Big ballsBy Marianne Moore
My friend’s rich older boyfriend—well, rich relative to my friend, who makes her living pretending to be a fairy at birthday parties (Her fairy name is Ginger-Snap. We know it’s a stripper name. We’re over it.)—is taking her to the Black and White Ball on Saturday, and I’ve been drafted into shopping. We’re now faced with a pretty awkward question: what do normal people wear to the fancy-pantsiest occasion on the San Francisco calendar?
Other people must have faced this problem before. After all, tickets to the party are $200, not cheap by any means but still well within the reach of many modest-living San Franciscans. Maybe some are kept away by the event’s reputation; personally, even if I had $200 to throw around, I would be way too scared to go. Whatever the case, there’s no information out there about how to dress for the B & W if you’re not immensely rich. One thing we know for sure: the boyfriend, while he may be shelling out $400 for tickets, isn’t about to spring for a $10,000 gown. That leaves us to dress on a fairy’s budget.
I figure we have three options:
(1) try and find a cute discounted dress a la TJ Maxx,
(2) go completely casual, or
(3) go vintage.
Option one is unattractive; given the achromatic nature of the event, there could be fifty girls at the party in the same dress. Also, while my involvement with fashion begins and ends with obsessively watching Project Runway every season, I feel a little protective surge of indignation at the idea of my friend rubbing elbows with the likes of Heidi Klum in last season’s styles. The Maxx is out. Moving on.
Completely “cazhing it up” has some advantages. It’s always more fun to be under-dressed at a party than over-dressed: it projects an aura of nonchalance that makes people wonder, not what’s wrong with you, but what’s wrong with them. But Ginger-Snap, budding actress and seasoned sprite, isn’t exactly shy about getting dressed up. We went to a high school prom together, and she was so miffed that my hand-made dress (painstakingly melted together out of brilliant blue and yellow newspaper bags) garnered more comments than hers, that she still talks about it to this day. So we’ll be going for something a little less forgettable.
Which leaves vintage, our best bet I think. It’s affordable, dressy, practically guaranteed to be unique, and if it’s threadbare or faded, its oldness and indisputable coolness excuse that. Since our base of operations is the East Bay, we’ll be hitting up at least Mixed Pickles on Shattuck, Twisters on San Pablo, Mars on Telegraph, and Madame Butterfly on College. If we can’t find some passable flapper dress for her to swish around in, I don’t know what we’ll do. Maybe, in the next 24 hours, I could whip out a candle and bang out a couture gown made from black liquor store bags, then an elaborate necklace of water bottle caps. Or she could just go in a mask, badly dressed but mercifully anonymous. Or we could go for quantity over quality, head to Clothes Contact in the Mission, buy thirty pounds of black and white dresses, and have her waddle to the ball wearing all of them at once. Hopefully they’ll be too frightened to throw her out.
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