I spent most of the 2000s telling anyone who’d listen that cream was a color for people who didn’t eat food in public, and I want to formally concede that I was wrong, quietly, with no one arguing me into it. I just wore one to a wedding brunch last month, sat in it for four hours, ate eggs benedict off a plate balanced on my knee, hugged approximately eleven people including one very enthusiastic uncle, and came home to find the thing still looked like a decision rather than an accident. That’s on me. I owe cream about fifteen years of apology.
The one getting the wear right now is a midi with pleats set close enough together that they read as texture rather than a statement, and I’ve washed it four times, twice by accident on the wrong cycle, and the pleats came back sharp both times, which genuinely surprised me because I’ve owned pleated skirts from the nineties that went soft and sad after one trip through a machine and never recovered. This one seems to have actual opinions about staying pressed.
I’m comparing it, unfairly probably, to a pleated skirt I bought in 1996 that held its shape for exactly one wearing and then spent the rest of its life looking like a paper fan someone sat on.
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My sister saw a photo of it and said “that’s a lot of dress for a Tuesday,” which from her is not a compliment, but I wore it on a Tuesday anyway, to a lunch that turned into three hours of sitting, and it didn’t crease across the lap the way I braced for, so I’m counting that as a win she doesn’t get to weigh in on.
I’ll admit the shorter one, the tea length with the fuller skirt, is a gamble. It’s cut for someone with actual hips to swing it from, and on me, no hips to speak of after sixty, it reads more costume than dress, closer to something you’d wear in a play about a wedding than to an actual one. I keep it anyway because on the right person it’s spectacular, I’ve seen it, I just am not that person and I’m too old to pretend otherwise for a photo.
What I keep coming back to is that cream survives a real day better than I expected it to, better than black in some ways, because you notice a stain immediately and deal with it, instead of finding out three wears later that black’s been hiding something the whole time. I called that a myth for years. I was wrong. I’m saying so once, and moving on.
