What is it to be underdressed during your prom?
In today's standard, a winning prom gown is one that transforms the wearer into an ultimate beauty, like the magic gown worn by Cinderella to the ball which elicited "oohs and aahs" from both genders, making her the center of attention.
Who does not want to be the center of everybody's admiring eyes? Every girl would want to look her very best during her prom night. And every mother would want her daughter to be the most beautiful on that very night. Mothers would go far and wide looking for the right couturier and designer who could whip up the most elegant gown for their precious darlings.
One such mother thought she made the biggest mistake of her life in consulting the wrong gown maker for her daughter's prom gown. When the design was shown to her, she knew she shouldn't have listened to her. But the gownmaker succeeded in the end to convince her that the gown fitted her daughter perfectly.
The evening of the prom came and the mother was there to see how her daughter compared with others. She was standing next to me and I could hear her muttering, "My daughter is underdressed. My God, I couldn't forgive myself for this. My daughter Annabel is so underdressed". When I looked at the group of gorgeous girls in princess-like gowns, I immediately spotted her daughter and understood what she meant.
While all the other girls were wearing layers and layers of expensive-looking gowns, full blown or gowns fully bursting out occupying much space, the daughter, who I recognized for she was my student, was wearing a gown shaped like a pencil, straight, and slim. It looked very economical, probably using only a meter and a half of cloth for the entire gown.
It's not just the cloth or the number of meters that was so obvious in that gown but it was the "total effect", how it made her look in comparison to all the others around her. She looked like an understatement, she was there but not really. In other words, because of the economy or slimness of the gown, she became lost or almost non-existent.
When everybody else's gowns are screaming with layers of expensive cloth, and yours make you look like a log in vertical position, then you're simply underdressed.
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