Most men shouldn’t be allowed to dress themselves let alone suggest what a woman should wear. But every once in a while I’ll stumble across an item of women’s clothing that makes me think, “I’d marry a girl on the spot if I saw her wearing that.” I call it #WifeMaterial.
#WIFEMATERIAL: LACOSTE F/W 2015 TENNIS DRESS
The US Open is well underway in Queens, the annual event in which New Yorkers shell out a stupid amount of money for tickets to a sporting event driven skyward by the willingness of corporate douchebags to out-douche other corporate douchebags. Beyond seeing world class tennis—some of it at night!—is the inspiration to make plans to dust off your tennis racket that you'll never make good on and the opportunity to gawk at the atrocity that is tennis fans trying to dress like they're at a fancy tennis event, and the fancy one percenters trying to dress like they're tennis fans.
This dress, from the Lacoste Fall/Winter 2015 runway collection, will ensure you don’t fall into either of those camps. It’s perfect, with the subtle tennis skirt ruffle (are you sensing a pattern here?) and diagonal stripes that say, “My body doesn’t need them to be vertical and my boobs don’t need them to be horizontal.”
Tennis needs more of this. Because unfortunately, fashion in tennis has become a cliché—where the country club crowd adheres to an absurdly corny hyper-white aesthetic that has the women looking like they aren’t just allowed on a championship golf course, but are caddying a round, and the men showing up to their weekly doubles match/capital gains tax bitch fest looking like they moonlight on a professional paint crew. Sure, they’ll defend it as “classy,” but let’s be honest—that’s too much white for anyone to wear, let alone those who can spill red wine and dijon mustard without consequence.
Fortunately, Lacoste has been doing this fashion in tennis thing long enough that their clothes don’t look like they belong in the closet of a caricature of Connecticut. And it’s not a fleeting, fashion show concept, either. In 1933, Frenchman René Lacoste co-founded the Lacoste brand after a professional tennis career that included seven Grand Slam titles and a world No. 1 ranking in 1926 and 1927. That’s legit.
You should be able to buy this dress later this Fall. So in the meantime, you’ll have to find something else to wear if you’re looking for a mixed doubles partner at the Open.
[Images via vogue.com]
Lucas Shanks is a writer and creative in New York City. If you want to marry him, you have to follow him on Twitter first.
