The Lost Art of Getting Dressed Up

I remember the ritual. The careful selection of the right heel height for the evening ahead, the delicate dance of fastening those impossibly tiny buckles, the way your posture changed the moment your feet slipped into them.

There's a particular kind of melancholy that comes from opening your closet and seeing stilettos gathering dust. Not just any shoes, but those perfect, impractical, gleaming instruments of transformation that once carried you into rooms where you felt like the most elegant version of yourself. They sit there now like artifacts from a lost civilization—the civilization of getting dressed up.

I remember the ritual. The careful selection of the right heel height for the evening ahead, the delicate dance of fastening those impossibly tiny buckles, the way your posture changed the moment your feet slipped into them. There was power in those shoes, a kind of alchemy that transformed not just how you looked, but how you moved through the world. Each step was deliberate, purposeful, musical against marble floors and hardwood. You couldn't rush in heels like that—they demanded presence, commanded attention, insisted on grace.

Beside them, my evening bags wait in their dust covers and stacked on the shelf like sleeping beauties. That beaded clutch that barely held a lipstick, a credit card, a band-aid and a phone, but somehow contained all the magic of possibility. The structured patent leather purse that reflected restaurant candlelight and caught the glow of museum gallery lights at exhibition openings. The black satin single clasp with sleek black gloves, a hand-me-down from my city-girl grandmother, repeating her whisper of a 1930s understated elegance. These weren't just accessories; they were props in the theater of sophistication, each one chosen to complement not just an outfit, but an entire evening's narrative.

Now my daily uniform consists of white sneakers—clean, practical, utterly sensible—and cross-body bags designed for efficiency rather than elegance. There's nothing wrong with comfort, nothing shameful about choosing function over form. But there's something profound that's been lost in this shift toward the perpetually casual, something that went beyond mere vanity or fashion.

Getting dressed up was a form of respect—for the occasion, for the people you'd encounter, for yourself. It was a way of saying that this moment, this gathering, this celebration mattered enough to warrant your finest self. The act of transformation was part of the experience itself. You didn't just attend a gala; you prepared for it, you became someone worthy of it.

I miss the anticipation of getting ready, the careful application of makeup that would photograph well under dim restaurant lighting, the selection of jewelry that would catch just enough light without overwhelming. I miss the feeling of walking into a room and knowing that everyone had made the same effort, that we had all agreed to participate in this collective elevation of the everyday into something special.

The pandemic accelerated something that was already happening—the "casualization" of everything. Office parties became Zoom calls, galas became virtual fundraisers, award ceremonies became livestreams watched from our couches in pajama pants. We adapted, as humans do, but something essential was lost in translation. You can't recreate the magic of getting dressed up through a computer screen.

What I mourn isn't just the clothes themselves, but what they represented: the celebration of occasions worth celebrating, the acknowledgment that some moments deserve to be marked as different, special, elevated. In our rush toward comfort and practicality, we've lost the art of transformation, the joy of becoming our most polished selves for an evening.

Those shoes are still there, waiting. The bags still hold their shape, still catch light when I move their dust covers. They're not just accessories gathering dust—they're now relics of a time of anticipation and reverence, when we regularly created reasons to become our most magnificent selves, when getting dressed up was both an art form and an act of optimism, and a belief that beautiful moments were always just around the corner, waiting for us to rise to meet them.