The Dress Is Back
Sun Herald
Saturday July 29, 1995
To make any best-dressed list this spring, you'll just have to be in a dress.
The dress is the star of the new season's collections, making as strong a fashion statement as it did in the fifties.
It's all part of fashion's current ladylike mood - harking back to more conservative times and getting away from a certain sloppiness that has prevailed over the last few years.
Conventiality is hip.
But that doesn't mean that you have to look as if you've just walked out of a page from a fifties magazine.
Retro shapes are reborn in nineties fabrics. Shiny synthetics, for instance. Old rules of what's right for when are forgotten. It will be perfectly okay, say, to wear a floral satin shift in the daytime (long as you're young enough, that is.)
And what you put with a dress is going to make all the difference.
Designers have universally chosen strappy sandals with medium heels and natural hosiery or bare legs as accessories. But Donna Karan went a step further by putting white bobbysox with her forties-style floral dresses and black sandals. Her fellow New Yorker Anna Sui went even further with glitter bobbysox and glitter slingbacks with her long forties dresses plus fifties-style floral hats with veils.
It's all a bit of a mishmash really, but a lot of fun.
The dresses and accessories pictured here are from selected David Jones stores. You can see them and more spring fashion on parade at the Elizabeth Street store this week. Times are 10.30, 12noon and 1.30 on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday plus 5.30 and 7pm on the Thursday.
© 1995 Sun Herald