I will quickly admit I am not a fan of tartan.
I am fully aware and respectful of its cultural significance, and I'm only talking about it in context of personal style.
I like plaid in button-down shirts that I can wear with a trusty pair of boots but I don't have a lot else in that print arena.
Maybe it's the romantic in me. There's just something about the print that feel stern, school-marmish,
square, and even sometimes, dowdy.
Not everything in fashion is everyone's style. That's what makes the industry so diverse and interesting.
It's suffice to say tartan would not be missed much in my wardrobe.
Then I see Zooey Deschanel posing on the red carpet at the 2012 Writers Guild Awards wearing something very unexpected. A dress in tartan or plaid, whichever you wish to call it, and looked utterly charming.
This Shareen vintage dress has an understated look to it, even the colors are pretty neutral, but the cut was subtle and sexy (as I can't really imagine a skin-tight scrap of a dress in such proper-looking print) and I have to say, if it weren't Zooey wearing this, I'm not sure it could've been pulled off.
It goes well with her quirky personality—it's unexpected and that's the punctuation mark of the dress in my opinion.
To be as accurate as possible when I decided to comment on this dress, I had to look up the difference between tartan and plaid.
I understood that both terms are commonly used interchangeably but it looks like they differ in their original meanings.
Tartan is criss-crossed pattern of vertical and horizontal lines, the design usually signifying a specific clan or region in Scotland around the nineteenth century. Plaid is the actual cloth in tartan pattern than was worn over the shoulder. I think plaid just became a more popular term to describe these checked patterns especially in North America.
This dress has made me more open-minded and sometimes, in a world full of possibilities, that's really all that you need.
*Photos courtesy of http://justjared.buzznet.com/
