The dress looks nice on you still

This week my sister-in-substack Kayla Carcone takes the mic. She’s covering another artist I hadn’t heard of before because my irrelevance is early-onset. I should also admit I’ve never seen Girls—my family saw The Force Awakens in theaters together and my sister did not know Adam Driver was in it, and when he was revealed she whispered to me, “Oh my god I’ve seen his dick.” which I have since learned was because of Girls.

Anyway, Dijon’s 2020 EP How Do You Feel About Getting Married? has some excellent album art in addition to some groovy tunes.

Kayla’s substack is at least 50% of the reason I started one. I hope you’ll consider checking her stuff out. She’s much funnier than I am. Enjoy~

Carl

“The Dress” by Dijon and other reunion fantasies

by Kayla Carcone

“Do you still take a long time to get ready?”

Dijon opens “The Dress” with this half-innocent, half-cutting question. What was likely a pain point in the previous relationship between singer and subject has transformed into a time-cooled and nostalgia sugared wonder. He follows it up with an explanation, “‘Cause you used to make too much out of that kind of stuff,” a reflection that ultimately leads him to fawn over his former love, the same vision in an old dress. This time, their meeting is uncomplicated by former expectations and unresolved arguments, “No, we don’t have to patch things up. Just turn the lights down for the thrill. ‘Cause the dress looks nice on you still, and it always will.” 

On Absolutely, “The Dress” cuts through the noise. Dijon says writing the gleaming, wistful Bonnie-Raitt-inspired track was an exercise, challenging him out of his comfort zone, to step outside of a “wall of sonic trickery and fuzz” and write a song plain and true. And he did, braced by a simple, steady drum machine and gospel-adjacent keys. “The Dress” moves earnestly through its own nerves, its vulnerabilities (“Okay, I took a long time to get ready too”), and repentance for the way things ended, but the song ends itself on, “we should go out, said we should go out,” giving the entire monologue an air of reverie. 

The fantasy of having a second, one-night chance with someone is indulgent. It imagines a kind of closure that doesn’t end with a tearful goodbye, an exchange of someone’s box of things, an unsettled quiet decided under the cover of night. It provides the opportunity to show up both old and new, to someone who is both old and new to you, too. It accounts for the space of a life continued outside of a person who once knew you well and shows you all the ways they did or didn’t grow, or at least in the way we may decide to see them. In the fantasy, we may forgive, we may show them what they’re missing, we may hope they want us back enough to say so. It’s another projection onto a filed-away self, crystallized inside a love that was previously agreed on, then lost, expired, clipped, erased, and now embodied in a person who to some degree has been rendered unrecognizable and exactly the same all at once.  

In a seminal episode of millennial television, “The Panic In Central Park” from Girls (which, yes, everyone is rewatching), Marnie (Allison Williams) runs into her ex-boyfriend, Charlie (Christopher Abbott) after years of no contact, and frankly lives “The Dress,” eventually becoming outfitted in a sparkly red number (she quips that it makes her feel like a “Bob Mackie Barbie doll”) picked out at a thrift store ahead of scamming a man out of several hundred dollars. Instead of Dijon, “Tied Up” by Cassey Veggies and DeJ Loaf plays over a montage of the two having a lavish Italian feast with wine, ice cream, and a spontaneous dance in the middle of the restaurant. It is the closest to euphoria I felt in 2016.

During the winter break the same year that episode of Girls aired, I was determined to see the boy I was determined to love in high school after a few years of strangled communication, a string of infatuating stand-ins, and complicated desire — all coming together, a glass Christmas ornament crushed in my own fist. What I wouldn’t see, what I couldn’t see then, was that I was gay, but when I was 19, that was not the point. What’s more, the love I made out to be larger than my life was simply, humanely unrequited, but that was also not the point. I was indeed about to have one of these moments, perched on a kitchen chair, watching my mother watch the window. Watching the microwave clock blink into new shapes. I waited for this boy to show up in his familiar car and drive us to the better of two Chinese restaurants in a three stop-light town. I don’t remember much of what we talked about, but I remember keeping my coat on. I remember the restaurant, a glowing square of fluorescent television light, spilling onto the blueblack parking lot, hanging off the edge of the Delaware River. Some murmur here or there about the 2016 election. How our mothers and brothers were. Of college roommates and majors. I remember he ate his meal so quickly, without a beverage. Me, painfully and characteristically slow. And isn’t that funny? How the cold, the smells, are so clear, but what I coveted in that connection — the chatter — folded away, forgotten.

A similarity falls over “The Dress.” While there are questions and admissions, there is no dialogue. We never hear from the wearer of The Dress. There is no conversation lined up nice and neat like in, “Taxi” by Harry Chapin, or even “Scott Street” by Phoebe Bridgers. Dijon’s reunion fantasy ruminates on the possibility bursting inside of these encounters and inside his own head — the anxiety, the unknown. Its closest sibling is maybe Mitski’s “Old Friend,” where the plan to meet up is being struck, the pair penciling in a trip to “Blue Diner” to “take coffee and talk about nothing, baby.” There is a difference, still: where Mitski’s reunion fantasy reads as a bit bleak, Dijon’s is laced with magic. 

The thing about “The Panic in Central Park” is that it doesn’t end in a romantic, lasting reunion, though Marnie and Charlie try to fit back together, agreeing to pretend the last few years were a dream they can both run away from. After finding a heroin kit in a pile of Charlie’s clothing, Marnie leaves with nothing but The Dress, now garish in the unforgiving morning light, only to return home to her husband, where also, things come to an abrupt end. Dijon’s song isn’t concerned with what happens beyond the Italian restaurant scene. In fact, on the topic of lasting, he muses, “Well, maybe that's a question and answer I don't have.” It begs you to stay in the moment of your own fantasy before you can decide whether the choice to indulge was good or bad. 

Almost two years before my own reunion, I had written that boy a deeply dramatic letter and told him that if I was asked to pinpoint the moment I knew I loved him, I’d say it was one morning he picked me up for a Saturday track meet in the dead of winter and noticed that the seat warmer on my side was already turned on. Getting into that car again was like slipping into the past: he turned to me and said that the distance between our houses wasn’t really far enough for his car to get warm, but that my seat warmer was already turned on. My very own the dress looks nice on you still. No drugs fell out of either of our pants by the night’s end, but I had a sense even then that I probably wouldn’t see him again, and so far, I’ve been right. The music stops and the life outside it moves on. 

When I listen to “The Dress,” I am reminded of my juvenile, obdurate refusal to believe I could ever love anyone else, because the reunion fantasy it depicts holds a mirror up to the forlorn teenager trapped inside me, pining for her good friend’s time and attention. She is equal parts hope and longing, completely haunting, and should never be fed after midnight. I am certain such a Gremlin lives inside everyone, we just grow farther away from them. I have since attended and participated in other post-severance reunions and none have ever been as satisfying as the wish to have them. Yet to experience them never fully quashes the desire to give it another try with the next ex-lover, whether in pursuit of some delicious closure, a last look, a last word – the mystery inherent in meeting again remains too enticing for me to fully dismiss. 

This never-ending loop artfully teases and tricks, but even once the smoke settles and the mirrors become unobscured, a shred of truth remains: not only does the dress look nice on you still, but it always will. 

Kayla Carcone is a writer/disaster (synonyms) living in Boston, MA. Read and subscribe to her Substack, where she’s written/disastered about such important topics as finsta, Trolls (2016), and an annual high school musical theater competition.