Dressing

My sister has been  researching on the 'nets details of our father's life.

Today she e-mailed me this photo >
of our parents chaperoning the 1958 senior prom at Maryland State College, where our father had his first teaching job. 
(He is a retired prof of political science).

My father would have been twenty-seven years old here; 
my mother, twenty-three 1/2 years old. 

OMG, she was Marz's age! How did young women manage to looks so... so grown up back then?
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The thing my sister discovered is that my mother's dress was designed by Dorothy O’Hara.

She was a big California designer in the 40s and 50s. 
< The dress was in Vogue in 1956. 

I remember adoring the photo of my parents in childhood––I still do!  (Though I'm not so sure about that bowtie...)
When I was little I thought the photo depicted what adulthood was supposed to look like, though I think I doubted I would ever achieve such a state of womanhood as my mother's––and I was right! 

By the time I was twenty-three in the 
1980s, I wanted nothing to do with such a version of femininity. 

It wasn't exactly in fashion then anyway, though come to think of it, Princess Di was bringing it back. But my friends and I thought she was a dope or a dupe. 

Poor girl---maybe she was both? I don't know, but now I can just say, hey! she looked great! 

Here she is in a similar twisty-white dress, published in Vanity Fair 1997, one month before her death.

Oh, what a pain it was to be a young woman trying to figure out how to present myself. I love being old[er] and not forced to constantly take into account other people's biological imperatives.
(I mean, I don't have to worry about guys hitting on me, something I always dressed to avoid. Not that they don't once in a rare while, but it doesn't phase me. Sometimes it even pleases or amuses me.)