How to Start Wearing Pretty Dresses Daily

Ladies,

Modern society has relegated pretty dresses to special occasions. Yet here we are with more beautiful fabrics and styles than ever before and at price points even low-income ladies can afford and so few women enjoy it. Such was the case for me when we had very little to spend and I found a dusty little thrift shop with $1 dresses on sale days. Yes, just $1. It was probably one of the closest experiences I have had to heaven on earth. I stocked up. It was around this time in my life that I had felt very drawn to dresses and had realized that I never owned anything floaty, long….feminine really.

Thrift shops and garage sales burst at the seams with beautiful dresses and yet, they often go forgotten and ignored. Women think “Oh that’s too dressy” or “Where would I wear that?”

Banished Beauty

How odd that we feel that to dress for the day we must be around anyone but our families. How sad to think that an ordinary day is not special enough to make things nice. I became disenchanted with the way we banished beauty. I realized that truly did happen. At some point in history women were dissuaded from using pretty things and wearing pretty things like it was silly or unstylish. As with most change it was a slow chipping away at their tastes and habits. I looked back in history and saw how women use to be allowed to have beauty in their everyday lives without it ever being seen as something negative.

Always waiting for “someday”

I realized that internally I was always waiting for special enough occasions to wear pretty things and then even at these occasions, people would dress casually sometimes. Christmas parties? People showed up in sweaters and jeans. Even weddings became a place that people dressed down. I could not take it anymore. Occasions were pathetically few and far between, I’m talking years sometimes. I began reaching for the loveliest items daily.

Allowing things to be beautiful

But even I would have to fight against my trained sense of “that’s too nice”.

Too nice for what?! To wear? To enjoy? To bless my family by looking my best for them? Every single day when I dressed, I would see my nice items hanging before me and longingly admire them. Sometimes I would reach out to feel the fabric and wistfully sigh. This went on even after I thrifted all of those pretty dresses. I would only wear some but keep others for “special occasions”. There they were for the taking to wear and I would put on something else and close the wardrobe doors on them.

“But I have work to do! I have animals that will dirty things”, the reasons to not wear them even though I wanted to went on until I realized that even pretty things can be washed, whites can be bleached, and patterns are really good at hiding mess and stains. Even pretty things can be durable.

They must be worn

When are my favorite things allowed to be worn? The day never came. They would never be worn unless I simply wore them because I wanted to without any other reason. Why did I even buy them if I was just going to be sad to never wear them? Why did I admire them day in and day out as I dressed in something else and walked away sad to leave them unworn? What did I think it took to wear them? Permission from someone else? Nothing ever happened! Nothing ever changed. Even when occasions came along, that wasn’t going to be enough wearing of the item for me. I did not want to just wear something nice once and go years without it again. I longed to wear these pretty items, and it had nothing to do with anyone else. I just wanted to wear the pretty dresses.

So, I finally started to wear them.

The Difference of a Dress

It started to dawn on me how much of my femininity has been diminished through the idea that it’s not suitable for life. That a dress is considered inherently fancy is inaccurate when a dress can vary greatly in style from daywear to formal. We have become untrained in seeing the difference because we stopped allowing feminine style to exist as anything other than occasion wear.

But even if we were to wear slightly dressy dresses for the everyday, so what? Is dressing nicer somehow a negative? I would wear dressy dresses and realize that all it did was make everything seem nicer.

The Blessing of Dressing

I want my family to experience the blessings of my womanly senses. It thrilled me when my mother dressed in her best. Children not only notice beauty, but it can also affect their mood and their behavior. Beauty sets a pleasant tone in the home. Women who are homemaking are working in their home, and they deserve to be well dressed for work the same as women in outside jobs. But I started to realize how even women in the workforce had been given a certain template of feminine dress because some styles were not seen as “professional”. I started seriously questioning how we view women’s clothing and why wearing something softer and less harsh looking was somehow less smart. When it is the pretty dresses of yesteryear that were once a part of the softness of a mother, the romance of a woman, and never a demeaning point to her intelligence or value. But we are supposed to hide away or not partake in this kind of femininity for much of modern life.

A different story

Pretty dresses do tell a different story about a woman. When I see other women dressing this way it tells me that she is comfortable being a woman and that she is showing the value of being a woman by dressing distinctly as a woman. My story began with being drawn to dressing this way even through my hesitations and cultural training to do otherwise. My story continues in how I felt so much more beautiful, so much more comfortable and had so much fun wearing dresses that I even learned to sew in order to make dresses!

Dresses are uniquely feminine clothing for women to embrace, enjoy, and enrich their world. But when I think about my story of getting to the point where I finally wore a dress as regular everyday clothes, it stuns me how this ever became so odd to women that I struggled to even do it. How sad and bizarre that women have been trained so far away from dressing femininely that wearing a dress for her everyday feels that strange to her. How sad that a woman would feel awkward dressing like a woman.

Praise God for Guiding

I thank God for helping me to step into my femininity and learn how to be graceful and modest in dressing and have so much fun and joy in it. As I reflect on being “dressed up” in my dresses, I can’t help but think how every day has beauty in nature, the beauty is not spared for only “special occasions”. God blesses us with beauty in His creation whenever and wherever and it glorifies Him.

Enjoy your beautiful dresses.

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CHRISTIAN LIVING – FASHION – HOME