This is such a pretty dress (I wore it to the mall the other day, and I actually got compliments from two teenage girls!). Amazingly, I bought it at one of those dollar stores a year or two ago - but not the kind where everything is a dollar. The kind where everything is priced in multiples of dollars (I think? I dunno, it's confusing).
Anyway, I usually prefer miniskirts (the shorter the better!) to dresses with full length skirts like this one, but this one is just so pretty. It's soft, too; but if I have any complaints, it's 95% polyester, which means it's a magnet for static electricity - which, with my long hair, is a recipe for disaster. It's also starting to stretch out at the knees (and I've only worn it a handful of times!). The top doesn't do much for my chest, either - as pretty as it is, it's the sort that seems designed for your breasts to "fill out", and so it kind of emphasizes the flatness of my chest. Not that I don't think my flat chest is sexy, but it's not very feminine.
If I were to start a clothing line featuring feminine clothing for men (because men's clothes, even when trying to imitate women's styles, tend to be so big and bulky and just generally too masculine) - which I would love to do, but I have no experience working in fashion, much less contacts in the industry - I would definitely want to look into creating styles that flatter a, um, well...flatter chest. You could do this either by effectively imitating the curvature of breasts - as some dresses do with shaping and padding - or not trying to hide the flatness of the chest, but emphasizing it in a more feminine way.
How could you possibly accomplish that, you ask? Well, I would use little girls' clothing as inspiration - nobody would argue that their clothes are feminine (not in a "this is what a woman's body looks like" but more of a "girls are awesome!" sort of way - which is just as good to me); and, while many parents do lament the encroachment of padding into their daughters' wardrobes, many of those clothes don't attempt to hide the fact that little girls have flat chests at all.
Here's a cute story: I spied an adorable one piece ballerina's leotard + tutu on the children's racks recently and I wanted one just like it that I could wear. But it looked small enough to fit a pet dog! Even if they made cutesy leotards like that in adult sizes (why do adult women insist on being all "mature"?), my body frame is a bit larger than average for a female. And even if I could find one in a bigger size, there is the delicate issue of my "equipment" (although I'd like to think the tutu would help to hide that), which is another problem that I would want to explore solutions to if I had a clothing line - how to enable men to wear tight-fitting dresses and clothing without making their bulge the centerpiece of the dress. Because that's all well and good if, say, you're attending a fetish ball, but not so much in everyday situations, especially if you're trying to pass.
I can tell you, I have tons of dresses in my closet that I would just love to wear, but they really aren't practical because they don't sufficiently hide my bulge, and as much as I would be fine wearing them anyway, and telling people to just deal with it - people are not capable of dealing with this sort of thing in a mature manner. It annoys me to no end that there are beautiful things women can wear to look pretty and sophisticated, but if I were to try to wear them, the overwhelming impression people would have of me is that I'm some kind of sex freak, and why am I incapable of keeping that in the bedroom? I guarantee a woman wearing a tuxedo would not be subjected to the same kind of negative attention (which, incidentally, is why I'm not a feminist).
Is it because everything men do is about sex? But even if that were true, so what? Sex is a driving force. Why can't we acknowledge its role in our lives? Why can't we talk about it? Why does it have to be this "inappropriate" thing? There are ways to talk about sex that aren't vulgar. But most human beings are not capable of subtlety. So we have to design our society around the lowest common denominator. It's tyranny of the lowlifes. I wish I could move to a more enlightened community (maybe on Mars or something?). I'm sorry. It's very frustrating living in a world that's not run the way you want it to be, and you don't have the power to change it, and when that fact impacts the way you must live (such that you are reminded of it every single day of your life). I try very hard to make the best of it, but sometimes "good enough" just isn't good enough.
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