The happy hostess

Here’s a fun fact you learn only in your forties: The “holiday” season is a misnomer.

For grown-ups, it’s actually a lot of work. In particular, the return of holiday entertaining adds “hostess” to your resumé. You know the drill: After a sleepless night fretting over your pre-party checklist, followed by a mad dash all over town the next day to pick up such last-minute absurdities as fanciful guest soaps and frighteningly expensive Spanish almonds, and before fluffing the tree (and the pillows and the towels), syncing up the iPod, setting the festive table and lighting the scented votives — you suddenly look at your watch and realize that your guests are arriving in 10 minutes and your house may look terrific, but you haven’t given a moment’s thought to what you are going to wear.

Well, I certainly have been there and back, and each time I marvel at how much work we all go to as guests at someone else’s party, getting our hair and nails done, perhaps splurging on a swingy new party dress — and how little we put into it when hosting our own event.

Part of this can be chalked up to party-planning overload: My own mother, a stylish hostess who threw us a wedding bash to rival all gatherings since, cannot bear to this day to look at our wedding pictures because of her deep loathing for her mother-of-the-bride dress — uncharacteris-tically, a bright green chiffon number she ended up in simply because the question of what to wear never made it near her to-do list.

But the other reason a fabulous outfit seems perennially on the hostess’s back burner is, along with everything else a hostess has to attend to, dealing with the back burner is part and parcel of the task at hand. Hence my recommendation against dangling appliqué and any dangerous draping of sleeves. The same goes for extra-long dress pants and extreme heels (all the better to tangle up in or trip over when rushing about madly in search of hidden serving pieces or running up and down stairs). What’s more, looking “hot” is particularly difficult when you actually are hot — a natural, hormonal response to both negotiating a crowded room and warming the canapés, ruling out anything in seasonal fabric larger than a tankini. All of which not only takes much of the fun out of party dressing, but narrows down one’s wardrobe options.

Enter the hostess gown. Like something Edith Head might have dreamed up in a black-and-white late-night movie, the classic hostess gown was simple of line for ease of movement, and typically unadorned with any troublesome frippery. Designed for practicality, it was nonetheless sewn from a sufficiently glamorous fabric to look dressed up. A sort of power suit for the home entertainer, it took all the guesswork out of what to wear but made it immediately clear to all concerned who was in charge. 

In my view, this was an idea ahead of its time. Fashion designers, obsessed as they tend to be with the “next new thing,” might not yet be on the same page. But if it’s not on store racks this holiday season, clearly we should take to the streets and demand it for Holiday ’09. Considering how much work these “holidays” require, the very least they could do is provide us with a decent uniform.

This article originally appeared in the December 2008/January 2009 issue of More