The Erotics of Prairie Dresses
Plus my top 5 prairie chic picks!
Last year, I wrote about my love affair with Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books, and by extension all things Prairie Girl. Paid subscribers got a sweet little peak into 10-year-old Sara’s desire to flee the humdrum reality of Trapper Keepers and Starter jackets in search of a more winsome existence of flower sprigged poplin, tin cups, and windswept adventure. Sometimes this meant the playtime romanticization of horrifying stories of survival as seen in The Long Winter (who can forget the hay twists?!), and sometimes this meant simply playing dress-up in my mother’s old floral-print hippie dresses. The works of Laura Ingalls Wilder, Lucy Maud Montgomery, and Louisa May Alcott blurred in my imagination with The Box Car Children, My Side of the Mountain, and even The Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. This is all to say that for me then, and for me now, I have no Grand Unified Theory of Prairie Girl Chic. It’s a shape-shifting aesthetic (nay, WAY OF LIFE) that mostly functions as a conduit for my ever-changing desires and tastes.
For example, as a nine-year-old Prairie Girl, I enjoyed subjecting my Sylvanian animals to every debilitating natural disaster a gal could conjure. Think The Perfect Storm meets Fixer Upper.
I also liked to walk dreamily through the pine woods near my house and call those woods Violet Vale. Sometimes I sang a la Ariel’s iconic “ah-ah-ahhhhh, ah-ah-ahhhh, ah-ah-AHHHHH!” and sometimes I’d arrange my face as though I might bump into Gilbert Blythe around the next bend. I liked to scratch our miniature donkey’s nose (yup we had one, along with a couple horses, which provided an appropriately equine-centric backdrop to my Prairie Girl musings), hurdle myself over the splintery split rail fence (carefully avoiding the electric tape in the process), and pick tiny wild strawberries. No humdrum plastic bucket for me - those strawberries were deposited directly into a far less practical (and far more porous) straw hat.
It goes without saying, of course, that as a Prairie Girl, I also pressed daisies into my mother’s vintage books and called it romance. When she introduced me to the many “junk shops” throughout New England, I started collecting my own gilt-edged books. Obviously I had a printer’s tray full of mica bits, seashells, and tiny ceramic animals, and you know a Mary Engelbreit poster hung over my bed. This one, to be exact.
Of course I saved pretty perfume bottles once they were empty and preciously lined them up on my bureau. I owned a locked wooden box full of mementos, and it goes without saying that I saved every single movie stub. I stared meaningfully at myself in mirrors on the eve of birthdays and then again the following morning to capture moments of great evolution.
This is all to say that for me, the Prairie Aesthetic so dominant in momfluencer culture, Magnolia magazine, and the aisles of Target, starts and ends with tender feelings of earnest whimsy.
And while the shape of my Prairie Girl purchases might have changed as I’ve grown away from writing purple poetry about “slips of girls” with “masses of glossy tresses piled high atop their heads,” “flushing rose red” when “caught unawares” by their “heart’s true loves” in woods “dappled bright with fairy light,” I’m still a Prairie Girl through and through and have the consumption habits to prove it.
When Jo Piazza asked me why I thought Prairie Chic was having such a moment (in media and people’s online shopping carts) for theWilder podcast, I posited that we like to believe in a time when things were simpler, when definitions were clear, when people’s lived were lived from a place of certainty rather than bewilderment, doubt, and fear. When history is presented to us through the lens of static imagery and romanticized memory, it’s disarmingly easy to forget that humans have always been humans and life has always been complicated. When life is hard (and life is pretty regularly hard), nostalgia promises more than dreaming of a brighter future. The future contains too many unknowns and variables to offer comfort (aesthetic or otherwise), whereas we can tell ourselves the past is a disparate territory untainted by the difficulties of today, when in reality yesterday, today, and tomorrow exist along a continuum and continue to shape each other.
So yeah. I think the Prairie Chic moment is kinda complicated! It reveals our tendency to mythologize the past rather than work towards a better future. That and the fact that flowers are sort of objectively nice to look at! And Prairie Chic is nothing if not flower-forward.
Whether you share my affinity for hay sheafs or you’re disillusioned with your dishwashing accoutrements, here are my Prairie Girl obsessions. Maybe you need one?
