No Audience Required
On silk, lace, soft light, and the private rituals that bring us back to ourselves.
Before I say anything else, I want to invite you to something special.
On Thursday evening, May 14, I’ll be bringing a small collection of sustainably curated nightwear, slips, robes, and evening pieces to the breathtakingly beautiful Plum Vintage Barware at the Front Street Galleries in Dayton, Ohio. We’re calling it Evening Pieces: A Vintage Nightwear Pop-Up, which feels exactly right: silk, lace, glass, glow, and the quiet glamour of getting dressed for no one but yourself.
You can stop by at 7 p.m. at the Front Street Art Studios - 2nd floor of building 100, have something to sip (compliments of the equally breathtakingly beautiful, Swoon Books & Wine), wander the shop, and browse pieces that feel like they belong to another era, or maybe to the version of ourselves we are still becoming.
Which has had me thinking….
Do we beautify ourselves if only there is someone to take notice? Does wearing a silk nightgown at candlelight beckon a grand reveal to another?
I have thought a lot about evening rituals when no one is there to bear witness. Not in a lonely way, exactly, but in the way life changes shape over time. Relationships change. Schedules shift. Children grow. Rooms of the house go unused. We are moving through different seasons of our lives, whether we like it or not. (I most often do not.)
And at some point, many of us find ourselves a little quieter and more introspective as the sun sets.
In this season of life, I love the feeling of washing my face at the end of a long day, putting on something soft, dotting a light scent into the nape of my neck, pouring something special into a pretty glass. I often take time to dim the lights and burn some luxurious incense. Each small choice in this ritual makes me feel like I am returning to myself after giving to the world. And every evening that I can take part in these little observances, I learn more and more that femininity does not have to be witnessed to be real.
Motherhood has a way of making women very practical. In my twenties and thirties, I moved quickly. I learned to be useful. To be needed. To be at the beck and call of little ones. There were many years when everything I wore, ate, bought, and did bent toward function.
As much as I achingly miss that version of me, I must learn to embrace the quiet importance of tending to self. To seek out ways that remind me that I am still here. Still soft. Still allowed to feel lovely. To celebrate my aging skin. The curves. The marks and scars. The evidence of a life being lived.
Maybe it is the glamorous chiffon robes and lace underthings of old movies I’ve fallen in love with over the years. Or maybe it is simply the permission I now give myself, more than I ever have before, to bend toward beauty, not only toward function, that draws me to the vintage evening pieces I choose to curate for myself and others in this season of life.
I cheekily told a friend recently that she will never again be as young as she is today.
And that is true for me. And for you.
So if not now, then when?
If not the silk, the lace, the satin, the good glass, the soft light, the small ceremony of feeling beautiful, then when?
