JuliaBobbin's Mad Men Dress Challenge!

I wasn't originally going to participate in the Mad Men dress challenge, mostly because I don't particularly like the show, and also because I couldn't think beyond my GoF dress. But now that the shoot is over and I've recovered from my chiffon nightmares, and I've found out that this week's Sew Weekly challenge is also Mad Men-inspired, I've decided to go ahead and participate. Even after browsing pages and pages of pictures (also, can I be really meta for a second and say how weird it is that the default meaning of "pages of pictures" is not a magazine full of pictures? I'm just browsing a bunch of 0's and 1's!), I don't actually have any favorite outfits. I am aware that such a statement in the sewing blogiverse is anathema. Thank goodness you all are just 0's and 1's, so I don't need to be afraid of getting egged.

Sooo...without a favorite outfit, how am I going to choose my inspiration? I like Betty Draper's style, but I'm pretty sure I have enough pastel, floral, fitted-bodice-full-skirted-dresses to last for a lifetime. Or at least until a baby ruins my waist. And I don't think I could ever pull off Joan's curve-hugging, intense jewel-toned sheaths, as that would require having curves to hug in the first place (also I hate sheaths and I don't have any Joan-colored fabrics in my stash).

Boring boring boring. Even her expression indicates she's bored with herself.

 [picture]

Which leaves Peggy. And Peggy (at least from the pictures I've seen) always looks like a drab, frumpy schoolgirl. The colors she uses are so brown and gray and boring, and she always has these prissy little bows at the collar, and all of these overwhelmingly convincing reasons make her the obvious choice of inspiration. Logic is not my strong suit, clearly. Anyway, I tried to distill all her outfits down and remix them into something cuter and not quite so frumpy. Will I succeed? That remains to be seen.

Gray. Collar. Bow. {picture}

Brown this time. Still the frilly stuff at the collar. {picture}

At this point, I'm sure someone is going to jump in and say that Peggy is not like that at all, and grows and gets a better wardrobe or something...but honestly, I will probably never watch the show, so please excuse me if I don't really care. Gosh, now I feel bad for saying that, even it this is an imaginary person. But, as John Green says in his preface to The Fault in Our Stars, "Neither novels nor their readers benefit from attempts to divine whether any facts hide inside a story. Such efforts attack the very idea that made-up stories can matter, which is sort of the foundational assumption of our species." I know that's not quite the issue here, but I know that I, personally, have fallen in love with and agonized with and eagerly watched the growth in imaginary people (even on TV -- hello, Firefly!). So yeah. Not really sure where I was going with that last paragraph. Which, I suppose, is why I'm not an English teacher. 

Also, thank you for all of your lovely comments about my Girl on Fire dress! I just saw the movie last night (midnight premier, of course!) and without giving away any costuming spoilers, I'll just say that it's not as bad as that one movie photo I posted. Still like mine better, though.