i gave my dress a DIY breast implant removal
i gave my dress a DIY breast implant removal
in pursuit of the Uptown Girls birthday dress
I’m hunched over a row of pink seams with the metal hook of dental tartar scraper in hand. I use the hook to dig up what looks like the small pink stitch, but it snags on the chiffon fabric which immediately frays out, gauzey and dry. I let out an exasperated sigh, which sounds annoying to myself. If this were a mock medical school exam where you perform sutures on an orange I would get an F.
This story started out with hope.
I’ve long been enamored with Molly Gunn’s outfits in Uptown Girls. They are unapologetically girly: pink, sparkly, embellished from head to toe. The crowning jewel of her wardrobe is the Blumarine Birthday Dress. It’s impossible to source (unless you have the resources of petrol heiress Ivy Getty). The rest of us have to rely on the wild west of the Depop algorithm. Something like y2k beaded dress blumarine cavalli sue wong may yield a decent dupe.
When Betsey Johnson collector Steph Ermer posted this TikTok video of a Diane Freis rainbow beaded dress, I was soooo smitten. It really captured the spirit of Blumarine Birthday Dress. I had never heard of Diane Freis. To my surprise, she was a Hong Kong-based designer. I started poking around resale sites. There was one vintage store that seemed to receive a periodic stock of deadstock Diane Freis gowns: