Just ask Cinderella, right? One fancy night for her, thanks to a brigade of mice who also double as talented seamstresses, and viola, she's now a princess for all little girls to adore for generations to come. One dress did it all, along with the help of some glass slippers (which sound incredibly uncomfortable to me). I wish my one outfit had a similar effect. Not so much really.
Allow me to introduce you to the outfit that changed my life. Meet the "doily sweatshirt" my grandma made me for Christmas my 7th grade year. My grandma was a home ec teacher for decades and can make you pretty much anything with her kitchen and sewing machine. Enter stage left, the doily sweatshirt. A fashionista, I was not, so I thought it was pretty neat when I opened the gift on Christmas day. The said sweatshirt was white with a doily sewn into the center. The cool part, or what I thought was cool, was that the fabric was missing behind the doily inlay so anything you wore underneath shown through. Cool, right? Want to wear a pink turtleneck under it, go for it. That'll make it pop. Or so I thought. Wrong again.
So one winter day shortly after Christmas, I decided to wear to my new doily shirt to school with a teal turtleneck. It was new, it was warm, so I went for it. In the wise, wise words of Julia Roberts "big mistake. Big. Huge." No one seemed to think anything of it with the exception of my two best friends. They wouldn't sit with me at lunch. I'm not kidding. Apparently you cannot wear a doily adorned shirt to middle school and expect to keep all of your friendships in tact. I learned that the hard way. Those two best friends never sat with me again at lunch, or anywhere for that matter. We were done and I was devastated.
Thankfully, I had some other friends who took mercy on me and didn't seem to mind my shirt. They let me sit with them and that's where I sat from that day forward. I also never wore that shirt to school from that day forward. I wasn't about to lose anyone else over a little fabric. And don't tell my grandma that her sweet, homemade gift had me exiled from my "cool kids" table. It'll be our little secret. That shirt already inflicted enough emotional turmoil. No need to bruise anyone else with it.
Morale of the story, choose your clothes wisely. They could be an unexpected game changer that you never saw coming. And it can still haunt you 18 years later apparently, because I sure did see something that made me stop and think about my doily shirt today. And I'd be lying if I said it didn't still sting ever so slightly.
And if you ever want to rock a doily on your clothes, come and sit by me. I don't judge. We've all made fashion mistakes, and we can cry over them into our tiny carton of chocolate milk together.
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