She'll Take You There

Forget “uniform dressing” and “five easy pieces.” Olivia Stren escapes reality in the fluid, feminine designs of gypset dream girl Ulla Johnson—a cult figure some 17 years in the making

- Olivia Stren

I recently purchased an unreasonable number of outfits in shades of white and cream. When I wear them, I feel fresh, well-leisured, like the kind of person who lets other people worry about the tedium of laundry—i.e., rich. That is, totally unlike myself. Not long ago, as my two-and-a-half-year-old, Leo, approached my creamy new dress, his jam-sticky hands gleefully outstretched like little stars—the way Jackson Pollock might have considered a blank canvas: an artist given, well, carte blanche— an onlooking friend remarked, “That looks dangerous.” You know you’re bourgeois when wearing white is what passes for danger. But she had a point. My current reality is no place for white dresses.

I’ve long engaged in the kind of wishful shopping that brings to mind the Oscar Wilde quote, “One’s real life is so often the life one does not lead.” A stranger perusing my closet could easily conclude that I lived in the climate of a toucan: I have more floaty frocks (in cotton voile, poplin, linen, gauze) than sunbeams in which to wear them in my native Toronto. And while as a freelancer I spent my thirties in pursuit of the farthest-possible-flung stories, these days I traverse more drugstore diaper aisles than oceans. You’d think motherhood might have made me more practical, or fiscally prudent. Instead it’s inspired me to buy—and pine after—clothes suited to life on a yacht somewhere off the sun-sequined coast of Sardinia.