Autumn in New York, it's good to live it again. Would you take a look at this beauty, huh? Photographic quality print, check. Slightly stylized yet crisp autumn landscape, oh yeah. And finally, but most importantly, brilliant use of negative space. Without the orange leaves trailing across the cream background and the clusters of blue rocks grouped around the waist, armpit and elbow, this novelty print would simply feel like it was trapped in a hunting lodge. The negative space gives it room to breathe.

I dreamed last night that I was shopping in Tokyo. I've never been to Japan, so my version looked disturbingly like Provincetown, Massachusettes. Anyhoo, I saw a beige dress covered with white silhouettes of butterflies, and was gratified to find a Vested Gentress label inside. I found a white blouse with light blue silhouettes girls jumping rope and chasing hoops.

But in the back of the store I found the novelty print to beat all novelty prints. On polyester. It's hard to describe because it was as much as feeling as a vision: a creamy yellow almost parchment-colored backdrop showed a musical score spinning off the pages in a spiral on the bodice. Leaping out of the music, and bouncing along with the notes that jumped onto the dress were hunting dogs who looked like greyhounds, who were snapping their fingers to the music. Really. Snapping their fingers. A lone fox hunt rider in a red coat riding side-saddle jumped across the shoulder. There was a fox near the hem, looking rather nonchalant. All the in style of late 1930's commerical art that was meant to evoke the medieval time period (think Errol Flynn's Robin Hood). I plotzed. The tag said 79 Yen.

With today's exchange rate, 79 Yen is 67 cents. Now, even presuming that I read the price tag incorrectly (I was after all, asleep), and it was 790, that's just about 7 bucks.

I couldn't read the music, so I don't know what song the dress used. In the dream a friend was with me and said that it was Debussy's "Claire de Lune", but thinking about it now the only really appropriate tune would be "A-hunting We Will Go".

I'd wear this shirt with a brown or hunter green a-line skirt, mustard colored boots, and a picnic basket-style hand bag and wear it to the Met to see their special exhibit called "A Sensitivity to the Seasons: Autumn and Winter".