you were wearing a red dress (m4w)

making sense of a missed connections phenomenon

Jun 06, 2026

As I prepare to move out of New York later this month, I’ve been lapsing into nostalgia despite my best efforts (conducting my first full rewatch of Girls with my husband since it aired hasn’t helped). Another factor in this nostalgia relapse has been the recent reactivation of my Facebook account (deactivated circa 2018) so that I could finally have access to Marketplace. I held out for as long as I could, but the lure of abundant secondhand home goods finally won out. It was this reactivation of Facebook—and subsequent re-viewing of all my old profile pictures—that led me down one particular nostalgic trail: the Craigslist missed connections dress.

For those of you who didn’t experience NYC Craigslist in the early 2010s, I’m sorry. It was a magical place, a perpetually refreshing tabula rasa where one could source a cheap bookshelf and end up with a job teaching a preschool art class (true story!), all offered up in the same bland Arial and Times New Roman. But the missed connections were perhaps the purest demonstration of Craigslist’s full scope and potential.1

I don’t have many of my missed connections preserved via screenshot, unfortunately, but rest assured, receiving one back then was not an uncommon experience. I’m sure my roommates and I were not the only group of women in their early twenties who held ritualistic communal readings of every new missed connection in the evenings after we all got home (“This one says Starr Street… weren’t you at that bike shop in Bushwick today?”) Most of them never led anywhere, but the thrill of reading about yourself through a stranger’s eyes, what they noticed and what they assumed, was a feeling I’ve never quite encountered elsewhere.

I soon learned that there was a way to almost guarantee a missed connection, which was by wearing a certain dress I’d gotten in my senior year of high school, a red sundress from Anthropologie. It was relatively modest as sundresses go—it came to the knee, had a square neckline and a smocked bust with an empire waist and fluttery short-sleeves. But it wasn’t just me that this dress imbued with the magical powers of Craigslist connection, it was the wearer. Whether it was my friend, or my roommate, or my roommate’s friend, without fail, at least four of us received missed connections while wearing this dress. (And no, it wasn’t this red dress that Lily mentioned from our days as roommates, it was a different red dress!)

I’ve tried to analyze it, to get to the root of the phenomenon. Was it just that we were all young, and Craigslist missed connections was the proto-dating app of our time, and it felt like everyone in Brooklyn under the age of forty was always posting on there? Not fully, though, because it was (small sample size, but still statistically) more likely to happen when you were wearing the dress versus when you were not. Trust me… we were monitoring those posts carefully. Even when it wasn’t technically a missed connection, the dress reliably garnered attention like nothing else I had ever worn. I still remember boarding the F at Jay Street and hearing a man who had just exited the train car yell back towards the closing doors, “The red dress is perfect!” Is it really as simple—are men really as simple—as red + sundress = must say something? Perhaps.

Though Facebook Marketplace can’t hold a candle to the electric sense of possibility that Craigslist used to offer, reactivating it did give me this one gift: a old profile picture (a Macbook Photobooth selfie, of course) featuring me in the dress.

Though I don’t know where the dress ended up (another likely victim of the Bedbug Wars of the Early 2010s), this photo jogged my memory enough to think about what to Google to find the dress itself—I had a feeling I’d be able to locate one secondhand (and I did). Seeing it in this Poshmark listing, wrinkled and flaccid on a headless mannequin and washed out by the camera flash, felt like comparing a golden hour selfie to the way I look in the background of a candid group photo.

Guess what, guys… it wasn’t really about the dress. The dress just happened to become the mascot of a brief, highly specific cultural moment for a group of twenty-somethings, alert to possibility and hopeful that every outing or errand, no matter how banal, contained the potential for a story. Craigslist’s missed connections managed to capture the magic of a city that was (and still is!) at once anonymous and incredibly intimate. The dress was merely the vessel we assigned that magic to.