the case of the most awesome dress EVER

Let me tell you all a sob story:
About a year and a half ago, I found a cocktail dress at Bloomingdale’s. It was a silver Sue Wong flapper-style dress, with several tiers of heavily beaded fabric. It was really flattering, vibrant, and chic. I loved it. But, as with most things in life, I didn’t know how much I loved it until it was gone. The dress had been hung in my closet with several other dresses I bought from Bloomie’s that day. I told my mom to return the “day dresses” in my closet (I was at Lehigh at the time). I didn’t expect my own mother, who taught me the most important foundations of the fashion world, to mistake this obviously-evening appropriate dress with the summer-like floral day dresses. She returned it. I cried.

I went back to Bloomingdale’s a few weeks later, the first chance I had to return to New Jersey. It was gone. I spent the next few months of my life devoted to tracking down this dress. I called store after store after store. I visited department stores that carried Sue Wong designs – Saks, Bloomie’s, Lord & Taylor, etc. I traveled to New York, Philadelphia, Miami, etc. I spoke to Sue Wong representatives, both domestic and abroad, to try to find this dress.

To this day, the only remnant of the dress is a small digital picture, taken off of the Sue Wong website, of a small portion of the dress – a reminder the fabric, a reminder of what could have been. I often stare longingly at this picture. I experience a pain deep in my stomach when I come across similar styles of dresses, or shoes and purses that would have been perfectly pair with this dress of my dreams.

Fast forward to this past Saturday, when I went back to Bloomingdales to look at dresses with my mom. There, in the petite department, was the Sue Wong dress. I held it in my arms and, for the first time in a year, felt a spring of hope. That hope was shattered by a lazy Bloomingdale’s employee, who tried to track down this dress, in a non-petite size, at other Bloomie’s in the area. I told her I’d pay upfront and pay shipping to get this dress on my doorstep. She was an utter idiot, and couldn’t do what I was asking her to do (what she was trained and paid to do, may I add). In the end, she blatantly lied to my face, telling me it was only available in the petite size. I raised my shoulders and lowered my brow, flatly stating that I had previously owned the dress in the standard size and thus know for a fact that the dress comes non-petite. She shrugged and repeated her disgusting lie.

I tried on the petite dress. The fit was perfect, as it was 18 months ago, except for the foot and of fabric missing at the bottom. If I were petite, about a foot shorter, for example, the dress would have surely covered my ass. But I’m pretty darn tall, as you know, and just looked like a skank-ho in the dress. The classiness came from the perfect length of the original dress, and all my praying could not make the petite seem appropriate, let along PERFECT.

So, now, knowing that the dress is alive and well, and still being manufactured and sold in the United States, I return to my quest to find and own the dress once again. A fire has been lit, and it wont blow out until that dress is on my body. I will periodically post updates of my quest on this blog, to show the youngsters out there that as long as you don’t give up hope, any dream can be attained.