Thrift Stories: The Pink Dress

I love thrifting for many reasons. One of them is the chance to find special/cool/unique things I might otherwise never come across. When you go to a retail store, you generally know what you can expect to find there. At a thrift store, the surprises never end. The story of the pink dress is one example of that.

I have been almost exclusively thrifting my clothes since around 2017 or thereabouts. Thrifting as often as I do (and you do have to go often if your closet is thrift-sourced), I have seen a LOT of clothes during that time, from different eras, different brands and designers, different styles. I have learned a lot about fashion and design, in a passive but nonetheless useful way. I’ve learned by sight, by feel, by trying things (sometimes with success, sometimes not). I have learned what I like, what works for me, and how to spot it (with increasingly high though not perfect accuracy) in a store packed with random things.

But enough singing of praises for thrifting.

Back to the story: the pink dress.

It was a fairly unassuming find, insofar as a bright pink dress can be unassuming. The colour is what caught my eye, and my heart, immediately. It’s almost Schiaparelli’s hot pink, but lighter and softer. It reminds me of roses and sunrises. There is some blue in its DNA, which always appeals to me because I love the cool end of the colour spectrum.

I was sold on the dress by the colour, but I still cast an eye on it before deciding whether to put it in my cart. The material was very light and felt like silk (there is no fabric tag). The shape was hard to gauge from the way in hung on the hanger, but at least it looked long enough to suit my preferences. The brand tag told me nothing; I didn’t recognize it: Myne by Ashley Ann. There were some subtle signs of good quality in the finishes (mostly around the neckline) but nothing determinative. I felt I could rule out a high end designer piece; for one thing, the dress wasn’t lined which it would have been, given the lightweight fabric, if it were a true designer dress. But it might be anything from a mid-tier contemporary label to a well-executed fast fashion piece, such being the state of the fashion industry these days. The dry-cleaners’ tag still attached to the label was intriguing, and did make me lean more towards the former; my assumption is that, in general, people don’t spend money on dry-cleaning inexpensive clothes.

At home, my first attempts to research the dress proved ineffective. I’m usually pretty good at tracking down brands and even specific pieces, but I struck out in this case. Then, I posted the dress is one of my weekly thrift round-ups on Instagram and a couple of followers pointed me in the right direction.

It turns out that this *was* a boutique brand, and this particular dress had in fact been (famously?) worn by Kim Kardashian at one time. I Googled and, sure enough, found the photos.

Based on the blog posts that discussed it, it looks like the dress was originally sold sometime around 2012/2013. It’s almost a decade old! Yet, to me, the design doesn’t feel especially dated. When I tried it on, I was struck by the draping in particular — it’s definitely the kind of thing I enjoy wearing now.

When I was deciding how to wear it (for the first time), I went with something simple: a belt and some jewelry.

This suits my updated Artist avatar almost to perfection. Coincidentally, around the same time I took the photo, I came across some outfits from the most recent Tory Burch runway collection and was struck by how similar the belts used in some of those outfits were to the belt I wore with this dress. Another thrift find, of course: a vintage Caleche by Anne Klein asymmetrical wrap belt. Out of curiosity, I did a side-by-side and realized that the whole outfit, in fact, bore similarities to the runway look:

Of course, it isn’t a literal copy; far from it. But the lines and the draping are similar, so they have a similar vibe/feel to me. What old is new again? That’s always the way that fashion goes, and it’s why thrifting remains enormously exciting for me. You can experiment with fashion exclusively by secondhand means and still engage with trends (if that appeals).