By
Emma Childs,
a fashion news writer at The Cut who covers style and pop culture.
Previously, she was the fashion features editor at Marie Claire and a fashion writer at The Zoe Report.
I’m in the dressing room at Salter House, a 700-square-foot store run by a woman we once called “The Nightgown Doyenne of Brooklyn Heights,” trying on my fifth nightie of the week: a $410 silk-cotton minidress so sheer I can count the constellations of freckles on my stomach. I take a selfie and send it to a friend. “I look like the ghost of a Victorian orphan. Some poor, sad dead girl,” I write. She responds an hour later, after I had put my jeans back on and the puff-sleeved chemise — “inspired by typical 16th century French undergarments,” per Salter House’s site — on its wrought-iron rack: “400 dollars to look like you could die of the plague,” she wrote. “But why’s it kinda cunty tho?”
