The Blue Dress
Garments That Might Change Your Lifecourse
After a week of sheltering from rockets and feeling like I was sitting at the epicenter of WWIII, it suddenly felt like the only thing worth thinking or talking about - was love. Maybe it always is.
When I’m single, I think about love a lot. I talk about it more. I fall into this very specific state of mind I call romantic anxiety. I don’t know what Sartre, Alain de Botton, or Esther Perel would call it, but I’m sure there’s a name for that quiet ache for something warm and bright, just out of reach.
The topic is too wide for one dispatch. Dating, flirting cues, intimacy, sex, desire — they’re all orbiting. But this isn’t about any of them in particular.
I’ve been in love. More than once. I’m lucky. But being in love - that wild, breathtaking thing - doesn’t necessarily mean being in a relationship with the person you’re in love with. I know that first-hand. And I’ve come to be grateful for that, too.
If you’ve read my want list, you might remember I wrote that one of my real dreams is to write a book. If you missed that dispatch — here’s a quick reminder:
'I want...' List
There’s something wildly life-affirming about desire - not the calculated kind, but that deep, all-consuming hunger for more. Whenever I hear someone say, “I don’t want anything anymore,” a quiet bell goes off in my mind. To me, that’s often the first signal of melancholy settling in - or apathy, or the heavy cloak of quiet depression. Even fatigue can …
I want it to be fiction. But based on something true. A real episode from my own life.
It all started with a dress. The blue dress. The most cinematic love story I’ve lived was wrapped around it. Despite everything my mother once told me, men do notice the garments - even in Tel Aviv, where no one is supposed to care, and even if it’s not aggressively sexy.
Three years ago, I fell in love with a man I’d never met - only through messages and phone calls. As strategic as I am in business, that’s how wildly romantic I am in my love life. We matched by accident. I was on the app for two days.
I still don’t know how we even matched. He didn’t have a proper photo. I only noticed him because he messaged me. And the message was strange enough to remember. He asked: “Recent dream?” Oddly enough, I’d just had one — about my closest friend, suddenly pregnant. I woke up and texted her, asking if there was news. Then I told him. That’s how it began.
The conversation was sharp, fast, funny. I love when it’s funny. It’s still one of the most important things to me in a man — that he can make me laugh.
I didn’t realize, back then, that I was texting from Tel Aviv with someone in Australia. Australia!!!!! With a 13-hour time difference. I’ll try to summarize: our long-distance, no-meeting romance lasted about eight or nine months. We talked endlessly - hours and hours - despite his very thick South African accent. Eventually, we did meet. Ten months in, I think.
And now you might ask - what does the blue dress have to do with any of this? What blue dress, for god’s sake? You never even met.
Well. I had a photo. In the blue dress. He loved it. Talked about it constantly. I never thought a man could get so caught on a dress. Yes, it’s a beautiful one. Yes, it shows a few things, maybe flatters here and there. But for it to become the center of so many conversations? That surprised me.
As you can probably imagine, eventually I wore it. Not on our first meeting - the circumstances didn’t allow it - but for an important one. Because I really wanted to please him. Everything between us shifted after that.
This isn’t a love story newsletter, so I won’t dive into details. No need to relive who said what, how it ended. It ended simply. We’re not together. We even stayed friends for a while. But the one thing that truly stayed with me from that whole episode - was the blue dress.
The blue dress was always there.
Since then, I’ve thought a lot about the role clothes play in love. Could it be that some love stories start with an outfit? Or maybe they just need one to survive?
No man has ever told me the dress his lover wore meant something. But they’ve never denied it either.
Eventually, I went down a small rabbit hole. I started looking at how dresses shape desire - and more broadly, what an outfit is, how it can hold something about fate. And of course, the easiest place to spot patterns in clothing and story - is film.
Recently, I noticed something: when a woman appears in a blue dress on screen, her life is about to change.
Here are a few examples:
One of the most familiar — and consistently reliable — examples is the American visual trope of the blue dress. It usually signals the arrival of a romantic heroine who, either out of curiosity or by twist of fate, is just about to step onto a path of transformation and adventure. You can often predict her entire dramatic arc from that one symbol alone.
I didn’t plan to dive into the symbolism of blue dresses in cinema. But once I stumbled on it, I couldn’t let it go.
Still, what I really wanted to talk about was something else entirely - the role clothes play in attraction. In desire. Not as metaphor, but as presence. As choice. As signal.
Some garments are almost universally understood as seductive. The red dress, for instance — that one’s undeniable. Since Breakfast at Tiffany’s, the little black dress has joined the list too: functional by day, quietly dangerous by night.
There’s plenty out there about clothing as a sexual signal - essays, data, behavioral studies. You don’t have to look far. But I’ve never been drawn to overtly sexual looks. Their purpose is too clear. Too easy.
What interests me more is the psychology of dressing. How it feels on. What it shifts within.
Sometimes, a single garment becomes the thing that changes how we move through a room. The quiet rush of alignment between body, fabric, and mood - that’s the real seduction. And I think that’s what draws people in.
I would never downplay the craft - the designers, the creativity, the culture. But the magic happens when a woman puts something on and feels it click. That confidence - the kind that turns a dress into armor, or into light - call it whatever you like. For me, it’s a shift. A small, seismic one.
It marks a shift.
And for women, that shift is rarely linear. It moves with the cycle. Around ovulation, somewhere in the middle, something subtle happens. A sense of being seen - or not minding being seen. Whether she intends to or not, she radiates that.
Cinema reflects this too. When a dress becomes the symbol of a heroine’s transformation, one thing never changes: she will always step forward with her head high, her back straight, and her eyes locked on the viewer.
I’m sure that is the key that elevates any dress attractiveness and makes it unforgettable.
Meanwhile, I finally done reading ‘The Husbands’ by Holly Gramazio and jumped right away into ‘Purple Cow’ by Seth Goldin and ‘Gli Aspetti Irrilevanti’ (Not the Most Important Thing) by Paolo Sorrentino. I watched We Were Liars, Saving Mr. Banks, Fountain of Youth, The Friend and Materialists.
I hope that by next week, I’ll be able to return to desire and love — but in quieter circumstances.
Sincerely yours,
Miri
Read it in a single breath
💙