The Hundred Dresses Project

The Hundred Dresses, for those of you who don't remember your children's literature, is a short "chapter book" by Eleanor Estes about a small American town and the new student who swears she has a hundred dresses, even though she only wears the same faded dress to school. At the end of the book she moves away (Katherine Paterson would have killed her off), and the other students discover that she has 100 drawings of dresses, all hanging up in rows in her former bedroom.

I don't think that I will ever own one hundred dresses; not at the same time, anyway. Still, I can't help referring to my "work clothes accumulation" endeavor as the hundred dresses project.

Why dresses? A few reasons. I've always liked dresses, ever since I was two years old and told my mother that I was going to wear only dresses, every day, for the rest of my life. (I actually managed to wear dresses, nearly exclusively, for most of my toddler/early childhood years. My parents had to trick me into wearing pants by doing things like asking my kindergarten teacher to tell me I was required to wear jeans to school.)

"Wear-to-work" dresses are also far less expensive than putting together work outfits involving slacks/skirts and blouses. If a dress costs the same as a skirt, it's idiotic (in my still-budget-obsessed mind) to buy both the skirt and the blouse when one can get just the dress and have the entire outfit done with.

Oh, and I can never find dress pants that fit me properly. Always too big in the waist, too snug in the hips, and too long in the legs.

Thus, dresses. ^__^

I don't have a hundred. Not even close. Right now I have fourteen. Nearly all of them are from Ann Taylor Loft, which has become my favorite go-to clothing store. (It is a testament to my provincial and/or shopping-deprived former lifestyle that, when I first went into ATL and they wrapped the clothes up in tissue paper before putting them in a fancy bag, it just about blew my mind. They never did that at Target.)

Four of these pretty dresses were bought this afternoon, and now I will show you pictures, because everyone likes pictures!


My favorite of the lot. So cute!

This one actually looks much better on me than it does on the model. Sometimes it helps to have actual curves.

Ditto for this one. I would happily model for ATL for free, if they would ever ask. (Since their clothes are designed for petite women, it would be nice if they actually had a photograph of a petite model in their stores. I volunteer myself.)

And there's the blue one. I always look good in blue. ^__^

No, I don't think I will ever have a hundred dresses. But it might be fun to cap out at 25. What's a little surprising to think about is that I'm more than halfway there. Forget 100 -- I've never even had fourteen dresses in my closet at any one time.

I love dressing for work. ^__^ And I can hardly wait to have all my dresses hung in my closet, organized by color, in my almost-there apartment.