"You know you're somebody when you start getting press releases."

Celestial Seasonings Tea commissioned Brett Cooper (he helped design the costumes for Priscilla: Queen of the Desert) to make a red teabag dress to "heighten awareness" of heart disease in women, and to get publicity for their largish donation ($100,000) to WomenHeart, a women's heart disease patients advocacy group. And not-so-incidentally, did you hear that drinking just TWO CUPS of black tea a day can lessen your risk of heart disease? What a coincidence!

I am all in favor of devoting time, money, and effort to fighting heart disease, considering it killed my grandmother and has a better-than-even chance of getting me, too (although considering the number of times I've joked about getting hit by a bus, any higher power with a sense of humor would take me out with the 49 Western).

It's a good thing this dress is for a good cause, though, because Cat Chow this man is not. In fact, it's godawful, and the woman looks as if she's mere seconds away from ripping that comically shrunken New Year's Eve party hat right off and cramming it in the designer's pie-hole. And then going out for a good cup of coffee, prophylactic antioxidants be damned.

Click on the image to see more about this dress than you ever needed to know, including a movie, closeups of the dress, and pictures of the (also teabaggy) shoes. (Don't tell The Manolo about the shoes, though. He might have the vapors and have to be revived with the salts of the smelling.)

This is the first time I've been sent a press release as a "Fashion Blogger," (ha!) and I have to say I'm flattered, nay, honored, to now be part of the Publicity Industrial Complex (as someone I used to know once put it). I can't imagine I'll get many more of them, though -- how many publicists could be pushing something suitable for the rarefied topic matter of A Dress A Day?

Executive Summary: Heart Disease: boo! Tea: yay! Dress: eh! Press releases: no comment!