What Does “Haute Couture” Have to Do With GoGo Gear??? Enter The Little Black Dress…

A clas­sic exam­ple of Chanel’s Lit­tle Black Dress

I’ve been think­ing a lot about fash­ion lately, prob­a­bly because we’re get­ting ready to show our new line of GoGo Gear in a fash­ion show in Los Ange­les dur­ing Fash­ion Week AND we’re get­ting ready to travel to Milan, cen­ter of the uni­verse for fash­ion to launch our GoGo Gear into the Euro­pean market.

Since I’m now in the busi­ness of mak­ing pro­tec­tive gear that’s fash­ion­able, I’ve come to pay a whole lot more atten­tion to what things look like than every before. Mind you, “ever before” doesn’t con­sti­tute much since I never got into that whole Bar­bie thing, per­haps because I watched my sis­ter chew her Barbie’s heads off! I was also never aware of what Bar­bie was wear­ing, but I DID know that Bar­bie was always get­ting some­thing new and I DID like all of the acces­sories that came with the out­fit (like, didn’t she get a motor­cy­cle once?!!)! How funny to think about this all these years later when I, of all peo­ple, am now dress­ing women! HOW did that even hap­pen?!!!  I mean, I was the con­sum­mate tomboy, cursed with no sense of style or the abil­ity to put a shirt and a pair of pants together (I was too old for Garan­i­mals!) and have them look good and WORSE, I didn’t under­stand why I had to have breasts because they would only get in the way of swing­ing a base­ball bat!

So how did the change come about??? Prob­a­bly when a friend lent me a lit­tle black dress for a work hol­i­day party, which by the way wasn’t actu­ally LITTLE, it was just CALLED a “lit­tle black dress”!  Oh, the lit­tle black dress! CoCo (Chanel), how much I love you, but I didn’t always love you, mostly because I could never FIT into a REAL lit­tle black dress, I never knew how to walk in a pair of shoes with heels but most impor­tant, I didn’t feel com­fort­able because it all just seemed so “girly” to me! So, on the day of the hol­i­day party, I was going to wear some dumb old out­fit like I would always wear and then my boss really pissed me off and I thought “the hell with you peo­ple, I’ll show YOU, I’m gonna wear that lit­tle black dress!!!” Some pun­ish­ment for him, huh?!!!

While in Hong Kong, I saw “The Age of Cou­ture: Paris and Lon­don, 1947–1957″ Exhi­bi­tion that lit­er­ally made me cry when I saw the dresses! I have NEVER seen any­thing so breathtaking!

WELL, I can­not begin to tell you the effect that lit­tle black dress had on every­one at that party but more impor­tant, the effect it had on ME! What I real­ized, all that time grow­ing up, was that I never felt con­fi­dent enough to wear some­thing that was fem­i­nine, some­thing that would be flat­ter­ing to my fig­ure, some­thing TIGHT, some­thing that would make me feel like the woman I am. This moment was absolutely trans­form­ing for me because I real­ized that clothes REALLY DO MAKE A DIFFERENCE in how we feel and when you look at all those makeover shows on TV and women talk about how they feel after they’ve had their lit­tle makeover, they are just radi­at­ing! That was me too!  And believe me when I tell you, I never wanted to take off that lit­tle black dress!

It is out of this expe­ri­ence that GoGo Gear has emerged and who we are as a com­pany and what will influ­ence us in the months and years to come… the recog­ni­tion that while I may not be able to pro­nounce “haute cou­ture” and even more, don’t even know what it is, I DO rec­og­nize that how I look and feel in my clothes DOES make a dif­fer­ence and if we can get just one woman wear­ing pro­tec­tive gear who wasn’t wear­ing it before because she has FINALLY found some­thing she likes, fits her well and feels good in it, then we will have done our job!

CoCo… thank you SO much for invent­ing the lit­tle black dress!!!  GoGo Gear wouldn’t be the same with­out you!

Arlene