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" &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;re so\u2026prim,&amp;quot; says my editor, offering a critical appraisal of my personal style. It seems a pretty apt adjective when you consider the evidence. Exhibit A: I keep two Rag &amp;amp;amp; Bone blazers (black and cream) at my desk at all times; when her daughter\u2014at age two, already a more daring sartorial adventuress than me\u2014got snapped in a gold lam\u00E9 Burberry snowsuit by a street-style photographer during New York Fashion Week, what you didn&amp;#039;t see was me off camera in a printed Rag &amp;amp;amp; Bone blazer\u2014my version of really splashing out. I&amp;#039;m not saying my clothes come from Brooks Brothers, but the funny thing about my fashion choices is that though I wear labels beloved by ineffably hip models off duty, I have an extraordinary ability to cherry-pick the most conventional pieces in any collection. Exhibit B: the collared button-down Alexander Wang dress I wear buttoned up to there often enough that you could almost consider it a uniform.   This somewhat Victorian vision of decorum doesn&amp;#039;t make me look much like a card-carrying fashion girl. Several colleagues have surmised that the risk-averse nature of my aesthetic must be what happens when a Harvard nerd decides to become a fashion writer. Indeed, there is something deeply formative for a teenager from Indiana about spending her college days in an ivory tower where even the student newspaper has a modestly titled induction ceremony known as Grand Elections and a fife-and-drum corps of Lincoln Minute Men in period costume is wont to serenade your dorm on the first day of the school year. At some point during my undergraduate career I may or may not have made a Facebook album named Adventures in Cable-knit. So yes, call me preppy. Modest. Straitlaced. Conservative, even. But, oh, that word\u2014prim. Consider Merriam-Webster&amp;#039;s definitions: &amp;quot;stiffly formal and proper : decorous&amp;quot;\u2014okay, I&amp;#039;m not exactly one to go with the flow\u2014and, cringe, &amp;quot;prudish.&amp;quot; Does anyone in her midtwenties really want to be thought of as that? One woman who manages to make the Take Ivy school of dressing seem fun and even a little, dare I say, sexy is my friend the designer Misha Nonoo. The Brit-by-way-of-Bahrain behind the contemporary line Nonoo\u2014and a new eveningwear collection under her full name, available this month at Bergdorf Goodman\u2014gleefully embraces the dual nature of femininity in her designs and in her wardrobe. She&amp;#039;s not afraid to wear a crazy headpiece to a 9 A.M. breakfast meeting. She&amp;#039;ll sport a whimsically demure contrasting plaid-and-heart-print shirtdress one day and a boucl\u00E9 skirtsuit with unexpected and rather risqu\u00E9 cutouts\u2014something of a personal signature\u2014the next. And for her wedding last summer\u2014a three-day Venetian bacchanal\u2014to fellow Brit and cofounder of the e-com art-auction site Paddle8, Alexander Gilkes, she designed her own semitransparent, entirely lace dress, hand embroidered by Oscar de la Renta&amp;#039;s couturier. Girl knows how to\u2014properly\u2014get down. She also seems to intuitively get me. &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;re extremely composed, and often people who are that way can be mislabeled as being, you know, prim or a bit standoffish,&amp;quot; Nonoo says. &amp;quot;I see you as a naughty square!&amp;quot; Which is not, as she sees it, such a bad thing. &amp;quot;You can be superseriously serious about your work and just want to have fun, too\u2014looking good is all about abiding by the rules of dress, doing things in the right way while putting your own personal spin on it.&amp;quot;  Somewhat reassuringly for a customer like me, Nonoo caps eveningwear prices at $2,200\u2014comparatively affordable in this rarefied genre\u2014and steers clear of overt tropes like, say, the hard-edge sensuality of Gucci and Anthony Vaccarello or the Hollywood-beloved surface decoration seen everywhere from Marchesa to Dolce &amp;amp;amp; Gabbana. She takes her inspiration from the elegant safety zone of midcentury fashion\u2014not so much Christian Dior&amp;#039;s high-glamour New Look or the burgeoning influence of such new-at-the-time players as Crist\u00F3bal Balenciaga, but the likes of the politically divided Mitford sisters and novelist/muse Lady Caroline Blackwood: all Renaissance women whose legends loomed as large as their personal style. Unlike most females of her time, Lady Blackwood&amp;#039;s reputation as a fashion plate was (appropriately) eclipsed by her career as a writer\u2014one of her novels was short-listed for the Booker Prize\u2014and her status as muse for the likes of Lucian Freud and Robert Lowell. But her style was worth noting: She could transform a T-shirt into black-tie garb by wearing it off the shoulder, or make a diaphanous debutante gown look thoroughly unfussy by pairing it with artfully uncoiffed hair. Similarly, Nonoo&amp;#039;s designs have a just slightly off-kilter take on elegance\u2014dress pants embellished with a drawstring, for example, or an entire collection paired with Adidas shower sandals\u2014that allows the wearer&amp;#039;s quirkiness to speak for itself. Of particular note: her unexpected use of sheer panels to highlight parts of the body usually considered banal. In the nineteenth century, exposed ankles were the height of eroticism; today, a gown that covers the d\u00E9colletage and yet showcases the lower calf, as did the Misha Nonoo gown that Ginnifer Goodwin wore to the Costume Designers Guild Awards, strikes a discordant note\u2014which is exactly what the designer wants. Inspired by her pep talk and fatigued, after several years, of my admittedly somewhat absurd fashion conservatism (there I am in my first intern ID-card photo wearing a blouse with a strand of pearls\u2014yes, pearls\u2014peeking out), I decide I&amp;#039;m ready to attempt to be sexier while still staying true to myself. Nonoo offers to dress me for an afternoon of watching all the pretty horses, four-legged and otherwise, among the tradition-minded, big-hat crowd at the Veuve Clicquot Polo Classic, which this year happened to be scheduled for very same day I had planned to be in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for my five-year college reunion. When I map the match&amp;#039;s location\u2014Liberty State Park\u2014I see that the grounds are in fact in New Jersey, a short distance from the Newark airport, and we hatch a plan. It will be a fashion doubleheader: Nonoo will dress me for a society event (her crowd) and my collegiate return (my crowd)\u2014and we&amp;#039;ll see just how well I can take the prim out of my preppy. &amp;quot;Am I overdressed?&amp;quot; It&amp;#039;s not a question I&amp;#039;m accustomed to asking myself. Nonetheless, I can&amp;#039;t help wondering if Nonoo has played a joke on me, dressing me even more primly than I would ever think to dress myself, when I turn up at the water-taxi terminal\u2014naturally, the event may be reached only by ferry\u2014in a dock-scraping draped-front gown and see a sea of short frocks. Her response when I voice my concerns? She pops a vintage feather fascinator onto my head. As the blistering June sun beats down, I feel my fair-skinned back reddening and wish I&amp;#039;d applied sunscreen under the gown; Nonoo&amp;#039;s design plays a conservative bait and switch with a racily sheer French-lace panel that spans from shoulder blade to waist. My fears about my overappropriateness are further assuaged during the stomping of the divots when Dree Hemingway\u2014dressed in an Isabel Marant jumpsuit for her official duty of throwing out the first ball\u2014tells us how modern she finds my attire. And maybe it&amp;#039;s just all the champagne I&amp;#039;ve consumed, but several hours later I&amp;#039;m pretty sure no one bats an eyelash when I stow my hairpiece in my carry-on and slip on my trusty cream blazer\u2014over the gown\u2014to catch my JetBlue flight to Boston. (I can&amp;#039;t help but think how closely I&amp;#039;ve unintentionally replicated Lady Blackwood&amp;#039;s look leaving the Chelsea Register Office in London on the arm of Lucian Freud after their elopement in 1953.) Do I finally have the confidence for a little fashion experimentation? When I arrive at the ivy gates of my alma mater, I feel ready to take my mischievousness to the next level. Which is a good thing, as Nonoo has packed me an A-line tweed dress from her resort collection\u2014so Harvard Yard\u2014that has strategically placed sheer onyx inserts. As my college roommate observes, &amp;quot;You were not wearing windows on your thighs back when you were writing papers about Jane Austen.&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/fashion/personal-style/a12591/misha-nonoo-new-eveningwear-collection/>