Hi everyone!
Thanks for all the encouragement, it truly means the world to me. I wanted to quickly put together a list for anyone who might want to wear the same outfit for their prom or just wear pieces of it. My dad and I put everything together over about a four month period and we spent all day today trying to write this blog post to chronicle the whole thing! I hope you like it!
NOTE: I’m not getting paid for any of this. I don’t know these companies and they don’t know me. I’m just a high school senior who wanted to share the steps I took in case anyone was thinking of doing a similar thing. I hope it saves people some time. Mostly, I just want to promote people being true to themselves!
EVEN MORE IMPORTANTLY: So many people have it worse than me and don’t have great dads that tweet about them leading to an avalanche of awesomeness. But I know you’re out there because I’ve felt that way. I know first hand how hard these last few years have been. Look at the responses on the Twitter feed. I share every single one of these, beautiful, awe-inspiring messages of affirmation with each one of you. When you read them, imagine that they’re talking about YOU because they are. They just don’t know you or your story, but we’re all in this together. Keep fighting. Stay strong and determined in the face of anger and hatred. Nolite te bastardes carborundum!
The Look
Why a suit?
I’m not a dress girl. Who knows why? I’ve just never really felt good in a dress for some reason. Also, everything you see on TV and in movies about dressing up is women squeezing themselves into some toothpaste tube of a dress, jamming their feet into stilettos with open toes in the winter and having to spend like two hours doing their makeup.
But, here’s the thing: I like to be comfortable!
So I was like, who do I want to dress like? Who in the world has a look and feel I want to emulate? Who has fun but also slays? (Literally)
Villanelle. That’s where all of this started. First of all: I wanted to be comfortable. Second, I wanted to be able to run if a hit team of assassins comes after me. Third, I wanted to approximate the whimsy of Killing Eve’s main badass. Plus, I’m obsessed with all things Jodie Comer. For my graduation present I got tickets to her play Prima Facie in NYC and I’m going in June!!!
NOTE: Villanelle is still alive. If you think she died in a river, you are sadly mistaken! Even Jodie says that she thinks Villanelle crawled out.
(Notice she’s always wearing shoes that are functional.)
Here was me at my Junior Prom last year. This is where I wore a suit for the first time! Check out my Villanelle phone case!
The Suit
This year, for my senior prom, I wanted something a little more sophisticated but with the same general vibe. I knew that I wanted to strike a balance here between the cut of a traditional men’s suit and expressing my unique femininity. I pored over multiple websites featuring women’s suits, but none of them captured the essence of the Gatsby vibe.
So, why Gatsby? Well, I was struggling heading into my junior year. My English teacher that year, Ms. McKinley, had just started at our high school and she changed my life. She brought a passion for literature that I had never experienced before and it was contagious.
Of all the books we read, The Great Gatsby resonated the most with me. I really related to Jay Gatsby’s isolation and loneliness, how he seemed to always be playing a role for others, and the pain it caused him. He’s flawed. He’s been hurt. But he has a quiet determination that I really admired.
Gatsby became an inside joke with me and Ms. McKinley. Sometimes we’d call each other ‘Old Sport.’ On the Twitter thread, my dad posted how I was delighted and laughing for most of the responses (I mean, Jane Lynch? Stephanie Ruhle? Glennon Doyle? Sam Simon? Soledad O’Brien? Malcolm Nance? Daniel O’Brien? How have these legends seen me? That’s bananas.) I loved any time I saw Leslie Knope images or anything Abbott Elementary or especially that Gatsby toasting GIF. It was hysterical. But the only time I got choked up is when people quoted Gatsby. I know every line that was posted and it makes me feel so giddy that there are insightful, interesting people out in the world.
Anyway, that’s how I decided to dress like Gatsby.
Some of you guessed right in the Twitter thread! Yes, this was the inspiration for the look, but Gatsby looks so severe in these pictures because he’s watching Tom and Daisy together. People asked: is Leo my favorite Gatsby? Is Robert Redford? I love them both, but I’m a book Gatsby girl. Gatsby of the novel is my favorite. So where to find the suit?
Brooks Brothers used to have a Gatsby collection. We found all of them on this site.
For a minute we were tempted to try to build one of the other Gatsby suits, but eventually I decided I liked the pink one the best.
I don’t know what happened to ANY of these Brooks Brothers Collection clothes though, because we couldn’t find any remnant of them anywhere. We checked all the used sites too, but whatever random pieces of the outfits we found weren’t the right look or size.
There were tons of great suits online, but they were either
- Cut only for men
- Cut for women but had sort of a pantsuit/wear-to-work sensibility
- Two piece and not three piece
In the end we decided on this suit because it was the closest one to what we wanted and had the right general vibe about it. It wasn’t pinstripes or that milky pink on Leonardo, but we hoped it might work. Also, it was pretty expensive, so we ended up breaking the payments up over a few months.
You can buy it here.
The Shirt
At first we were trying to find a pinned collar so that we could use a collar-bar in it. I had no idea what a collar bar was but it looked cool. Guess what? Not a whole lot of collar-bar style shirts out there these days that fit a petite girl!
We started looking everywhere for different collars and kept coming back to the rounded one. I thought that by taking the hard edges off of the collar it sort of feminized the look and made it more fluid. Plus I have a round face, so when I tried on sharper-edged collars it didn’t work as well!
Luckily for us, the store where we found the suit also had rounded collar dress shirts. The one we picked also required cuff links. I asked my dad: what the hell is a cuff link? Collar bars! Cuff links! What’s even going on?
The Cuff Links
This search took FOREVER. It turns out that the market for girl-centric cuff links is non-existent! My dad would send me all kinds of ideas for different cuff links. We couldn’t find Gatsby cufflinks so we were going to settle for something else I was passionate about. We looked at Star Wars cuff links. I wanted to find Ahsoka Tano cuff links, but they don’t seem to exist. These rebel cuff links in wood were cool.
But I thought they wouldn’t work as well with the overall look.
I tried to find Killing Eve cufflinks so I could emulate Villanelle but we couldn’t find any. I almost settled for some game controller cuff links because I’m an avid gamer but it didn’t feel right either.
Also, it’s a pretty egregious oversight in the cuff link industry that there’s no Clue cuff links.
The runner up was these sweet Arsenal cuff links because I’m a HUGE Arsenal fan. Go Gunners! Go Leah Williamson!
Then we stumbled on an ETSY store that had the ones you saw me wearing. They came all the way from England and really were a huge find. They cost just about $27.
The Tie and Pocket Square
This was probably the easiest part of the fit. We knew what we were looking for — striped tie and solid pocket square — and we found something that looked like it would work pretty quickly.
The Tailoring
Luckily for us we have a local tailor named Fiore who is a seventy-two year old Italian genius tailor from the old country. We brought him the suit off the rack and he loved the challenge of fitting it for my build.
Not only did he take up the arms and the overall length of the jacket, but he took in the back (on both the jacket and vest) as well. When he asked us if I wanted a break in the pants I said ‘yes, a big one!’ because I wanted to wear comfortable socks and didn’t want anyone to see!
Here’s me getting fitted. You can see that I was trying out a different style of shirt but it made me look more lounge-pianist or birthday-magician than I was going for! Check out those fresh kicks!
The Hair
This part was kind of stressful since my dad waited until the last minute to call and get me an appointment to get my hair done. Mostly it was because I was holding out to see if anyone was going to include me in the pre-prom getting dressed ritual. One of my friends said she would but she kept putting off telling me what time, and it seemed like they were going to blow me off, so I just told my dad to get whatever appointment he could.
Once he started calling there was nowhere with any availability. Except finally one salon was a maybe and then they said yes. I was so stressed. Once we got there, we met the nicest stylist in the world, Lona, who laughed and said that she has two daughters and when she heard that there was a dad calling about a last minute up-do she had to stay late to fit me in. She was seriously the best stylist ever and made me feel so comfortable because I can be very anxious.
I knew that I wanted a tight hairdo. No frills or dangling hairs or loose buns. Everything had to be all business! Lona was so amazing and is a perfectionist so even if there was a little hair out of place she was like ‘nope I don’t like that’ and she would re-do it. Her attention to detail was amazing.
Here’s me combed out before she put my hair up.
Lona put my hair up, stuck it all down on the sides and then braided a high ponytail.
Then she spun it into a tight bun. I loved it!
Needless to say, I’m going to go to her for every haircut for the rest of my life! She saved the day and she’s amazinggggggg!
The Makeup
I borrowed some lip gloss from my little sister, who is nine years old. That’s it. When it comes to makeup I’m pretty much never made up. I know some people love it but au naturel is more my speed. So lip gloss is all I ended up wearing!
The Shoes
This was obviously a big choice. We looked at so many brands and so many types of shoes. I had no idea how many unique shoe brands are out there! Here are some of the places we visited. We bookmarked all of them because they were so great.
Cool-Ass Shoe Companies We found:
- Irregular Choice
- Chie Mihara
- Fluevog
- Birdies
- United Nude
- Sophia Webster
- Shop-Pêche
- Intentionally Blank
- Cos
- Camper
- Angela Scott
- Lotta From Stockholm
- Avarcas
- Kat Maconie
- Vagabond
- House of Avenues
- Oak Tree Farms
- Tawi
- Inkkas
- CYDWOQ
- Trippen
- About Arianne
- Hot Chocolate Design
- Bernie Mev
- Papucei
- Freebird
- FEIT
- Blu Betty
- Brother Vellies
- Bared
- Demonia
- Sinister Soles
Some of those links are for shoe makers and some are for sites that seem to carry a variety of different shoes. (I just added every link that we bookmarked.) You can see why it took us so long to find shoes! Lots of people were suggesting Mary Janes but it’s not my favorite look (on me – they look great on everyone else).
I kind of fell in love when I found the site for T.U.K. shoes. I’ve never owned any before but right away I felt like they would be my jam. Especially the creepers. I know lots of people were speculating that I was wearing Doc Martens but I wasn’t. I do love Docs, though! In fact, I got a pair for Christmas with a Union Jack on them. Here’s me rocking them junior year!
We couldn’t tell from the T.U.K. website which shoes were going to work best with the pink suit. Should we try to match the pocket square? Should we go with something flashy? Should we have a more reserved leather look? We ended up buying four pairs and then tried them on with the pants. It was soooooooooo much better to see them on rather than try to figure which ones would work just using online images.
One note on the T.U.K. shoes: they were all super comfy and light. Like wearing sneakers.
We unanimously went with the last pair. (I returned the other three.) One thing to note: we were shopping on Google Chrome but we always checked out using Microsoft Edge because there was a built in plugin or something that automatically looked for discount codes. We had never seen that before, but for example the shoes below list for $109.95 but with the codes that Edge found, I think it brought the price down to $78. That’s a pretty big savings. Hopefully it works for you as well!
And that’s how we pieced this whole thing together! Not bad for a teenager and her middle aged dad who says that he has the fashion sense of a yurt. This was the final result:
The Prom
I was very nervous on the drive to the prom. Yeah, I got mean-girled, but I don’t want to waste any more of my time talking about them. I was worried about being alone but my dad kept trying to cheer me up. ‘The world is full of smart, fun, kick ass people’ he said, ‘and if they could see you in that outfit, they’d have your back.’
‘Sure,’ I laughed. I took a deep breath, got out of the car and made my way into the prom.
That’s when he sent the tweet. Sitting in the parking lot outside my prom, so that when I came out he could prove that there were, in fact, smart, fun, kick-ass people out there who had my back.
I think we know how that turned out! Try to imagine feeling alone one minute and then all of a sudden, thousands of people are supporting you. I feel like the luckiest person in the world.
The prom itself was a bit of a challenge but I was determined to make the best of it. I was still left out by my peers, but remember when I mentioned Ms. McKinley? She was a chaperone and she stuck by me the whole night, refusing to let me have a bad time. The world needs more people like her. It made all the difference for me.
Here she is, getting ice cream with me at the prom: Ms. McKinley. The best teacher on the planet. Yay for awesome teachers!
That’s it! I hope this helps anyone enduring the same type of situation. It’s really disorienting and it crushed my self-esteem for a long time.
Ultimately, I’m going to be okay. I have amazing teachers and three brilliant friends who are sophomores. I adore them and they always have my back, even if people in my class don’t. (I wish they could have been at the prom!)
So I’m not alone. I have a great family, excellent teachers, and I have six more days of high school left. That’s it. Six. I’m going to be okay. I’m going to make it. I got accepted to my dream college and I can’t wait to start there in the fall.
For anyone else thinking about building the same Gatsby look, I hope this guide saves you some time searching online. Thank you again for all the love and support. There truly are, beyond the shadow of a doubt, smart, fun, kick-ass people out there. I can’t wait to meet them when I get out of high school!
