127 Feisty Dresses
CW: Excessive Dress Wearing
My name is Jen, and I have a bit of a Dress Problem. I mean, it’s not really a problem other than spending a larger than average amount of money on dresses and not having enough space to store them all, or the excess joy they bring me while wearing them.
In 2019, I did a thing called 100 Feisty Dresses where I wore 100 dresses over 100 days starting on January 1 and ending in April on the same day that the UCP were elected in Alberta (but please don’t blame my dresses on that).
If you want to see those dresses, you can search #100feistydresses on Instagram. You can also find a few of the posts if you search #100feistydresses on Twitter and select “latest” - in theory they should all be there but as we know, the site is a bit broken right now.
I’ve had some of my dresses for 20+ years and for much of that time was the same size, and many of them were never really in style so I say they never go out of style. Then the pandemic happened and I gained some weight and not all of them fit anymore. I hadn’t counted my dresses since 2019 and lately a few people have asked, so I checked and now have 127 dresses and 44 skirts. Of those, I gave away 20 dresses and 4 skirts, which had a brief visit with some junior high students in Edmonton at a fashion class before making their way to a women’s shelter in Whitecourt.
As you can probably tell, I prefer brightly coloured and patterned dresses over plain ones and in the last few years, I have been very drawn to the styles and patterns of Svaha, after being introduced to the brand by an Edmonton Twitter friend in 2020. These are some of the most comfortable dresses I have ever owned - all have amazing STEM inspired patterns, pockets and work well for a chronically painful body. One day while wearing a dress that has mathematical equations done by Katherine Johnson at NASA (who you may recall as one of the characters in the Hidden Figures book and film) I was helping a family find books at the library and had a conversation with a little girl about it, who promptly decided she’d like to work for NASA one day too. Here are a few of my other Svaha favourites:
I’ve also fallen in love with some dresses recently ordered from Modern Millie (also suggested by a Twitter friend), especially the Retrolicious brand (although I did know about this brand from previous purchases at Rowena and Mars and Venus in Edmonton). Here are some of those favourites:
And I can’t forget some of the times Jeff has done epic outdoor photos with me while wearing party dresses. While I’ve loved all of those shoots, the two favourites took place in Tofino, one of my most treasured and magical spots in the world.
When I post dress photos on Twitter, I always have at least one person ask if I make my dresses, to which I say no, I am not that talented. The one exception is the button dress that I made over a few months in 2020, and even then I didn’t make the dress itself, just sew the buttons on it.
CTV article about button dress
I find it very tricky to decide on my favourite dress, but if I had to pick just one I believe it would be my second carrot dress (yes I have two carrots dresses) not only because of the fantastic print, fit and pockets, but because of how the dress came about and some of the memories I have associated with the dress. After giving a Vancouver friend some advice, he offered a bottle of wine or something of my choosing to return the favour and one day in 2017 I shared an image of the carrot fabric from Spoonflower on Facebook, professing my love for the pattern. He then had a dress designed for me out of the fabric, which fit perfectly and I still treasure.
As you can see, buying and wearing dresses is kind of my jam. I love the joy they bring me and others, that I have inspired/enabled some Twitter friends to buy and wear brighter patterns, and I even love passing them onto someone new when they no longer fit me.
Your dresses are classic, elegant and often themed based. The dresses are also practical as they have pockets. For work are your dresses "durable and able to be machine washed"?
I love your dresses and they always look so good on you. I am short...like 5 feet so always feel I do not wear dresses very well now that my feet have decided heels are not for them. In fact I only usually buy maybe one dress a year; that would be to attend a wedding usually. I think the last dress I purchased was for a pre-pandemic wedding and grad . It works for me because I rarely am in the same audience of people two times in a row. Thus no one really notices or cares that the same old dress is out again! Now skinny jeans, leggings and sweaters...that is my thing.