Those Target dresses, though!

Social media is going crazy making fun of some dresses Target is selling. Someone named Lorca Damon posted a photo/meme of dresses on display with the following caption: Target has decided if we’re gonna suffer a pandemic, we might as well look like we just lost the farm after the locusts ate our crops. To get a better understanding, here’s the photo:

Lots of people are making fun of these frocks, but I’m sure there are people who are actually buying them. Yes, some of them are purchasing them to make fun of them, but I’d be willing to bet there are people who are getting them because they really want to wear them in public. They think they’re cute.

And if you were a girl in high school or college in the late 80s, don’t act like you’ve never seen this kind of “fashion” before. Come on. Yes, it’s hideous, but there was a time we actually thought it was cute. Yes, we did…admit it.

I even wore some dresses similar to these…on dates! What in Hell’s bells was I thinking?!? And why were boys asking me out at all when I was dressed like I lived in a place so remote that I didn’t even know television existed? Seriously…nothing says “please don’t kiss me on this date” like a dress that covers every inch of skin except your face! In my defense, I didn’t wear them a lot; I think I had one or two of the dresses that I wore maybe a couple of times, but I wore them!

I’m not kidding. I have a picture of myself wearing one of those Little House on the Prairie dresses at an Alabama football game when I was in college…I think it was 1986…with a date! It was a royal blue flannel dress with a black floral pattern, long sleeves, and a black velvet collar and cuffs. Ugh. On that particular day, I wore it with black pantyhose and black flat shoes. I can’t post the photo here, because I don’t want to make the poor guy look bad for having a date with someone dressed like Laura Ingalls Wilder. Honestly, I think anyone who wore a dress like that in the 80s needs to send notes of apology to all the guys we knew. Laugh if you want, but I wasn’t alone. All the girls were wearing them! And often, we were wearing them with…wait for it…Little House on the Prairie lace-up boots. Here are some pictures of various dresses from that era in the 1980s:

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Those dresses above are real dresses from the 1980s. Those hideous dresses were so popular that the brand, Laura Ashley, had whole stores full of them in malls across the United States! And another brand called Gunne Sax too…two brands devoted entirely to making us look like Laura Ingalls. It was a terrible style then, and it’s a terrible style now…unless you never want to get a date…or you’re trying to repel all men. Even my parents made fun of them in the 1980s. Every time I wore one or they saw a photo of me or my friends in one, they made faces. They even suggested then that we looked like we didn’t want dates. And they were right that we looked like we didn’t want dates, but we wanted dates…and we got dates…even dressed like that! Poor guys had to look at us in those dresses and pretend we looked pretty…even when we were wearing boots like these with the dresses:

So yes, I love seeing the memes about the Target dresses. In fact, a woman named Laura Waters did a whole silly photo shoot in one of the dresses and posted the photos on Facebook. You have to see it to believe it…I shared it on the Facebook page for Kelly’s Favorite Things, so you can see it there, or you can see the original post here. And as hard as I have laughed at the dresses, I have to remember that I actually wore dresses like that…and I cringe. Did I mention we wore skirts down to our ankles with those lace-up boots too?

I have to ask myself why styles like this would catch on in modern times in the first place. I saw this coming, though. I noticed in the past year that necklines got higher on blouses. It’s a lot more difficult to find a v-neck dress or top than it used to be…even in spring and summer styles! Maybe the pandemic is making us look for safer fashions?!? I don’t know what the reason is, but it’s terrible.

Let’s just hope this doesn’t catch on as widely like it did in the 80s. I don’t want to see whole stores filled up with dresses Laura Ingalls Wilder would wear. We have to do better than that in 2021.