New Year, Old Dress
Originally published at Historical Personality Disorder. Please leave any comments there.
Please kick me if I ever try to buy a dress for a special occasion anywhere else but Moon Zooom, here in San Jose. That place never fails me. Some friends were throwing a formal NYE party last night and, because I’ve been in my hermit hole working on 12th Night stuff for the last week, I didn’t have a chance to go shopping for a formal gown (I have tons of cocktail dresses, but nothing that fits the “formal” category). So, I got up on Saturday and thought I’d try Ross or Marshall’s or the Salvation Army, figuring at least one of those places would have something I could wear for the evening’s festivities.
To make a long story short, I was wrong. Every one of those stores had just about nothing worth spending money on, let alone something that qualified as “evening wear”. I almost got something at the Salvation Army, but the dress was about three miles too long and I didn’t have any time to make alterations. Leaving the store, I figured my last hope would be Moon Zooom, this quirky little retro/vintage clothing and accessories store here in San Jose. I’ve been very lucky with finds there before, but I had it in my head that I could find something in a more mundane store so I put Moon Zooom off until the end of my shopping trip. I really just should have gone there first. Upon walking into the store, I went to the one rack where I’ve had consistently good luck finding vintage evening gowns, stuck my hand into the hangers and pulled out this:
SCORE! And at $45 it was actually cheaper than most of the dresses I had already looked at. I couldn’t resist getting a matching earring and necklace set to go with the dress, too, as well as those bitchin’ full-length silver lame gloves. My space ship drivin’ gloves, as I lovingly refer to them. :)
The good news is the gown fit, but there’s always issues with modern body shapes and vintage clothing, and for me it’s usually in the rib cage area, so it was a tight squeeze to get the dress zipped up. But the zipper withstood the abuse and I got to swan around feeling like a goddess all night. Best of all, apparently women were shorter in the 60s, so I didn’t have to hack any material off the hem to make it the right length for me. You have no idea how happy this makes me, since 99.9% of everything in stores these days is on average 10″ too long for me.
I have another vintage ball gown that I purchased from the same seller at Moon Zooom for Costume College 2010, which some of you may recall:
I have no idea where it went off to, though… Otherwise, I might have trotted it out last night. Anyway, this is all just a shameless plug from a satisfied customer who wants to share her love of an awesome store. :)
If you’re in the South Bay area, Moon Zooom has two locations, one in San Jose and the other in Santa Cruz. Definitely check them out!