In The Trenches

This Saturday I will be attending my bachelorette party. My fiancé will be holed up in a log cabin for the weekend, planning to rip his groomsmen to shreds with a paintball gun.

I thought I might work with my Maid of Honor to plan something a little more civilized. Something that wouldn’t necessarily require the use of a tarp. So, we reserved a table for the 8:30 show at The Baton - which is rumored to employ the best female impersonators in Chicago.

With the inevitable scrutiny involved in spending my bachelorette evening with sharp witted drag queens, I of course began planning my outfit early. It was necessary for my emotional safety.

I began with a beautifully simple Leifsdottir bandage knit black mini dress that I convinced myself to buy on sale. This dress has been hanging in my closet since I purchased it, waiting for the perfect occasion to be woken from dormancy and paraded out for, let’s say, a bridal party and the very particular female impersonators of The Baton.

And I know it will work because the stretch knit fabric feels just so delicious against my skin, like a tee shirt really. And the allover rouching makes this very tight mini dress actually wearable. As most of you ladies already know, rouching forgives the body like almost no other dressmaker detail. The neckline is a wide v-neck that is just the tiniest bit asymmetrical, and the shoulders of the dress have about a half inch of extra gathered fabric, creating a wonderful touch of volume. The dress is, in a word, bitchy. And I love it. Not to mention - paired with bronze platform cutout booties – the dress makes my legs look like the Meryl Streep of legs. In that everyone loves them, they have received many accolades, but have only ever been recognized for their supporting roles and have never won the Oscar they really deserve.

So I had the dress and the shoes all figured out, but I needed the perfect completer piece. I hit Nordstrom Rack in search of some kind of outwear that would look great with the black dress and the bronze heels. I tried on many cropped moto jackets, which are very in right now, but nothing really worked. And then I found, tucked into an overcrowded rack of Trina Turk clothing, a trench coat bolero from Pink Tartan’s ’09 spring / summer line.

The bolero was made in that beautiful tan color of a traditional trench and had all the great details of a traditional trench: the belted sleeves, flaps at the bust, and shiny pewter buttons. But, it was cropped to the perfect length. The jacket hit right above the natural waist, and while the front was boxy in a pleasant way, the back was vented so it opened like a swing coat. The thing I loved most about the jacket is that it was perfectly in line with the cropped outerwear trend, but it carried enough classic detailing to look chic rather than trendy and disposable.

So I agonized over whether or not to purchase the jacket. While it was only a quarter of its original cost, it was still more of an investment than the moto jackets I had tried on. I visited The Rack a number of times over the following week, each time pulling out the bolero to look at it again, trying it on, and then hiding it on some rack where it didn’t belong – mixed in with mom jeans and August Silk.

I even once - on my way to see my makeup artist - popped into the store to visit my bolero, walked back out and then spent five minutes bouncing from the entrance of the store to the corner of State and Washington like a crazed pinball, convincing myself alternately to just purchase the damn thing and that I really didn’t need to be spending the money anyway.

In the end, it was mine.

I walked through the doors of Nordstrom Rack at the tail end of a Wednesday lunch hour and made a bee-line for the last rack on which I had hidden my bolero. It. Wasn’t. There.

In a frantic last ditch effort, I looked through the rack where I had originally found the jacket and, buried between hangers and hangers of inferior trench coats, there it was. I ripped it off the hanger, and with only the faintest blush of guilt, carried it victoriously to the register.

And now it hangs in my closet, waiting patiently for its big debut.

And it ain’t a tarp, but at least it’s water resistant.