Wednesday: I am from the wrong era

In 1964, my mother was crowned Miss Connecticut. She was 18 and she spent the year making public appearances, waving in parades, wearing a number of glorious suits and dresses and competing in the 1964 Miss America pageant in Atlantic City. She lost, and four years later she was happily married with a new baby girl (me).

I grew up playing hide-and-seek among my mother's pageant dresses and suits, where in the dark of the hall closet I could slip my hand under the plastic wrap and touch the soft velvet and crinkly bugle beads. If we were really good, sometimes she would let us wear her crown; my sister and I would impatiently sit on the edge of her bed as she took it out of its green cardboard box, rapping my feet against the mattress as she clipped it to my head with bobby pins. There were and are photos everywhere in my house, of my mom in her Jackie O style suits, crisp and polished and so very 1960s. I still have the full Miss America photo in my living room, a black-and-white extra-long landscape shot of 50 lovely women in ball gowns and white gloves, representing their states with pride and grace.

Growing up in the 1970s, lots of kids my age had hippie parents; I had a beauty queen. For many years I rebelled against that, refusing to wear makeup or care about my appearance, rolling my eyes every time my mother tried to suggest ways I could make myself look more attractive. It has only been in the last few years that I've changed my attitude about my appearance and fashion in general, and in the last year that I've been able to lose enough weight to be able to wear different styles besides "hide the belly". I finally have all the pieces in place to seek and find styles that appeal to me, silhouettes that work for my body and my sensibilities and my style.



Turns out, I like to dress the way my mother used to when she was a beauty queen. Shapely silhouettes, classic elegant lines, the last era when women dressed up for ordinary days, not just special occasions. (Special occasions require velvet and bugle beads.) It's kind of amazed me to realize that; I'd been thinking lately that I was becoming too enamored of the "Mad Men" style, which was weird because I don't watch that show. But I love the look of that era, and now I realize I always have.



Top: white ribboned camisole, ATF; Semantiks purple plaid knit top, Nordstroms
Belt: elastic-and patent belt, AT
Bottom: black pencil skirt, AT
Shoes: Lifestyle pumps

I just picked up this top at Nordstroms last night; it killed me to pay full-price for it, but I knew I had to have it. Purple plaid! It's just so darned pretty. I felt pretty in it all day.

Almost like a beauty queen. :)