This is the story of my love affair with Clover Canyon. 

Five years ago, I was looking for a dress at the Marshalls at Yonge and Gerrard five years ago, for my convocation. It came down to a choice between the Winter Solstice and the Irish Box dresses, though I did not know them by that name yet. 

As much as I liked the feeling of staring into a tentacled floral abyss on the front of the Winter Solstice dress, the back did not inspire the same feelings. Also true blues remind me of my grade 10 high school ID photo where I looked like a drunk 23 year old man. Blue just does not play nicely with my complexion. 



So the warm florals on the Irish Box dress it was. It was 99 CAD, plus HST. 

I liked it so much that I looked up what other designs they had available. Then I stopped looking, because they were all, like, 300USD, and I was going to grad school, which pays merely alright. It was fine. I still had the good ol' Irish Box dress. The Irish Box dress took me not only to convocation, but in subsequent years, to Justin's brother's wedding, award dinners, and other schmancy stuff. 

Clover Canyon has not has as merry a time as I. Sometime in 2016, they went out of business. Possibly from oversupply and underdemand. It is a shame, because I haven't found anyone else who makes scuba-style dresses with as unique, violently eye-catching designs as they did. I regretted not buying some of the my favourite prints. Clover Canyon became my white whale - nearly impossible to spot in consignment stores, and never in my size. 

Now, in the last month, I discovered the joys of online second-hand shopping, because all the actual consignment stores are closed. Technically I am an essential worker. So instead of dropping a few hundred dollarinos on bus fares this month, I rediverted them to a wardrobe refresh, the likes of which have not been since since the last time I went on vacation.

Among the new members of my closet include these:



This is the Gatsby dress. Remember when the Great Gatsby movie came out in 2013? I hope not, because art deco screams the 2015 flapper trend, and using "Gatsby" as a metonymy for all things Roaring Twenties. Gatsby is a guy who clung to the dreams of the past and died for his mistake. Bah. I feel like Amy when she said "But Romeo and Juliet die at the end of the story!" I mean, I didn't know what she was referencing then, because I lived under a rock. But whatever. It's 2020 now. So hopefully everybody has forgotten, and art deco is just art deco again. On the other hand, the quasi-skater silhouette is getting dated, but that kind of skirt works really well on me. 

I also got the "Wings" dress:




So it fits a bit like a giant T shirt. And I might have to sew some darts. And the hem rises dangerously high when I raise my arms. None of it detracts from my love of the design and the symbology. So la. 

But those weren't the white whale. No, the white whale was the Rose Matador dress. 


Look at that shit. The front is baroque, the rose garden of Versailles. And the back is all Mena Suvari in American Beauty. Best of all, I snagged it for 30CAD plus shipping. 

Will I buy any more Clover Canyon dresses? I can't say no for sure. But I have caught my white whale, at last. It was delivered to me today, and it fits exactly like the Irish Box - which is to say, like a dream. And because I liked the dress so much, I wrote this entire blog post about it. 

But, perhaps you say, Captain Ahab dies at the end of Moby-Dick. The metaphor doesn't work! The only casualty here is your chequing account and perhaps a wee bit of your dignity!* 

Well, I can't hear you, cos my dress is too fabulously loud. 

* Nobody said that, of course, but the dress is fabulous. 

Oh, yeah, and then Justin brought wings home and coincidentally we'd reached the Wingsluts episode of our Brooklyn Nine Nine rewatch. 

And Fleabag was excellent, as my boss said, but not depressing, as she also said it was. It's just really sweet. Don't know if I hate the Godmother, Umbridge, or Shivani's elderly halfling cleric more.