? Vogue 1134, which got pretty roundly thumbed-downed at Gertie's awesome blog and at the Pattern Review Message Board. Take a look at it:
Dear God. What a disaster! The model looks wide as a truck and rather unhappy about that fact. The fit around her bust is baggy -- really, it makes her head look sideshow circus small. And none of this is helped by the fact that someone in the Vogue hierarchy decreed that this dress should be made out of flowered fabric ripped off of a discarded sofa. Those flowers, I might add, are a specific shade of mustard yellow and green that a high school friend and I termed "puner" for its nausea inducing power. Note further that the flowers on the fabric run in a pattern as crazymaking as the yellow wallpaper in the Charlotte Perkins Gilman story.
So how could I like this dress? It doesn't even touch any of my usual weak spots, like big ol' floppy collars!
Well, take a look at the line drawing for starters:
It's actually pretty, with the gathers and the rounded waistline. Sort of a 1930s feel to my non-fashion historian mind. Imagine it cut to the knee and made in a fabric that wasn't a) puner, b) reminiscent of furniture or c) crazymaking -- perhaps an emerald green silk.
I think this is the ugly duckling with potential -- what do you think?