For our fall  issue, and on the heels of Paris Fashion Week and Highsnobiety’s Not In Paris activation, we asked a handful of writers and designers to give us a short essay –– or prose poem or something in between –– about something they found in Paris that changed them. Could be an article of clothing. Could be a phrase. Could be a meal. For Eileen Myles, it was language. For Arisa White, it was a dress. Natasha Stagg wrote about a perfect tee shirt. Ryota Iwai told us about a new tea routine. And Marine Serre described a bicycle. 

It is today, and love is coming back home again. The white peony she picked from the garden brings me to this dress, which I got back in 2006 in Paris from a vintage shop with many floors. I see clothes everywhere, in sepia tone, with that old mold scent, a hint of mothballs, and stubborn notes of cheap and expensive perfume. 

I don’t know what kind of material it is. There are no tags. It’s like rayon, synthetic, maybe a seventies maxi dress with three-quarter sleeves. My length is accentuated. This is what I love about some of the clothes from that era. I can’t say how I found the dress. Its dominant color is black. There are watercolor flowers of three types. One I know is a peony. Gardenia or Festiva Maxima. 

 My mother told me that this dress was too dreary for my brother’s wedding, which I didn’t disagree with. The muted tones and ease of its cut were too informal for the black-tie event on a rooftop in Midtown Manhattan. But no one can mistake the beauty of the flowers, with blushes of pink, blue, and green, faded-gold chevron, going horizontal and rhythmically striping the dress. 

When there is a breeze, the fabric clings to my legs. If the sun hits me directly, you can see through it. The outline of my body suggests its presence. I wear nude or black underwear, depending on what is clean that week. I walk around with my truth exposed, a self-possession embraced by the silhouette of this dress.

I was in love when I went to Paris. That kind of sweet love where you are in it, where you step from the margin, from the outskirts, into the room that is love. This dress is always that room. A soft touch, an invitation to be simplistically feminine, to show my collarbone in the slit at the neckline that I can tie into a thin bow or let loose the beautiful part of my body. 

My girlfriend would let her thumb graze, delicate so as not to erase my natural line, gingerly like approaching something wild and scared, and gentle are her lips, and my heart beats in my throat. I am beautiful in this dress. My tall is loved — down to my ankles in this dress. I will not be escaping high waters in this dress. 

When I caught my heel in the hem, and it began to unravel, I took it to get mended at the dry cleaners. I felt like I was giving over something precious. It was my skin I stepped out of and said, here. She has a snagged thread, got pulled, and lost what put her together. Return her and make her new. I haven’t worn that dress in years. 

And now there’s a woman who doesn’t know if the peony in her vase is Miss America or White Emperor, but we agree it is a Festiva Maxima on the dress and wants to know on which date I will wear it.