Fashion Plate

My daughter Betty is only three months old and she has an entire closet and dresser full of clothes. She has a pink corduroy mod dress with a brown flower on it, a pair of pink and gray striped bellbottoms, a gray shirt with robots on it and a gray Jackie Kennedy coat for fall. Many of these items are gifts and/or hand-me-downs, and she has grown so fast already that it's hard to predict what size she'll be next week, let alone next month.

One of her favorite games to play is "put away laundry" or "put on a new outfit." In both of these games, I hold up a piece of clothing and tell her what color it is and what it is. She always seems entertained by it, though it might be because I enjoy it and it's contagious. Sometimes I  even use a little bit of spit up on the neckline of a onesie as an excuse to pick out something new for her to wear. My love of dressing her has far exceeded my love of shopping for myself wearing nice things; most days I wear yoga pants and sweatshirts. I'm not working right now and I rarely go anywhere that merits a nice dress or even clean hair.

When I was small, I loved going clothes shopping with my mother. I was a "girly girl" from the start--my mother, who rarely wore skirts or dresses and still owned, in the 1980s, a clumpy, separated bottle of foundation from 1969, did not make me this way. I always wanted a complete outfit: hat, dress, purse, patent leather shoes, and every Easter I got just that. My mother, a great bargain shopper, would take me to Capitol department store in Lowell, with the clown on the sign, which was more like a warehouse full of off-priced merchandise: Izod shirts with the tags ripped off, books with the covers ripped off. I realize now that these items might have been procured illegally, but it was thrifty to shop at Capitol, and they had everything from Barbies to lawn mowers.

The one thing I wanted the most was a long dress, the kind that Cinderella or Laura from Little House on the Prairie might wear. It was the 1970s, we weren't Amish, and most stores didn't carry long dresses for little girls. I begged my mother to let me wear my butterfly nightgown to school in the hope that I could pass it off as a long dress, but she said no. My young, hip aunt who wore a leather visor and aviator shades tried to get me to be more with it by buying me a pair of jeans, which I refused to wear. That Christmas, my babysitter Jeannie, who was from Taiwan and had a new baby of her own, made me my own long dress--it was red and white, with a flower design, complete with white apron and Holly Hobbie-style bonnet. My parents have pictures of me in it that Christmas--I was quite a sight in my giant red bonnet with my missing front teeth. Although my mother judged it too "fancy" for school, I wore the ensemble every day after school until it ripped and finally ended up as a doll blanket, eventually landing in the rag pile.

My favorite outfit in junior high was a dark blue Nike t-shirt and shorts. My husband saw a picture of me back then and thought it was my brother. I don't remember when I stopped liking dresses, but I started dressing up for school again in college. I am not sure what Betty will wear when she can choose her clothes, but I am pretty sure I won't approve of it. I can keep my mouth shut, though, especially if I think of my mother putting up with the red prairie dress and bonnet every day.