The controversial dress every young woman wants
The Realisation Par Alexandra dress is selling like hotcakes. Photo: Instagram/Realisation Par
“Have you noticed that every girl seems to be wearing this dress?” a colleague recently asked me, sending me a link to the website of a brand named Realisation Par and a short ruffled wrap dress called The Alexandra.
I hadn’t noticed, probably because the colleague is gorgeous and tall and in her 20s and is checking out dresses that to me look like tops.
Meanwhile, I’m still busy watching The Crown for the second time and admiring Elizabeth’s twinsets and A-line skirts.
The Alexandra dress is pretty enough, in a sort of sweet, sexy, Guess campaign way, like the girl wearing it should be leaning wantonly against a haystack, chewing on a piece of straw.
The brand is the work of Australian blogger/model, Alexandra Spencer, and design director Teale Talbot.
Spencer and Talbot are making waves (and money) because of the accompanying copy which is says oddly manipulative things that both confuse me and give me the creeps.
“Men love sundresses,” the description of the dress reads.
“[S]ometimes…. just sometimes you need a get-out-of-jail-free card. Maybe you forgot to take the trash out or you scratched your dad’s car or maybe you were really late and you forgot do the one thing they asked you to do.
“Whatever the reason, the Alexandra dress is the solution. This is the dress that makes them forget why they were even mad at you in the first place.”
It’s working – famous models, actresses and “influencers” have all been photographed in the dress.
Bloggers and Instagram stars like Spencer were apparently going to change the face of fashion, and create a vibrant new conversation when it came to influence and innovation, but I haven’t connected with a lot of it.
Maybe I’m just not looking in the right places, but girls with tiny waists in string bikinis clutching teeth whitening trays on Instagram aren’t sending me to the running to the dentist, that’s for sure.
There is a lot of sameness to the popular blogs – torn jeans, messy hair, off-the-shoulder cotton tops, chokers, crop tops and, of course, the Alexandra dress.
The truly stylish people that I see on social media tend to be captured by someone with a very good eye, such as the original and in my opinion, still the best street style photographer Scott Schuman at The Sartorialist.
He is still the one who always sees past try-hard fashion and lame tricks and recognises true, innate style in a person.
I suspect the people he captures on his feeds are doing everything but taking selfies at home of their outfits.
Watch Scott Schuman photographing the people of Milan
Many of the early bloggers and social influencers who became famous are now merely dressed by paying sponsors, creating dreary red carpet marketing that eliminates any sense of personal style or quirk.
In a ‘be whoever you want’ world (at least that’s the concept most ad agencies talk about these days) it’s surprising to see just how many people still want to dress like everyone else.
The fashion world I grew up with was led by fashion editors who could imagine and recreate any world, be it Gaugin’s Tahiti or Chanel’s Biarritz, but social media has spawned a slew of bloggers who endlessly record themselves pouting at the camera in ripped denim, black bikinis, delicate jewellery and striped t-shirts.
There are of course, exceptions, and you sometimes happen upon someone who has mixed up some vintage, with something cheap, and something designer and struck a fab new look.
But I’ll have to find my style inspiration elsewhere. Like Princess Margaret in episode three…
Kirstie prefers to take style cues from Princess Margaret in Netflix’s The Crown. Photo: Netflix
