Lifestyle
What Is a Sundress?
Something strange unfolds online each spring. As the warmer months approach, many men seem compelled to post about the allure of a woman in a sundress. The simple wardrobe staple has long been a point of inexplicable obsession, but this year, people are asking questions.
Why do some men get so excited to see sundresses? Wait — do men even know what a sundress is? Does anyone know what a sundress is? As social media flooded with responses, it became clear that no one could quite agree on what made a sundress a sundress (as opposed to a slip dress, a day dress, a shift dress, a shirtdress, a caftan, a tube dress or a nap dress).
So we want to unravel this thread a bit, and ask you, the reader, to answer the question at hand: What is a sundress?
Many people say sundresses are bright and floral, maybe blue or yellow. White is widely accepted. Pastels are classic. Black is divisive. No one really talks about gray.
On the resale platform Depop, a seller named Bianca Steele listed a “Boho Black Sundress 100% Viscose sundress made in India.” The inky maxi was “most definitely” a sundress, Ms. Steele wrote over the in-app messenger, adding that she had personally enjoyed black sundresses for over four decades. She currently owns at least 10.
But Jeannie Stith, the chief executive of Color Guru, a seasonal color analysis company, said she can’t condone a black sundress. “In general, black has been sold to us as a universal color,” she said. “It’s actually not.”
Ms. Stith said that universally flattering shades had a mix of warm and cool tones. For sundresses, that includes peony, periwinkle, teal and sage.
While out in Lower Manhattan on a recent afternoon, three sundress-wearers — blocks apart — said a sundress can be any color that makes you happy. Though each acknowledged that being sad in a sundress was also valid.
A more joyous example — for those who believe sundresses must be colorful — floated down Sixth Avenue.
A black, slinky dress spotted in the park may not meet everyone’s parameters. Anakeesta Ironwood, 19, said she would identify it more readily as a slip dress, but acknowledged that some people might consider it a sundress, too.
“You’ve left me no choice but to mansplain women’s fashion,” Randy Trembacki told viewers on TikTok in May. Gesturing around the empty space where he would insert an image of a mini dress from Shein, Mr. Trembecki, a 30-year-old podcast producer based in Texas, named some features of a sundress: fitted top, flowy bottom.
On the phone this month, he elaborated: “It’s conservative but revealing. You know music videos circa early 2010s, where it’s the farmer’s daughter type thing?”
But he acknowledged that his viewpoint was not universal. Much of the feedback he received on his original TikTok came from Black viewers with different ideas about the quintessential sundress.
In “Sundress Pt. 2,” Mr. Trembacki addressed comments like: “Ask any black person what a sundress is and you’re gonna have the OPPOSITE answer.” In response, Mr. Trembacki included a clingy slip by Skims as an example of a sundress.
“The Black community’s preference for form-fitting, long dresses might emphasize a different aspect of allure, one that focuses on visual appeal and the celebration of body contours,” said Shelby Ivey Christie, a fashion historian and former board member of the Black in Fashion Council.
It’s close-fitting, it’s black, it has spaghetti straps — but is it a sundress? Its wearer, Yesenia Valverde, 25, said no. She considers sundresses to be something one wears on vacation and said they should be flowy and printed. She said her dress didn’t qualify mainly because of its color.
Some might consider this loose-fitting, floral-printed dress a prime example of the form. While that may be so, Renèe Monaco, 29, didn’t think sundresses needed to be flowy to qualify. A sundress is any dress a person wears in the sun, she said.
Dictionary definitions of “sundress” typically stipulate sleevelessness.
But how thick is a strap before it becomes a sleeve? Do you have to see shoulder? What about tube tops?
James Hamilton Butler, the director of the associate degree fashion design program at Parsons School of Design, shrugged off the question. Talking about sleeves is outdated, Mr. Butler wrote over email. “We can be who we want without fear of judgment. (Not sure about tube tops though!)”
Sophie Strauss, who calls herself “a stylist for regular people,” says the question of sleeves depends on what the wearer wants to get out of the sundress. In sundress-happy Los Angeles, she sees clients gravitate toward the garment because it tends to “play up parts of women’s bodies we’re told to play up, and downplay parts we’re told to hide,” she said, rattling off brands with big puffy sleeves.
Mr. Trembacki, the TikToker, was not so dogmatic on straps either. “There should be some type of strap,” he said. “Though, there could be no strap, too.”
A crewneck silhouette can be divisive in the sundress taxonomy. But its wearer says she considers her floral dress a sundress. The thin straps on this midi dress may put it firmly in sundress territory, according to some.
At some point in recent years, the sundress — traditionally homely and demure — came to take on a peculiar sexual charge. (At least for those who are extremely online.)
On the meme database Know Your Meme, a riff on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs replaces survival requirements like “water,” and “friendship,” with a refrain about sundress-induced activity, too vulgar to print.
What is it that makes “men go crazy for ‘the sundress,’” as a user on X recently put it?
Kyle Brown, a writer who lives in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn and has a bicep tattoo of Joan Didion, offered some insight into the contemporary male gaze.
“It’s all about this pastoral American fantasy,” Mr. Brown said, describing a passionate scene involving a man who has come in from doing yardwork to find his sundress-clad wife in the kitchen baking bread. “Men are confused.”
On the street, more practical considerations still prevail.
Lexi Hide, a photographer who was wearing a Chopova Lowena dress on Fifth Avenue on a hot day, explained her reasoning. “I was thinking that a sundress has to be airy enough to make you not want to wear underwear.” She clarified that she just likes how it feels. “Nice warm breeze,” she said.
Laura Meyers, 31, donned an above-the-knee dress on a recent afternoon. She said she thought it counted, but added that, with its eclectic print and more muted palette, it may be difficult to categorize.
Gabriella Chaves, 25, deployed the “pop of red” trend when styling her long, airy white dress. She said sundresses should ideally be short — but that she still thought hers made the cut.
It may be that the sundress is more of an idea than an article of clothing. After canvassing Lower Manhattan for a potential consensus, I stopped in to Reformation, a clothing store some consider the mother ship of sundresses.
I couldn’t remember the particular sundress Ms. Strauss, the personal stylist, had mentioned, only that it was named after a type of pasta. When I asked a saleswoman for help, she encouraged me to consider any dress in the store. A sundress is whatever you want it to be, she said, pointing me to a mini fit-and-flare in the shade “Last Tango.”
A screenshot from George Mélière’s Gugusse et l’Automate. The pioneering French filmmaker’s 1897 short, which likely features the first known depiction of a robot on film, was thought lost until it was found among a box of old reels that had belonged to a family in Michigan and restored by the Library of Congress.
The Frisbee Collection/Library of Congress
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The Frisbee Collection/Library of Congress
The Library of Congress has found and restored a long-lost silent film by Georges Méliès.
The famed 19th century French filmmaker is best known for his groundbreaking 1902 science fiction adventure masterpiece Le Voyage dans la Lune (A Trip to the Moon).
The 45-second-long, one-reel short Gugusse et l’Automate – Gugusse and the Automaton – was made nearly 130 years ago. But the subject matter still feels timely. The film, which can be viewed on the Library of Congress’ website, depicts a child-sized robot clown who grows to the size of an adult and then attacks a human clown with a stick. The human then decimates the machine with a hammer.
In an Instagram post, Library of Congress moving image curator Jason Evans Groth said the film represents, “probably the first instance of a robot ever captured in a moving image.” (The word “robot” didn’t appear until 1921, when Czech dramatist Karel Čapek coined it in his science fiction play R.U.R..)
“Today, many of us are worried about AI and robots,” said archivist and filmmaker Rick Prelinger, in an email to NPR. “Well, people were thinking about robots in 1897. Very little is new.”
A long journey
Groth said the film arrived in a box last September from a donor in Michigan, Bill McFarland. “Bill’s great grandfather, William Frisbee, was a person who loved technology,” Groth said. “And in the late 19th century, must have bought a projector and a bunch of films and decided to drive them around in his buggy to share them with folks in Pennsylvania, Ohio, New York.”
McFarland didn’t know what was on the 10 rusty reels he dropped off at the Library of Congress’ National Audio-Visual Conservation Center in Culpeper, Va. A Library article about the discovery describes the battered, pre-World War I artifacts as having been, “shuttled around from basements to barns to garages,” and that they, “could no longer be safely run through a projector,” owing to their delicate condition. “The nitrate film stock had crumbled to bits on some; other strips were stuck together,” the article said. It was a lab technician in Michigan who suggested McFarland contact the Library of Congress.
“The moment we set our eyes on this box of film, we knew it was something special,” said George Willeman, who heads up the Library’s nitrate film vault, in the article.
Willeman’s team carefully inspected the trove of footage, which also contained another well-known Méliès film, Nouvelles Luttes extravagantes (The Fat and Lean Wrestling Match) and parts of The Burning Stable, an early Thomas Edison work. With the help of an external expert, they identified the reel as having been created by Méliès because it features a star painted on a pedestal in the center of the screen – the logo for Méliès Star Film Company.
A pioneering filmmaker
Méliès was one of the great pioneers of cinema. The scene in which a rocket lands playfully in the eye of Méliès’ anthropomorphic moon in Le Voyage dans la Lune is one of the most famous moments in cinematic history. And he helped to popularize such special effects as multiple exposures and time-lapse photography.
This moment from George Méliès’ Le Voyage dans la Lune (A Trip to the Moon) is considered to be one of the most famous in cinematic history.
George Méliès/Public Domain
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George Méliès/Public Domain
Presumed lost until the Library of Congress’s discovery, Gugusse et L’Automate loomed large in the imaginations of science fiction and early cinema buffs for more than a century. In their 1977 book Things to Come: An Illustrated History of the Science Fiction Film, authors Douglas Menville and R. Reginald described Gugusse as possibly being, “the first true SF [science fiction] film.”
“While it may seem that no more discoveries remain to be made, that’s not the case,” said Prelinger of the work’s reappearance. “Here’s a genuine discovery from the early days of film that no one anticipated.”
Joshua Jackson
I Got the Eye of the Tiger!!!
Published
BACKGRID
Joshua Jackson may have picked up a thing or two from “Karate Kid: Legends” … we got video of him going H.A.M. in a boxing gym with a trainer.
Watch the video … the 47-year-old actor ditched his shirt for the workout, really working up a sweat as he bobbed and weaved in the ring while throwing in some pretty impressive jabs!
He later goes to work solo on a speed bag like an old pro.
Joshua has publicly said that starring in “Karate Kid: Legends” in the role of a former boxer was a dream for him, but there’s no word on whether he’s training for another role or just really fell in love with boxing.
Either way … you’re looking great, Joshua!
Tracy Morgan, left, and Daniel Radcliffe star in The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins.
Scott Gries/NBC
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Scott Gries/NBC
Tracy Morgan, as a presence, as a persona, bends the rules of comedy spacetime around him.
Consider: He’s constitutionally incapable of tossing off a joke or an aside, because he never simply delivers a line when he can declaim it instead. He can’t help but occupy the center of any given scene he’s in — his abiding, essential weirdness inevitably pulls focus. Perhaps most mystifying to comedy nerds is the way he can take a breath in the middle of a punchline and still, somehow, land it.
That? Should be impossible. Comedy depends on, is entirely a function of, timing; jokes are delicate constructs of rhythms that take time and practice to beat into shape for maximum efficiency. But never mind that. Give this guy a non-sequitur, the nonner the better, and he’ll shout that sucker at the top of his fool lungs, and absolutely kill, every time.
Well. Not every time, and not everywhere. Because Tracy Morgan is a puzzle piece so oddly shaped he won’t fit into just any world. In fact, the only way he works is if you take the time and effort to assiduously build the entire puzzle around him.
Thankfully, the makers of his new series, The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins, understand that very specific assignment. They’ve built the show around Morgan’s signature profile and paired him with an hugely unlikely comedy partner (Daniel Radcliffe).
The co-creators/co-showrunners are Robert Carlock, who was one of the showrunners on 30 Rock and co-created The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, and Sam Means, who also worked on Girls5eva with Carlock and has written for 30 Rock and Kimmy Schmidt.
These guys know exactly what Morgan can do, even if 30 Rock relegated him to function as a kind of comedy bomb-thrower. He’d enter a scene, lob a few loud, puzzling, hilarious references that would blow up the situation onscreen, and promptly peace out through the smoke and ash left in his wake.
That can’t happen on Reggie Dinkins, as Tracy is the center of both the show, and the show-within-the-show. He plays a former NFL star disgraced by a gambling scandal who’s determined to redeem himself in the public eye. He brings in an Oscar-winning documentarian Arthur Tobin (Radcliffe) to make a movie about him and his current life.
Tobin, however, is determined to create an authentic portrait of a fallen hero, and keeps goading Dinkins to express remorse — or anything at all besides canned, feel-good platitudes. He embeds himself in Dinkins’ palatial New Jersey mansion, alongside Dinkins’ fiancée Brina (Precious Way), teenage son Carmelo (Jalyn Hall) and his former teammate Rusty (Bobby Moynihan), who lives in the basement.
If you’re thinking this means Reggie Dinkins is a show satirizing the recent rise of toothless, self-flattering documentaries about athletes and performers produced in collaboration with their subjects, you’re half-right. The show feints at that tension with some clever bits over the course of the season, but it’s never allowed to develop into a central, overarching conflict, because the show’s more interested in the affinity between Dinkins and Tobin.
Tobin, it turns out, is dealing with his own public disgrace — his emotional breakdown on the set of a blockbuster movie he was directing has gone viral — and the show becomes about exploring what these two damaged men can learn from each other.
On paper, sure: It’s an oil-and-water mixture: Dinkins (loud, rich, American, Black) and Tobin (uptight, pretentious, British, practically translucent). Morgan’s in his element, and if you’re not already aware of what a funny performer Radcliffe can be, check him out on the late lamented Miracle Workers.
Whenever these two characters are firing fusillades of jokes at each other, the series sings. But, especially in the early going, the showrunners seem determined to put Morgan and Radcliffe together in quieter, more heartfelt scenes that don’t quite work. It’s too reductive to presume this is because Morgan is a comedian and Radcliffe is an actor, but it’s hard to deny that they’re coming at those moments from radically different places, and seem to be directing their energies past each other in ways that never quite manage to connect.
Precious Way as Brina.
Scott Gries/NBC
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Scott Gries/NBC
It’s one reason the show flounders out of the gate, as typical pilot problems pile up — every secondary character gets introduced in a hurry and assigned a defining characteristic: Brina (the influencer), Rusty (the loser), Carmelo (the TV teen). It takes a bit too long for even the great Erika Alexander, who plays Dinkins’ ex-wife and current manager Monica, to get something to play besides the uber-competent, work-addicted businesswoman.
But then, there are the jokes. My god, these jokes.
Reggie Dinkins, like 30 Rock and Kimmy Schmidt before it, is a joke machine, firing off bit after bit after bit. But where those shows were only too happy to exist as high-key joke-engines first, and character comedies second, Dinkins is operating in a slightly lower register. It’s deliberately pitched to feel a bit more grounded, a bit less frenetic. (To be fair: Every show in the history of the medium can be categorized as more grounded and less frenetic than 30 Rock and Kimmy Schmidt — but Reggie Dinkins expressly shares those series’ comedic approach, if not their specific joke density.)
While the hit rate of Reggie Dinkins‘ jokes never achieves 30 Rock status, rest assured that in episodes coming later in the season it comfortably hovers at Kimmy Schmidt level. Which is to say: Two or three times an episode, you will encounter a joke that is so perfect, so pure, so diamond-hard that you will wonder how it has taken human civilization until 2026 Common Era to discover it.
And that’s the key — they feel discovered. The jokes I’m talking about don’t seem painstakingly wrought, though of course they were. No, they feel like they have always been there, beneath the earth, biding their time, just waiting to be found. (Here, you no doubt will be expecting me to provide some examples. Well, I’m not gonna. It’s not a critic’s job to spoil jokes this good by busting them out in some lousy review. Just watch the damn show to experience them as you’re meant to; you’ll know which ones I’m talking about.)
Now, let’s you and I talk about Bobby Moynihan.
As Rusty, Dinkins’ devoted ex-teammate who lives in the basement, Moynihan could have easily contented himself to play Pathetic Guy™ and leave it at that. Instead, he invests Rusty with such depths of earnest, deeply felt, improbably sunny emotions that he solidifies his position as show MVP with every word, every gesture, every expression. The guy can shuffle into the far background of a shot eating cereal and get a laugh, which is to say: He can be literally out-of-focus and still steal focus.
Which is why it doesn’t matter, in the end, that the locus of Reggie Dinkins‘ comedic energy isn’t found precisely where the show’s premise (Tracy Morgan! Daniel Radcliffe! Imagine the chemistry!) would have you believe it to be. This is a very, very funny — frequently hilarious — series that prizes well-written, well-timed, well-delivered jokes, and that knows how to use its actors to serve them up in the best way possible. And once it shakes off a few early stumbles and gets out of its own way, it does that better than any show on television.
This piece also appeared in NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour newsletter. Sign up for the newsletter so you don’t miss the next one, plus get weekly recommendations about what’s making us happy.
Listen to Pop Culture Happy Hour on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
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