What’s Wrong with Kate’s Dress?

As a handknitting designer, Conventional Wisdom dictates that you position yourself with either the craft market or the fashion market. This is a silly requirement, of course, because what we’re doing covers both sides. Most knitting designer blogs talk about the craft of knitting. Today I’m going to talk the aesthetics of fashion.

Let’s look at Kate Winslet’s color block dress, worn at the 68th Venice Film Festival.

I will put myself on the record that I think Kate Winslet is beautiful. But this dress is all wrong. No one could wear this dress. No one Should wear this dress.

Clothes, like make-up, should be selected and worn to draw the eye toward the wearer’s best features and away from the weakest. This dress is a “working too hard” example, and in working too hard, it actually accentuates the areas that she’s trying “too hard” to hide.

The placement of nude beige across the body, in the shape of a body, and the use of black at the sides, is supposed to imply a narrower figure (especially waist) than Kate currently has. That tiny waist is Barbie doll proportioned. No one healthy has such a small waist compared to such voluptuous hips and thighs. You see instead, how wide that black part is at her waist, compared to the thigh, and realize that she’s thicker than she wants you to believe. Why should she want to camouflage her natural, adult figure? Why would an accomplished person want to pretend to be a teenager again?

The white bib, clearly, is to draw the eye to the chest, and visually lift the breasts to a more youthful line. If you look at the curve of her actual figure, you’ll see that her breasts begin an inch or two below the white portion. She’s cutting her breasts off at the bottom, and with that high neck, hiding the cleavage that nature only gives mature women. Why?  And if you look VERY close, and think hard, you’ll realize that not even a teenager has tits that high. It’s a completely unnatural configuration. It doesn’t look good. It looks weird.

The severe cut of the armscye also makes her look like a linebacker.

The color blocking isn’t the only problem with this dress. It appears to be made from a spandex-like creation; a fabric with little forgiveness and less breatheability. The only way she’s holding into the perfect, smooth surface is if she’s got significant foundation garments underneath. That means a hefty girdle.

So she’s at this event, in a dress that doesn’t suit her, that is ugly in design, and requires her to be crammed into a girdle, where she can’t possibly be comfortable.

The hemline is perfect, though. And the shoes are perfect. I can’t wear heels like that (weak ankles) so I’m always amazed by women who can.

Kate is so beautiful; what could have made her wear such an ugly dress? Isn’t it well past time that fashion respected an adult woman’s shapes, and clothing manufacturers started producing garments we feel beautiful wearing? Beauty is what comes out when you feel good about yourself. It’s not something you apply in order to conform to a standard handed down from on high.

That’s why we knit, folks. Make yourself something beautiful today.

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3 Responses to What’s Wrong with Kate’s Dress?

  1. moiraeknittoo says:

    I loved this entire post. Full of awesome!

  2. Well said Terri and I agree with you!

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