Olympic-Class Fauxleros!

Vireya sent this link to me, from the opening of the Olympic Village ... I really like the "fauxlero power!" hand gestures. Although I'm not exactly sure if these are fauxleros, or just extremely vestigial boleros. These may be the long-disputed missing link between the fauxlero and the bolero ...

Check out picture #5 in the series, too, to see the Olympic-rings hairstyles in closeup.

Also: Sheila (of Out of the Ashes Collectibles) is having a vacation sale: she's on vacation until late August (but with a quick trip home to mail orders about about August 7 or 8) and she is offering 15% off all orders. So if you don't mind waiting until 8/7 or 8/8 or after that the first of September it's a good savings!

And yes, I'm still in Japan, and yes, I bought a lot of fabric in Tokyo ... and if you want to know what brought me to Japan, it was giving this talk:

If Language Weren't a Commons ...

view presentation (tags: isummit08)

Yes, that first slide is blank. I should probably edit it to have my name or something on it, shouldn't I?

edited to add: Vireya found another photo, this one full-length:

Nice Day for a White Wedding (Dress)

These GoodOrient folks sent me a very nice email this morning, and I went to their site to browse around. It's been ages since I've worn a qipao (mostly because they don't have POCKETS) but I've always loved how elegant they are ...

This is in their clearance section. It is available in sizes 4 or 14, and looks to me like a wonderful no-budget wedding dress. It's long, it's silk, it doesn't feature the patented Shelf-o-Cleavage that seems to afflict so many wedding dresses today, and it is TWENTY-FIVE DOLLARS. (Yes, you read that right. $25.00.)

The non-sale price? $38.99.

I know for some people it's all about the acres of tulle, but this would be a wonderful dress for a quiet (or second) wedding or elopement. Bridal, but not Cinderellaish; elegant, but still funky. An small evening ceremony, with a reception at home? A city hall ceremony followed by a nice lunch in a restaurant? This dress would be wonderful ... you could look like a bride and still get yourself into a cab without having to have a Designated Stuffer. And at this price, you could add some truly fabulous shoes and some serious undergarments. I'd wear sapphire (or lapis lazuli or at least sapphire-colored) drop earrings for the "something blue". (For the something borrowed I hereby lend you this idea.)

You could have a LOT of extra honeymoon if your dress was only $25. I'm just saying.

GoodOrient would like to advertise here -- does anyone have any experience with them? I'm on the fence about whether to accept them, as I really prefer to accept advertising only from small businesses who do sewing- or vintage-related things. But a lot of people have been asking me where to get clothes made in Asia, and I have no answers. I'd love your feedback, folks.

Speaking of advertisers, I'm starting a new series of posts, a "meet-our-advertisers" series. I was a bit curious about all these folks -- how did they start their businesseses? What do they like about patterns and vintage? These are not sponsored posts (other than that these folks all advertise) I was just nosy, I mean, interested, and I thought you all would be, too! I'll post the first one later on today. (These will be in addition to, not replacing, daily or semi-daily posts.)

Any Chinese Translation Help?

Dress A Day reader Erma's husband is a non-native speaker of Chinese and a linguistics professor, and he has a dress-related translation question. Does anyone know the meaning of the Chinese character bai3 (摆)? It's used in compounds such as qun2bai3 (裙摆), where qun2 means skirt. It was used in a sentence which translates to something like "Under the rustling of the evening breeze, the entire bai3 of the skirt was billowing".

The dictionary defines bai3 as "hem or lower part". But a native speaker told Erma's husband that bai3 refers to width -- a narrow skirt has a "small bai3" and a wide skirt has a "big bai3".

Anyone have some input? I have to say, if we figure this one out, I'm going to steal that word into English and use it to refer to this concept all the time. "I only wear skirts with big bai," I'll say.

[The image is an artwork called "Memory Dress" by Yu Hong.]