Description In the generation shortly before eating disorders are diagnosed and treated, Paulette quietly starves, heaves and cuts herself.
Built like a '50s pin-up girl with a pleading pout, she detests herself and even though she lives for beauty, she cannot see her own.
She takes sanctuary in the secondhand dresses scored in thrift and vintage shops, a world of storied fabrics and a beacon for something meaningful beyond the California ideal that surrounds and often suffocates her.
At 15, Paulette is a rocket heading straight into mid 1970's space.
She has so little guidance and yet quite a lot of good fortune.
Luckily she has a grandmother who relates to Paulette in the language of old clothing.
And then there is her on-again, off-again romance with the semiotician Benjamin, who unzips more than a figure of speech.
Over the course of seventeen years and seventeen vintage dresses, each frock tells a delicate tale, uttering significance and inspiring Paulette's transformation from girl, to gal to grown.
Part coming of age, part homage to the rousing world of vintage, 17 Dresses is a haute and haunting glance at the suffering that comes from not wanting to fit in to anything but that venerable dress in the window.
