Easter Sunday - A look backwards. (A short post)

 

By the time you read this, Easter should be a memory.  Yet, I find important to note that RQS and I both got dressed in our nice dresses and attended church for a change.  What I found interesting is how things have changed since we were children decades ago.  Men and women would put on their Sunday finest, and wear many of the same clothes that they could be decked out in before they were buried.  Today, people are much more informal, and we saw quite a few people wearing jeans in the church.

Is this bad?

Not really.  As much as I like getting dressed up for social functions, I appreciate the informality of the current age. We are much more socially relaxed now than in the 1950's when we were born.  (Politics is just as divisive, save that society is much more polarized today.  Who'd have dreamed that the Orange Snowflake would normalize hatred, anger, and nihilism among members of his cult and hijack one of the two political parties in the USA?  But I digress.)  When I watch videos of old game shows, I often see women in evening gowns and men in "dinner suits" (Tuxedos) as panelists for shows such as "I've got a secret" and What's my line?"  Today, with the exception of summer casual wear, it's uncommon to find women wearing dresses or skirts.  We have become a much more equal society than the one we were born into.

There are many among us who'd return us to the 1950's and the "Red Scare" era.  People would blacklist others, keeping them from gainful employment if they didn't toe the party line and hate communism with a passion.  Any defense of people holding contrary views were to be shunned.  Over time, we saw that the Red Scare was way overblown. Many lives were ruined because of our national fear.  Yet, we overcame that fear and moved forward to our current era where people again have lost faith in our institutions and civil norms.  We have overcome our fears before as a society and will do so again.

The message of Easter is a message of redemption and of life.  Let's hope we can remember it while we struggle to go about our daily lives.

Dresses, dresses, and more dresses.

 

The one generalization a person can make about transgender people is that we like to wear clothing strongly identified with the gender of which we identify.  As a trans-woman, I love wearing dresses.  And that's OK.  But it means that to blend in I have to tone things down by wearing a dress as an oversized tunic.  So that's what I do more often than not these days.

When I bought the above dress, I didn't have the idea that it would be out of stock as quickly as it was.  I bought it just before the color above was gone.  Today, wearing this dress to work with a pair of black leggings, I felt that I looked pretty and appropriately informal for a place like my office.  (I'd hate to be wearing a T-Shirt and Jeans to the office every day as some women do at my office.)

 

This dress is slightly more problematic.  Once I put it on for a test drive, it screamed to be worn as a dress.  So, on the next warm day that I have free, I plan to do so.  It is very comfortable, and well worth the bargain price I paid for it.  (Remember, both dresses came from Target, and the net including shipping and tax was under $42.00.)  Even if this dress and the dress above it last for only one season, I'll get good value from them.

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Recently, the above dress arrived in the Mystery Box shipment from Universal Standard.  This is the type of dress I'd never buy on my own as it's best worn by a woman with a defined figure, and not by a trans-woman. It took me a while to figure out how to put this dress on, as the outer belts which tie together by the woman's left elbow didn't have a hidden hole for one tie to go through - like the one below.

This dress was also in the shipment, and I posted a mediocre picture of me wearing it in an earlier post.  At least, this dress was easy to figure out once I saw the hole for the belt that came in from the left side of the dress.

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Even though I feel that the dresses from Universal Standard are of better quality than the dresses from Target, I will get more use from the two simple garments at the top of the entry.  Will I be tempted to buy more dresses in the future?  Yes.  But most of my purchases will be for practical purposes, and not to gamble on getting something nice as I did buying "Mystery Boxes".