I love pleated skirts x with stockings and suspenders and heels x
#pleatedskirt #seams #highheels

I am very obsessed with my huge bridesmaid dress with a hooped petticoat! I just love how the hoop and layers gently rub against my legs while gently feeling the folds and the seams of the huge full skirt! Mmmmm

In the Hills after the Bomb they mostly call me The Late Detective. Late to justice, late to lunch, late to the end of the world. The sky was the colour of an old television left on after the station died, tilted at a Dutch angle like God had nudged the tripod and walked away. In this town, fabric tells the truth faster than people. I walked through it swaddled in turquoise satin, layered, intentional, defiant. My trenchcoated attire was heavy silk satin, the kind with a weight to it, a gravity. Satin doesn’t flutter; it arrives. It caught the light even in monochrome, turning every streetlamp into a confession. Underneath, the Victorian mourning attire did what it was designed to do: announce loss while indulging excess. Glossy deluxe blouse frills, cut wide and deep, each fold edged like it had a memory. They whispered when I moved. Satin remembers. It always does. The hijab headscarf was oversized turquoise satin, wrapped high and proud, smooth as a bribe sliding across a table. Over that, a chiffon voile veil, sheer, unforgiving, honest. Chiffon doesn’t hide anything; it only softens the blow. It floated just off my face, catching the radioactive breeze, turning my grief into motion. Taffeta anchored the gown beneath it all, crisp and slightly petulant, holding its shape like a stubborn alibi. Taffeta never forgets it’s there. I knew the case was serious the moment I saw the mannequins. The Garment District had been stripped naked. Not torn apart, undressed. Racks stood empty, arms out like they were asking questions nobody wanted to answer. The air smelled wrong. Usually it was starch, dye, steam, ambition. Now it was dust and panic. Silk was missing. All of it. Not just silk as a category, but silk as an idea. Satin-faced charmeuse. Heavy duchess satin meant for gowns that expected to be remembered. Raw silk with its tiny imperfections, honest as a tired smile. Silk twill that knew how to hold a line. Gone. Satin too, proper satin, not that plastic nonsense. The good stuff that slides between your fingers like it’s trying to escape. Satin that makes even cheap tailoring look like it has a lawyer. Vanished. Taffeta bolts were missing next. Crisp, noisy taffeta that rustles when you walk, announcing your presence whether you like it or not. The kind of fabric that refuses subtlety. Someone had wanted drama. And chiffon. God help us, chiffon. Weightless, floaty, translucent. Chiffon that catches on breath, on light, on the idea of movement. The chiffon racks looked like a graveyard of empty hangers. Voile too, cotton voile, silk voile, the gentle middle child that designers rely on when they want softness without surrender. Gone like a promise after the bombs. This wasn’t theft. This was curation. The femme fatale found me tracing the grain of a wooden cutting table, my gloved fingers remembering where silk had once lain. “They took only the best,” she said, lighting a cigarette like it was an accessory. “Nothing synthetic. Nothing that couldn’t mourn properly.” That told me everything. In the apocalypse, fabric becomes currency. Silk means water, means safety, means time to think. Satin means power. Taffeta means spectacle. Chiffon means hope. Voile means tenderness, the most dangerous commodity of all. I followed the trail through tailor shops and bombed out ateliers, past pattern paper fluttering like white flags. A single thread of turquoise voile snagged on a rusted nail led me uphill, toward the old soundstages where dreams used to be pressed, steamed, and sent out into the world with a smile. Inside, the thieves had laid it all out. Bolts of silk arranged by weight and weave. Satin draped over chairs, catching the light like liquid. Taffeta stacked with military precision, crisp edges aligned, ready to explode into skirts and coats. Chiffon suspended from rigging, floating in layers, a cloud of almost nothing. Voile stretched and tested, light passing through it like mercy. They weren’t stealing to sell. They were building. A final show. A post apocalyptic couture reveal. If the world was ending and it always was then it deserved a proper wardrobe. They surrounded me, guns low, eyes hungry. I adjusted my veil, let the chiffon breathe. “You can’t hoard fabric,” I told them. “It has to be worn. Silk dies in the dark.” The Choir hesitated. Madame Bias frowned, fingers brushing a length of satin like she was checking its pulse. The Cutter looked at my gown, at the way satin, taffeta, and chiffon argued and reconciled on my body. Fashion did the rest. In the end, the fabrics went back out into the streets. Seamstresses worked by candlelight. Mourning gowns bloomed. Trenchcoats shimmered. Veils floated through fallout like prayers that hadn’t given up yet. I walked home heavy with more layers than I arrived wearing, turquoise against the end of the world, every material doing what it was born to do.

In the dim parlour of a narrow terraced house on the edge of town, where the January dusk pressed against fogged windowpanes, Hanimefendi (once Tony, though the name now felt like an old coat left in the attic) sat perfectly still before the tall cheval mirror.
At sixty four, the body that looked back at her was soft and heavy, rolls of flesh pressing against the seams of her chosen mourning. Yet every inch of it had been reclaimed in Barbie Pink the violent, unapologetic pink of bubblegum, flamingos, and little girls’ birthday dreams. She had buried the muted blacks and charcoals of conventional widowhood the same afternoon she buried her former self. Grief, she decided, deserved better than drabness. Grief deserved to scream.
Her long gown swept the floorboards in heavy, liquid folds of pink satin. The fabric caught the lamplight in subtle, expensive highlights shimmering like wet sugar or the inside of a seashell. Tiny seed pearls marched along the modestly high neckline and down the front in orderly, virginal rows. The sleeves ended in deep cuffs of gathered pink chiffon that trembled with each slow breath.
Over the gown rode the blouse: glossy, deluxe, almost liquid in its sheen. Frills cascaded from throat to waist like a waterfall of spun sugar ruffles upon ruffles upon ruffles, each edge finished with the thinnest piping of darker rose. The cuffs alone could have doubled as christening bonnets.
But the true crown was the headscarf.
An oversized triangle of blush pink satin, almost cartoonishly large, draped from the top of her head and cascaded past her shoulders in glossy waves. She had tied it under the chin with an extravagant bow, the ends trailing like rabbit ears. Pinned beneath it floated a sheer pink chiffon voile veil long enough to brush the upper swell of her ample chest, fine enough that her features showed through like a watercolour left in the rain. The veil softened the male jawline she had once hated, blurred the double chin, turned every blink into something theatrical and tender.
Her mouth was a dramatic wound of matte fuchsia, outlined sharper than a paper cut. Above it arched brows drawn in powdery rose, while the eyelids shimmered with pearlescent pink shadow and were rimmed in vivid bubblegum liner that flicked outward in exaggerated Rococo commas. Cheeks bloomed with circular rouge like a porcelain doll painted by an over enthusiastic child. The overall effect was sissy maid meets Marie Antoinette in full defiant mourning feminine, excessive, absurdly pretty, and deliberately inconsolable.
He, her male persona had hated the colour pink. Called it childish. Called it weak. On the nightstand sat the little brass urn containing what remained of him, his cremated wardrobe of male clothes, positioned so that the urn had no choice but to stare at her forever.
Hanimefendi lifted one plump, ring laden hand. The nails were lacquered the exact shade of strawberry marshmallow. She touched the veil where it lay across her lips, pressing the satin bow against them as though kissing herself goodnight.
I wore navy coloured clothes for forty-one years, she whispered to the mirror, voice low and cracked from crying and cigarettes she had given up in 1998. Navy and sensible shoes and ‘yes dear’ and ‘not now.’ You had your funeral in charcoal. Mine is pink. Barbie bloody pink. And I’m not sorry.
A tear escaped, cutting a bright path through the rouge. It hung on the veil like dew on candyfloss before soaking in.
She rose slowly, arthritic joints protesting and moved to the ancient radiogram in the corner. The needle settled onto an old 78. A scratchy soprano began to sing something unbearably sentimental about lost loves and rose gardens. Hanimefendi began to sway. The gown whispered against itself. The frills trembled. The veil floated like breath.
In the mirror a vast, pink, glittering figure danced alone widowed, overweight, outrageously made up, and for the first time in six decades entirely herself.
She was mourning, yes. But she was mourning in colour. And the house, for one evening at least, smelled faintly of rose talc, hot satin, and the sweetest kind of revenge.

My seams are straight but not me...

Work week yesterday but I had a good "lunch" break, read my book and stretched a bit to get rid of the office chair butt! (disclaimer for honesty and avoidance of misunderstandings: I am a crossdresser. I am wearing a breastplate. I colour correct my pics a lot generally, i think that' fine as I'm not lying, or changing myself in any way. I'm just trying to portrait an atmosphere - 50s pinup here for example. In this series though I've gone a little extra and hid the breastplate seams. It's an aesthetic decision and not with the aim to confuse or misdirect anyone. Sorry if someone is offended I'm happy to re upload with the seams visible) xx

Would i get punished for wonky seams ???

Have I got my seams straight??xx

A follower wanted to see me in back seams, sparkly ones are the only ones I have for the moment. Xxx

Seams for a change xx

Cant seem to get seams straight , photo in comments

How do you ladies check to see if your stocking seams are straight?