Everybody packs a green skater dress for a beach trip like it’s a decision already made, and nobody ever mentions the wind. That’s my complaint, and I’ll make it flatly because there’s nobody around to argue the other side. A skirt with that much movement in it goes up. It goes up at the boardwalk, it goes up on the ferry to the island, it went up on me in front of an entire outdoor restaurant in Naples, Florida in a way that required a hand permanently stationed on my thigh for the rest of the meal. I have never seen a single packing list mention this. I’m mentioning it.
I bought my first green one in 2011, a sort of grassy kelly color, convinced it would be the dress I wore to every dinner for a week. It came home basically untouched. Turns out a fitted waist and a skirt that catches on every stair rail is not what you want after a day of actual walking, actual sand, actual getting in and out of a rental car with a cooler and two beach chairs. What did get worn, every single time, was the looser one in a deeper bottle green, the one that skimmed rather than clung, that I could throw on over a swimsuit and not think about again until dinner. That’s the whole test for this category on vacation. Does it survive the walk from the car, or does it just survive the photo you take before you leave the house.
The gamble pick, and I’ll say plainly that it’s a gamble, is anything in a really saturated emerald with a lot of skirt volume. On the right person, on a boardwalk at golden hour, it’s genuinely striking.
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On someone shorter, or someone doing more walking than posing, it can tip into costume territory fast, and I say that as someone who owned a version of this exact silhouette in 1997, in a much uglier shade, and looked like I was headed to a garden party nobody invited me to.
As for what goes with it, gold sandals, always, and something a little worn in, not brand new leather that’ll cut your feet apart on the boardwalk by day three. A denim jacket over it in the evening when the wind picks up, which it will, every single evening, without fail. What genuinely does not work is a structured bag. I tried it once, my sister looked at the combination and said absolutely nothing, which from her is the most damning review available.
I still think green is the right color for this particular dress, more than navy, more than anything floral. It photographs like you meant it and it hides sand better than white ever will. I just wish somebody, anybody, had warned me about the wind before I did.
