On Gardenias and Starlets

Thank you all so much for your feedback on my rose dress dilemma! Your responses were passionate and quite varied, to say the least. I kept changing my mind with each new comment! I'm so impressionable. Which is why I feel I must pull out the big decision-making guns: listening to my mother. She feels that Michael Kors-designed Vogue 1117 is to die for, and I cannot, in good conscience, disobey my mom. That's what a good daughter I am. (I can just hear her laughing in disbelief as I write this.)

But aside from my mother's good opinion, there's also the little matter of the Michael Kors Gardenia Dress (pictured above), which is the exact same pattern as Vogue 1117. I know I'm like two years late to this party (the Gardenia Dress was part of Kors's fall 2008 line), but there you have it. This dress was also made in a glen plaid wool - as on the Vogue pattern envelope - and called the Starlet Dress. Isn't it crazy how different it looks in a floral?

And look at the lines of it next to the Ceil Chapman rose dress:

I think the wide neckline is what really does it, along with the pleating that keeps a floral fabric from looking too much like a bed sheet.

Also, it looks like good old Michael Kors got some major inspiration from Ceil Chapman on this number, which makes sense in a roundabout way. Kors cited Mad Men as his primary inspiration for the collection this dress came from, and Chapman would have been in her heyday in the era Mad Men is set in. (Oof, that just made my brain hurt.) Just look at the similarities in pleating in these two dresses - the Starlet Dress in brown and a vintage Chapman in a blue floral print :

And for those who worried that 1117 isn't va-va-voom enough, I give you Ms. Kristin Davis, an actress who actually has hips, wearing the Gardenia Dress.

So I'm going to give it a go! My plan is to muslin 1117 when it arrives and go from there. I'll keep you updated, as always.

In the meantime, I'm on my second muslin of the VoNBBS background dress. Good grief, this dress has been a headache to fit. I'll show you pictures of the muslin once it's in show-able form. Wish me luck! I hope you're all having a lovely week filled with sewing (or at least pleasant dreams of sewing).