For the Love of Sister Dresses

This photo hangs in my hallway and I walk past it everyday without really looking at it. Today while I stood at my ironing board I looked up at the picture and thought about how often my sister and I were dressed alike for the big occasions, you know, Easter, Christmas and the Forth of July Picnic.

This photo was taken on my Grandparents front porch at the farm where my Aunt lives in that house and my parents just past her in a new house. I know for sure that is where we were sitting, not because I can remember that day, but because of the painted metal glider in the background where many a Grandmother drank many a bourbon.

The fact that I am wearing a hat, or bonnet to be more precise and Margaret and I were dressed in identical outfits means this was Easter and we had come to visit from Connecticut. I don’t know this for sure, but I can guess that my mother had bought these dresses at the Junior League thrift shop in Norwalk where she volunteered so she could get first crack at the barely worn Florence Eiseman outfits so many of the well-off New Canaan and Darien mothers dropped off at the shop. The Peter Pan collar was pure Florence in the mid-sixties.

It was common practice for WASPS to dress their children in matching outfits, probably to be able to tell them apart from other blond straight haired children when picking them up from the church Sunday school. Proof of this is the fact that my mother was often able to buy us matching clothes even though I am three and a half years older than Margaret. If she were buying new it would have been easy to just buy the same dress in two different sizes, but it takes real skill to find two matching ones at the Junior League Shop that fit both girls at the same time.

Well, they did not always fit so sometimes I had one on that was just too tight and Margaret was swimming in hers. My sister Janet, being five years younger than Margaret never really had to do the sister dress thing, but then again, she barely did the dress thing at all and my Mother had given up volunteering by that time.

I wish I had a picture of the matching bathing suits Marg and I had that had a daffodil made out of some starchy organza material that stuck out 3-D from our tummy’s and had a cut out in the middle of the suit that made the center of the flower. We loved the tan polka dot that cut out made on our stomachs.

I hardly see anyone dressed in sister dresses anymore, except maybe in those TV shows with families with 19 children. I guess their matching outfits are homemade from the same bolt of gingham popular with fundamentalists. Sad that they have gone that way, but maybe it is a sign that parents can differentiate one child from the next.