Jessica McClintock, perhaps best known for absolutely dominating the prom dress section of Dillards for the entirety of most American Gen X and millennial girlhoods, has died at age 90.
But before she was churning out the strapless or tank dresses so many of us would get awkwardly felt up in, McClintock was the genius behind the Gunne Sax dresses, linked to San Francisco “flowers in your hair” hippie culture, a style that is currently enjoying a very welcome (in my home at least) revival in the form of the cottagecore prairie dresses, which have returned to fashion in all their flowery, flowy, Victorian ghost glory. To celebrate the contribution Jessica McClintock made to the aesthetic of looking completely modest and like one knows how to roll a tight-ass blunt, here are some of the best vintage Gunne Sax dresses I could find while scrolling through Etsy and wondering if there’s a chance I might meet a stranger who will marry me shoeless in the mud at a music festival so I can justify buying one.
Is she taking her first communion, or is she going to hear The Byrds in Golden Gate State Park? Maybe both, bitch.
Has she isolated herself and her young ward in a decaying mansion long after being jilted on her wedding day by an unfaithful lover, vowing to have her revenge against every man she sees as the very lace of her trousseau sheds in yellowing flakes from her withering body, or is she about to head over to Ginsberg’s to drop some acid and just, like, groove, man? Why not dress for either and see where the day takes her?
Is she a remarkably lifelike doll found in the attic of that rotting Queen Anne revival the villagers won’t go near since the fire and the servants mustn’t speak of but for in whispers, or has she spent the last two years living in a microbus with real far-out daddy she met at Altamont whose name she can definitely remember if you just, like, give her a minute, dude? Yes.
Farewell, Jessica McClintock, and long live Gunne Sax.
DISCUSSION
I wore a dark green velvet Jessica McClintock sheath dress with an elaborate lace neckline to a winter formal at my HS in 1992. The lace was slightly different than this, but I really loved that dress.