wedding dress

5 Excellent Excuses to Dress Up In Your Own Home

Kate Sloan

I’m sure that, like me, you’ve been reading a lot of conflicting advice online about how to stay stuck at home without totally drowning in despair. Some people say, “Put on lipstick and real clothes every day so you feel put-together and normal!” while others say, “Wear pajamas and skip shaving for as long as you want – shit’s hard right now and you should be gentle with yourself!”

The thing is, both of these perspectives are correct. Lounging around in sweatpants is necessary and uplifting, at some times and for some people. So is dressing to the nines.

With that in mind, here are 5 excuses to put on a fancy/cute/weird outfit, even if you don’t plan on leaving your house for the foreseeable future – because I know that some of you, like me, are of a persuasion that enables fashion and beauty to lift your mood and bolster your confidence. You don’t need an excuse to get dressed, but if you want one, I’ve got some for you!

Attend an online event

A few friends of mine have been loving the nightly opera streams currently offered by the Met, and I can’t imagine an online event better suited to be dressed up for, especially given how fancy people usually get to attend the opera. You could wear a sequinned gown, a velvet suit, a long and flowing skirt, a giant fascinator in your hair… Whatever feels elegant and dressy to you!

That said, there are lots of other online events worth dressing up for, albeit not necessarily as formally as you would for the opera. I recently enjoyed attending a Risk livestream; there are online queer dance parties, literary panels, film festivals, and much more. These are relatively easy to dress for because you can just ask yourself, “What would I wear if I was attending this event IRL?” and then wear that.

Host a gathering

We’re entering the era of the Zoom party! May as well have a good time if we have to be stuck at home. Invite several of your favorite people to an online event. This, blessedly, usually takes less planning and preparation than an in-person rendezvous, and also enables you to invite people you don’t normally get to see because they live in different cities/countries/continents than you.

You could hold a get-together to mark your birthday or some other significant occasion. You could also just pick a theme (which often makes it easier to choose an outfit) and have a party for the heck of it. Toast to your shared circumstances and have a good time!

Do a photoshoot

If you’ve got extra time on your hands, as many of us do right now, you may as well spend it feeling sexy and documenting your cuteness! (Check out my post on at-home exhibitionism for more tips along these lines.) Put on something you don’t often get to wear, but that you feel amazing in – like a set of fancy lingerie or a hot leather jacket – and set up your phone or camera to take some self-portraits. Post ’em or don’t – it’s up to you.

Should you happen to be self-isolating with someone else who also wants to participate, you could take some snaps of each other. Hell, if you want, you could even schedule a time to video-call a similarly dolled-up friend and the two of you could take screenshots of one another while you strike various poses. Anything to distract you from the constant barrage of bad news, right?

Roleplay a sexy scenario

This is, of course, easiest if you happen to be holed up with a partner – but you don’t have to be. You could make plans to Skype your sweetie for a costumed teacher/student roleplay, for example, or tell your polycule to dress as various different superheroes for a fanciful group FaceTime call designed to devolve into an exhibitionistic touchless orgy.

You could even incorporate your medium of communication into the roleplay itself; for instance, sometimes my partner and I talk on the phone pretending I’m a hysteria patient who’s called in to a medical hotline for advice and guidance. You don’t have to let our current era’s limitations hamper your erotic imagination!

Put on a performance

There are a lot of jokes going around right now about the proliferation of Instagram Live broadcasts, but frankly, if reading the Twilight novels aloud to an online audience or casually painting while chatting with your followers is what gets you through this tough time, I say go right ahead! It’s probably a nice escape for the people tuning in as well.

Slither into a satin dress to play some ukulele tunes on Facebook. Don your best goth ensemble to perform some of the Stephen King oeuvre on YouTube. Bust out your tutu for an impromptu ballet show on Instagram. Fuck the haters; dressing up and performing are fun, and may well be helpful to the folks watching.

And hey, if you want to put on a sexy show, there are plenty of ways to do that, as you probably know… This Cirillas Fleshlight review and my review of the Vixen Bandit are great places to start if you’re looking for sex toys that help with a wee bit of exhibitionism!

Have you been getting dressed much lately? Any good outfits/stories/pieces of wisdom to share on the subject?

 

Heads up: this post was sponsored. As always, all writing and opinions are my own.

Winsome in White: Wedding Dress Fetish

Kate Sloan
A strapless white Betsey Johnson dress that makes me shriek

When I attended a cakesitting party, I theorized that perhaps the spark of lust some people feel from destroying a cake materializes because we put so much time and effort and emotional energy into cakes. Not just the making of them, but also the planning for them, presenting them, eating them. They’re the centerpiece of a traditional birthday party, and to destroy something so precious and so highly celebrated is an almost unfathomable taboo. It’s why, you’ll note, many big showy “Oh no!!” moments in movies culminate in a cake being tragically (and comically) destroyed.

Around the same time, I started wondering whether this taboo of destroying highly celebrated objects could extend to other types of celebrations. So, naturally, I typed “wedding dress fetish” into Google, thinking: what could be a more celebrated object than that?

Currently, that phrase brings up 41 results. In those results, you’ve got your brides merely expressing extreme enthusiasm about their dresses, sure, but you’ve also got an Experience Project page of men professing their lust for wedding dresses, porn clips of women giving blowjobs in floofy white frocks, and a review of a mystery novel about a serial killer who dresses all his victims in wedding gowns. It’s often said that humans can and will fetishize anything and everything you can think of, and this is no exception. One fetishist writes that a wedding dress is “the ultimate in femininity and the most ultimate dress anyone can own.” I can’t argue with that, except to add that the femininity being referred to here is, of course, a capitalist and conventional form of that gender expression, tied up in many different axes of historical oppression.

More broadly, some people have a “bride fetish” or a “bridal fetish,” which might focus on the dress but also might focus on the other trappings of a woman being wed: the white lingerie under the dress, the flawless makeup, the veil, the unattainability, the supposed virginity, or any number of other things. I’m most interested in the dress as a fetish object, though, especially after having read Laurie Essig’s book Love, Inc. where she dissects the vast psychological baggage we’ve placed on the wedding dress as a symbol. It’s right up there with crosses and the human heart in terms of the importance we heap onto it.

I spent some time in a bridal shop a couple years ago when I joined my friend’s wedding party. While I was trying on bridesmaid dresses – which are pretty much designed to make the wearer look unremarkable and plain, but in a pretty way – my friend kept swanning in and out of the dressing room in one gorgeous gown after another, commanding the room. I teared up almost every time she emerged in a new dress, because the effect of seeing someone you love – or even someone you hardly know! – in a dress that culturally weighted is powerful.

I didn’t experience that feeling as sexual, but I can easily see how someone could. Swathing yourself or a loved one in white tulle and satin could be a way of accessing what’s supposed to be the best day of your life, a day when you look and feel gorgeous, a day that we all winkingly acknowledge will probably end in romantic sex. It’s a day when everyone stares at you, when you’re the center of attention but no one gets mad at you for it, when you make promises that are supposed to be binding. There’s a lot in there that overlaps psychologically with concepts like exhibitionism and voyeurism, dominance and submission, and (especially when you factor in the corsets and high heels) sadism and masochism. It’s no wonder some people fixate on weddings and their trappings in a distinctly sexual way.

Apparently sometimes bridesmaids try on wedding gowns when the bride-to-be does, because “When in Rome” and all that – but I didn’t, when I was in that bridal boutique with my pal. It would’ve felt inappropriate to steal her thunder, but also there was something powerfully sacred about these dresses in my mind. I didn’t want to try one on until I had “earned” the right by getting engaged and actually being a bride-to-be, rather than just playacting as one. I knew seeing myself in a white gown would unleash a torrent of feelings I wasn’t ready to feel. So I zipped myself into my meek blue cocktail dress and tucked that desire away for another day.

I hope someday I have sex in a wedding gown, whether or not I actually got married that day, because I imagine there’s just nothing else quite like it. What else could be as decadent – besides sitting on a beautiful chocolate cake?

 

This post was sponsored. As always, all writing and opinions are my own.