I wore a dress made by a very high-end European designer for headshots at my workplace. Our intern told me that she loved it and asked who made it. Not to sound conceited but I’m prob the only fashionable person in my office and I get a bit of attention for it. This particular girl has expressed to me that she admires my style and I think shes not too bad herself for a Gen Z so I share the info with her, eating up the compliment. As I was going out after work that night and The Dress didn’t suit my evening plans I changed into a different one and left The Dress in a bag in my studio cubby so that I didn’t have to carry a big tote with it out the whole night. I let the bag sit there for a quite a few days. When I finally brought it home, I realized that the Loewe dress was not inside.
I asked nobody at work as I thought it would be offensive to even assume at my intimate studio of <40 ppl that anyone would deign to take another person's belongings. So I tore apart my closet. I interrogated my dry cleaner (*could i have dropped it off & forgotten? Could they have misplaced it?*). Eventually I gave up, accepting my own irresponsibility. I set search alerts on the RealReal, eBay etc. In the following weeks, the Intern is now asking me for creative advice on her projects, requested me on linkedin, and recently, started following me on IG and I followed back. I think she kinda looks up to me. But this weekend, I was shocked to see that she posted a picture of herself on her IG stories wearing my **exact** dress. Now, I know for a fact that this designer makes every collections in extremely limited runs and that it was part of a collaborative capsule collection from nearly 10 years ago. There aren't tons of them floating around the secondhand market. Even if there were, I have been checking everywhere on the internet religiously always keeping an eye out for my dress. Not to imply that I have my eye on every used designer store in America, but this is not the kind of dress that one would stumble upon frequently and given that I am a savvier shopper with more expendable income than this intern, if both of us were making an effort to find this dress on the internet at the same time, I swear to GOD I would have found & purchased it first. Now I very much want to delicately confront her about it. it would put my mind at ease to see a reciept to know that she went and sought out my dress for herself, that she's just a little copycat & not a thief. If she took it I'd ask for it back and keep it between us. I'm friendly with her superior and could say something to him too, or to be safe just go to HR to keep it 100% kosher, but tbh to me that feels extreme. What if it cost her her internship? And if she didn't steal my dress after all, it would REALLY embarrass me, not just her. Am I petty? Sure. But if justice for The Dress is possible, I want it. It sounds silly but it had sentimental value to me, not just material.
