WEIRENS | Dressed to Distress: White Dress Woes

111 dresses tried. Three states. Hours and hours spent standing in front of cracked mirrors and dirty white walls, bending and zipping, spinning and twirling. Stomach grumbling, head pounding, legs aching. That’s how one of my friends spent three entire days of her spring break – endlessly shopping for the right graduation dress. 

This friend, although a more extreme example, is fairly representative of the struggle many graduating women experience finding their dress. This is for many reasons: White, the traditional (to a duress-like extent) color of a graduation dress, is a difficult color to look good in, the social pressure of shopping for such a large event is stressful, and clothes shopping in Ithaca is far from easy. And beyond Ithaca, the selection for this specific item isn’t exactly great either. 

For some reason, dress designers seem to think women want to expose the entire length of their legs while receiving their diploma. I personally don’t want to be peeling the backs of my upper thighs from a sticky plastic chair in front of my professors, family, peers and all their families, and yet retail America seems to think otherwise. 

No woman wants to deal with dress shopping while taking prelims, finals and the myriad of activities that keep them busy at Cornell. I myself chose to procrastinate on this task — hearing all my friends’ struggles with it made me put it off until I had nowhere else to look but 1) the Ithaca Target and 2) the expanse of the internet. 

Hours of searching, scrolling and whining ensued. 

“Aurora, why don’t you just not wear a white dress?” my mother would say over the phone. “You can just wear something you already own, that you like.”

Because I’m a lemming, is the answer. A six foot tall lemming trying to fit into these white dresses that wouldn’t cover an American Girl doll’s kneecaps. 

Eventually, my efforts paid off, and I found something nice on Amazon. Presumably hand stitched by Jeff Bezos as he waited for his betrothed to return to the planet. It’s arrived, and doesn’t fit, but that’s fine. There are tailors in Ithaca. My next obstacle will be finding matching shoes — where there is far less room for error. No such thing as a shoe tailor. 

My conclusion from this process: We should ditch the “White Dress for Graduation,” tradition. 

White is not a flattering color on most women – or if you are one of the lucky few that do look good in it, there are bound to be better colors. It should be encouraged for women to look as lovely and perhaps even unique as they can on graduation. I do understand where a neutral white is a tasteful default when there is a colorful graduation cap and gown layered on. But it’s not like we’re going to walk on stage with our robes unzipped, fluttering in the breeze. 

Furthermore, a white dress shows stains and dirt easily — there are no secrets with the white. No sloppy joes. No burritos or powdered doughnuts. That juicy summer watermelon? Don’t even think about it, melon head. In all seriousness: Even one month in advance, I’ve been wondering if my post-graduation dinner restaurant has bibs that I could use for the meal. 

It’s just not practical. If I buy an impractical clothing item, it better look amazing, but white graduation dresses do not fulfill this criteria. 

Lastly: over consumerism is a problem in the United States. I already own way too many dresses, and now I own yet another. This is not a very sustainably-minded tradition.

In the end, of course, it’s not about the dress. It’s about the accomplishment of graduating from Cornell. 

On this note, the women I’ve talked to say that the struggle to find their white graduation dress is metaphorical for their time at Cornell — through struggle and time, you get a wonderful reward. However, unlike our Cornell education, this white dress is no reward. It is merely a trip to the Goodwill in July. 

At graduation, we should embrace unity, but not uniformity. I hope this tradition evolves, but I don’t think it will. If I feel strongly enough to write an article on it, and am still wearing one, white dresses aren’t going anywhere. Lemmings in white, may we step off into our future together bravely. 

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