{"id":158000,"date":"2022-03-25T16:00:29","date_gmt":"2022-03-25T20:00:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=158000"},"modified":"2022-03-25T16:11:01","modified_gmt":"2022-03-25T20:11:01","slug":"the-dress","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2022\/03\/25\/the-dress\/","title":{"rendered":"The Dress"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Illustration by Na Kim.<\/p><\/div>\n

I bought the dress known in inner circles\u2014that is, in the echo chamber of my closet\u2014as the Dress in 1987, for a rehearsal dinner in New York for a couple I\u2019ll call Peter and Sally. I found it on sale at Barney\u2019s on Seventeenth Street. On the hanger, it looked like a long, black cigarette holder. It was February, and outside on the street, the wind was coming up Seventh Avenue. I had been married for exactly one month. That year, all my college friends were getting married. We barged from one wedding to another, carrying shoes that hurt our feet. In some cases, we knew each other all too well; sometimes the marriage was the direct result of another marriage, on the rebound: someone\u2019s beloved had married someone else, chips were cashed. In this instance, I had hung around with the groom on and off through college, and the bride had once been the girlfriend of the man I left when I met my husband. The Dress was a sleeveless crepe de chine sheath, with a vaguely Grecian scooped neckline composed of interlocking openwork squares, which sounds dreadful but was not. It was sublime. Cut on the bias, it skimmed the body\u2014and, it turns out, it skims\u00a0everyone\u2019s<\/em>\u00a0<\/em>body: the Dress has been worn to the Oscars three times\u2014in 2001, 2009, and 2018\u2014though not by me.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

In 1987, the nominees for Best Picture were\u00a0Platoon<\/em>,\u00a0Children of a Lesser God<\/em>, The Mission<\/em>, Hannah and Her Sisters<\/em>,\u00a0and\u00a0A Room with a View.<\/em>\u00a0That year, my husband and I had spent our winter honeymoon in Italy, at the pensione in which Lucy Honeychurch feels so fettered in\u00a0A Room with a View<\/em>; we\u2019d eaten our tiny breakfasts from pink plates.\u00a0Hannah and Her Sisters<\/em>\u00a0was nominated for seven Academy Awards and won three, including Best Original Screenplay. In those days, I lived in a tiny apartment on West End Avenue with a window that looked out onto the brick wall opposite. In the spring, the wall was covered with morning glories. During those years, my friends and I were eating ramen dry out of the packet and still scrounging, late at night, through the refrigerators of our parents\u2019 apartments\u2014which looked like the apartment in\u00a0Hannah and Her Sisters<\/em>\u2014on Central Park West and Riverside Drive, at after-parties that went on long after they should have ended. The movie seemed to us about people inconceivably older than we were, making bad decisions of the kind we would never make. When we thought about our futures it was as if we were looking through the wrong end of a telescope. The week I bought the Dress, a friend of mine saw a man jump from an upstairs window and hurtle into the courtyard of her parents\u2019 Riverside Drive apartment below. She was sitting next to her parents, and her brother, with a girl from Ohio whom he planned to marry. No one said a word.<\/p>\n

Of the evening of Peter and Sally\u2019s rehearsal dinner I remember little, except that the heel of my shoe detached when I stepped out of the subway on Seventy-Seventh Street, and that the Dress made me feel like Anjelica Huston in\u00a0<\/em>Prizzi\u2019s Honor<\/em>,\u00a0a film that had been nominated for Best Picture the year before. Or, at least, that was the idea. ( \u201cDo I marry her? Do I ice her?\u201d asks Jack Nicholson, as Charley Partanna, in the film\u2019s best lines. \u201cMarry her, Charley,\u201d says Huston, as Maerose Prizzi. \u201cJust because she\u2019s a thief and a hitter doesn\u2019t mean she\u2019s not a good woman in all the other departments.\u201d) For the wedding the next day I wore a sleeveless blue-plaid silk dress of my mother\u2019s, made by Jacques Fath in 1952, which was tight in the waist. I was too hot and the zipper broke. The next year my husband and I had a child, and that spring we took her to Florence, where she fell in love with the pigeons in the piazza by Santa Maria del Fiore, and we discovered that at least four pensiones near the Uffizi claimed to be the one where A Room with a View<\/em>\u00a0had been filmed.<\/p>\n

But the Dress? Like many things we think belong to us, it\u2019s had a life of its own, like an old lover who resurfaces, now a fish wearing a waistcoat, in dreams. In 2001, extracted from behind a pile of snowsuits and maternity clothes, it went to the Oscars, for\u00a0Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,<\/em>\u00a0written by Kuo Jung Hsai, Hui-Ling Wang, and James Schamus, which had been nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay. \u201cWhat am I going to wear?\u201d\u00a0Schamus\u2019s wife, Nancy, had asked me as we sat in the Riverside Park playground six months before 9\/11, watching two little girls pour cold sand on each other\u2019s head.\u00a0 A decade later, in the second year of the Obama administration, the Dress walked the red carpet, worn by my friend Margaret, when her husband, the cinematographer Tom Hurwitz, was nominated in the Best Documentary (Short Subject) category, for\u00a0Killing in the Name<\/em>,\u00a0a film about Islamist terrorism. In 2018, my friend Susan, whose husband, Andr\u00e9 Aciman, wrote the book\u00a0Call Me by Your Name<\/em>, came over one afternoon a few weeks before the Oscars to show me and my youngest daughter her outfit: a silk skirt printed with roses, and a shirred black V-neck top. Susan and I pulled a black beaded jacket I had bought at Housing Works out from my closet, and substituted a black silk shell for her top. She wore her own shoes and looked ravishing. From where she was sprawled on my bed, my daughter called, \u201cYou should feel like\u00a0you<\/em>, not like you\u2019re wearing someone else\u2019s clothes!\u201d Susan looked grim. \u201cI\u00a0am<\/em>\u00a0wearing someone else\u2019s clothes!\u201d she replied. She gave the beaded jacket a gimlet eye. \u201cI think it\u2019s too much.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cShow her the Dress,\u201d my daughter called back. By now, Susan, who has raised three boys but no girls, was back in her jeans and sweater, ready to go. \u201cI have to get undressed\u00a0again<\/em>?\u201d she said, rolling her eyes. The Dress was in a garment bag in the back of the closet, stowed away with a navy-blue evening gown that had been worn only once. \u201cReally?\u201d said Susan. In a moment, the Dress was slipped over her head. \u201cI like it,\u201d she said. \u201cWhose is it?\u201d \u201cYours,\u201d my daughter said.<\/p>\n

When I bought the Dress, I was taking the first steps into the life that would turn out to be my own. By the time it went to the Academy Awards the first time, I\u2019d had a child, gotten divorced, married again, acquired stepchildren, and had another child. In my closet now is a row of dresses I can\u2019t bear to give away: three prom dresses, worn by my three girls; my second wedding dress, a floor-length Edwardian gown made of burgundy velvet, with a jeweled bodice; a fern-green dress embroidered with holly berries, which all of my daughters loathed and called the Christmas Dress; my first Ala\u00efa, impossible to walk in; an apricot dress with a row of twenty-five covered buttons, by Jean Muir, that I wore to my own first rehearsal dinner. The Dress hangs among them.<\/p>\n

Last summer, when I told my mother about the Dress, she paused for a minute. Then she said that she, too, had had a dress that went to the Oscars\u2014in the sixties! \u201cWho wore it?\u201d I asked, incredulous. It was hot, and we were eating egg-salad sandwiches. I hadn\u2019t seen my parents in a year. She couldn\u2019t remember. \u201cIt was the wife of someone named Marvin, who was in the business,\u201d she said. She turned to my father, who was alive then. \u00a0\u201cWas her name Carol?\u201d \u201cNo, it couldn\u2019t have been Carol,\u201d he said. \u201cShe was too zaftig!\u201d What kind of a dress was it? I asked. My mother smiled. \u201cA little black dress.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI have loved you for the last time. Is it a video?\u201d sings Sufjan Stevens in \u201cVisions of Gideon,\u201d at the end of the film version of Call Me by Your Name. <\/em>Is there ever a last time? Always, it\u2019s hard to tell. \u201cThe heart is a very, very resilient little muscle,\u201d says Mickey in Hannah and Her Sisters. <\/em>The last time I wore the Dress was in May four years ago, at a preprom party at the Knickerbocker Club. Parents were invited to see their daughters off to their first soiree\u2014the beginning of another movie: the one in which they go off into their own lives, and we take the long view. We stood looking out on Fifth Avenue, clutching our glasses of wine, sweating a little, so close together in the festive shimmer that another mother spilled a little wine on the Dress when I jostled her with my elbow. Parties used to be like that; perhaps one day they will be like that again. \u201cYou must forgive me if I say stupid things. My mind has gone to pieces,\u201d says Cecil Vyse in A Room with A View<\/em>. From the top of the spiral stairs I could see my daughter in an emerald-green silk charmeuse slip dress, linking arms with her two best school friends. Her date was a boy she\u2019d known since childhood, the son of one of my old friends from college. (I\u2019d asked her if she wanted to wear the Dress. \u201cNo!\u201d she said. \u201cI\u2019m saving it for the Oscars!\u201d)<\/p>\n

In my household the first question about any party or outing is, What did you wear? After the first lockdown, I left the city for some time, and when I came back, I saw three dresses, the ghosts of yesteryear, hanging on the shower rod in the bathroom\u2014dresses I had worn the week before the background music of New York switched over to the sound of ambulance sirens. Afterward, what did we wear? Leggings and sweaters and T-shirts and sometimes, for days, the clothes we wore to bed. Now, holding our breath a little, we\u2019re going out again, but tentatively. This year, no one has asked to borrow the dress to go to the Oscars.\u00a0I\u00a0plan to wear it myself in front of the television.\u00a0I\u2019ll pair it with my COVID<\/small> cardigan, a brown, tweedy wool affair I wore almost every day for two years, unless my daughter manages before that to light it on fire\u2014for, as she says of so many things, she never wants to see it again.<\/p>\n

For some of us, what we wore connects us to our former selves, but now the world has changed again in terrible ways.\u00a0In an interview<\/a> with Sabrina Tavernise of the\u00a0New York Times<\/em> last week,\u00a0Vika Kurilenko, a television screenwriter and journalist who escaped Bucha, northwest of Kyiv, with her three children, and whose husband threw himself across their youngest daughter to protect her from flying glass, said, \u201cI left my diaries, my children\u2019s toys, my dresses.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Cynthia Zarin’s most recent book is <\/em>Two Cities, a collection of essays on Venice and Rome; a novel, <\/em>Inverno, and <\/em>Next Day: New and Selected Poems are forthcoming. A longtime contributor to\u00a0<\/em>The New Yorker, Zarin teaches at Yale.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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