I’d like a word with the woman who wore a pale blue linen dress to an outdoor wedding in 2001 and spent six hours pulling it away from her legs in the wind, convinced the breeze was a personal insult rather than just what lawns do. She learned nothing from that day, which is why I still have opinions about it now.
My sister was over for dinner recently and caught sight of two aqua maxi dresses hanging on the closet door, both waiting to be decided on for the same garden party, and she said, without being asked, that she couldn’t tell them apart from across the room. That’s the sort of comment that starts a real argument in a house where I live alone, because I had very strong feelings about which one was the “true” aqua and which one had wandered off toward teal, and apparently from six feet away that distinction does not exist. I still think it does. I’ve just accepted I might be the only one who can see it.
Here’s what I’ll say for the color itself, since that’s the actual debate worth having. Aqua gets pitched sometimes as a neutral, the idea being it goes with everything the way navy does, and I think that’s optimistic.
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It goes with gold jewelry beautifully, it goes with a tan, it goes with the specific quality of light you get on a lawn in late June, but put it next to certain greens and it starts an argument with them, and I don’t love it in a photo where somebody’s brought out the good silver. It’s not a neutral. It’s a very good, very specific color that happens to look expensive outdoors, which is a different and better thing to be.
The real test of any dress at a garden party isn’t how it photographs standing still, it’s whether it survives the actual day, and a garden party day is a long one. You’re standing around holding a drink for an hour before anyone sits, then you’re folded into a folding chair for the toast, then you’re up hugging people who’ve had two glasses of prosecco and hug like it. A maxi that shifts around at the waist becomes a full time job by hour three. The ones I’ve kept wearing have a waist that stays put through all of that without needing a hand check every time I stand up, which sounds like a small thing until you’ve spent an afternoon doing the math on it instead of listening to the toast.
One of my picks here is a genuine gamble, a version with enough volume in the skirt that it looked incredible standing still on a lawn and slightly like a tent the moment real wind got involved, and I’d only send someone toward it if they already know how to manage a skirt in weather, because not everyone does, and that’s fine, that’s what the other option is for.
