Sunday, November 02, 2008

Dia de los Muertos dress

I have always been fascinated by Dia de los Muertos.  I like the way it combines mourning with a certain lightheartedness, with sugar skulls and dancing skeletons and visits to the graves of those we've loved.

A few years ago I bought some Day of the Dead themed fabric, and have been planning to make something out of it ever since.  This year I finally got around to it.  I didn't have anything to do for Halloween that warranted a full-on costume, so I wore this instead.  If something that required a costume had come up last minute I would have
just painted my face like a skeleton and gone as one of the skeletons on my dress, but that didn't happen.

It's a duro dress, which is a design that I think lends itself to themes.  I don't normally like to sew theme dresses, because then I feel limited in how often I can wear them and my thrifty nature requires me to only make things that have multiple uses, or at least things that I can convince myself will have multiple uses even if that is just denial on my part.  but this?  I can wear it every year!

So I wore it to work Friday, and got many compliments, particularly from strangers on the Muni train in the Castro.  I would have worn it Saturday too at the Dia de los Muertos
 procession, but it was raining cats and dogs so I didn't go.  Then I wore it again today under my choir robe at All Souls' Day mass where we sang the Mozart Requiem.

I also included a picture of my skull necklace,
 which I bought in San Antonio over 10 years ago at an artsy shop in the King William District which specialized in such things, shortly after I first developed this ongoing fascination with Day of the Dead.  I used to wear it quite a lot, though nowadays I'm only goth on Halloween itself so after today I'll hang it back up on the vanity where it's been for all 4 and a half years we've lived here.

2 comments:

yuweiquan said...

sharp dress! I've always liked the idea of the border between life and death being at its most porous on the Day of the Dead, perhaps more so of late, with my mom having died in late October a decade ago, and with Lin who, of course, was into the Day of the Dead. -kwy

heh: the captcha is "noughti"

Anonymous said...

What a beautiful dress. Love the print.