In Which Robert Demonstrates His Genius Once Again But in an Unexpected Domain

UPDATE: I really thought I had posted this and a couple other pre-written posts already.  Oops. 

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I really had my act together on Sunday (6/1) and put my entire week's worth of outfits together.  With the advent of the warmer weather, I was excited to move on to skirts and dresses worn without tights, huzzah.

Target has a good selection of comfy knit dresses, at good prices, that are very appropriate for the casual to business casual workplace, except they are often just too damn short.  I have a couple that I bought in the fall/winter that work with tights but that I'm not comfortable with wearing to work in bare legs.  I know opinions vary on this subject, but I really think that more than a couple inches above the knee is just too short on anyone who works in a professional environment.  I recently saw a post about dressing for summer associates in law firms that linked to this poll about skirt lengths, and I am firmly in the C is probably OK but any shorter is not (unless you wear opaque tights) camp.  And unlike the "lots of commenters [who] noted that the more fit a woman is, the shorter a skirt she can get away with," I think this applies to everyone: Ally McBeal, Camryn Manheim's character on The Practice, whoever.  There are a couple of outfit bloggers I read sometimes who post their way above the knee skirts (like E in the photo accompanying the poll) that they wear to their jobs as lawyers and other professionals and I'm just like, Are you fucking serious?

The idea that Target sells dresses too short to be appropriate for work is not surprising except that these dresses are often specifically (for lack of a better word) targeted toward women with professional office jobs.  And it's definitely not just Target, either.  For example, I have a nice pleated skirt from Loft that I was terribly disappointed to realize this week is too short to wear without tights to work.

I was talking to Robert about this issue, and wondering why I have this problem with some, though not all, skirts/dresses but not pants.  Yes, some garments are intended to be shorter than others, and some brands might systematically be cut shorter than others (I find that Lands End does well at making dresses that are a bit longer, like the coral red one in my previous post), but my experience seemed not to line up with these factors in the ways I would expect.

And Robert made the brilliant (but duh, in-retrospect-obvious) observation:  My body is unusually long between the waist and the top of my legs.  (Sometimes people call this being "long-waisted," but that's not what I'm talking about here though I might have a bit of this, too -- long-waisted means having a lot of length between the shoulders and the natural waist, not between the natural waist and the top of the legs.  I do not know if there is a term for my disproportionality.  Long-abdomened?)  My legs themselves are normal for my height and my knees are in a normal place on my legs.  So my long "abdomen" and regular length thighs means I am longer between the natural waist and the knees than most women my height, and since I'm a bit taller than the average woman (even the "average" woman most manufacturers use as their standard at 5'7") to begin with, it means I have an atypically long waist-to-knee length to cover.

This is totally compatible with the pattern I have observed: That dresses (which usually have waists that hit at the natural waist) and skirts that sit at the natural waist are often going to be a bit too short (because I am longer than most women, even most women my height).  The skirts I have that are looser in the waist and thus are worn down some on my hips are more likely to be long enough (because they do not have to cover the entire waist to knee length). 

All this is to say, Man, getting dresses and skirts to fit for the bare-leg season is tougher than I thought it would/should be, but it makes more sense to me now.

A Longer Target Dress -- Monday, 6/2/14

In any event, I was happy to discover that this dress from Target is long enough for me to wear to work sans tights.  (I can't remember if I've worn it at all/on the blog before.)

Green striped dress from Target
Black knit cardigan (old)
Multistrand stone necklace from Outfit Additions
Black flats from LifeStrides

I was not happy that this funky, very useful necklace fell apart on me this weekend, however!  I lost two of the three strands.  I have collected as many of the beads and stones as Robert and I could pick out of the carpet, but I don't know if I will be able/willing to try to restring them.  I also haven't decided whether I want to try getting a refund/exchange for my necklace from the seller.  I really like their stuff, and was considering putting in another order with them, but now I'm feeling gun shy.  I probably should give them the chance to show excellent customer service and not lose my business forever, but I'm feeling meh about it right now.