Cursed Dresses: How Enchanted Fashion Exposes Misogyny in A Sunny Place for Shady People

Introduction

In Mariana Enriquez’s story “Different Colors Made of Tears” from A Sunny Place for Shady People, a set of vintage dresses serves as a concrete object through which hatred, violence, and misogyny become physically real. These garments do not merely remind the wearer of a painful past—they actively inflict wounds on the body. The cursed dresses are a powerful symbol linking collective guilt and moral reckoning with trauma and the supernatural, and they directly engage Enriquez’s recurring concern with bodily autonomy and transformation.

Literal Description and Origin

The dresses are antique garments from the 1920s–1950s, originally owned by Susana Swanson, the wealthy wife of real-estate mogul Noah Seidel. After Susana left Noah for another man, he kept the clothes for decades. He claims he “drew” his murder fantasies onto the fabric using a knife, leaving no visible damage but somehow infusing the material with his imagined violence. The clothing is stored in his decaying Buenos Aires mansion along with valuable jewelry that, crucially, carries no curse. When the narrator—a vintage-clothing buyer for the store Isis—collects the pieces, Noah urges her to try one on, a suggestion she refuses.

The Dresses’ Powers and Wounds

Once the dresses reach Isis, the narrator, her coworker Willa, and their boss Delilah try them on, each suffering horrific but temporary wounds. The narrator’s body displays slashes across her belly, a gash in her chest that reveals her heart, and bruises on her neck. Willa develops deep cuts on her thigh, a split sternum, and a swollen, blackened eye. Most disturbingly, another woman who later tries on a dress sees her own vagina “mangled” and her clitoris gone, a wound so traumatic that the narrator, upon repeating the act, faints from the pain. All injuries vanish when the garments are removed, yet the psychological scars linger — the narrator experiences months of traumatic menstruation. The email Noah sends after the first try-on confirms his intent: he calls the women “whores,” boasts of his imagined killings, and reveals that the dresses contain his unacted violence toward Susana.

The dresses recur only in this story, but the curse does not end with Noah’s death. Months later, Delilah discovers another box of his dresses in a dumpster; when she touches one, her fingers are shredded, almost severed. The effects remain, proving that the hatred embedded in the fabric persists beyond the owner’s life.

Character Connections

The Narrator (vintage buyer): Her role as a seeker of beauty and her initial contempt for old people blind her to Noah’s danger. After the trauma, she quits Isis and returns to teaching, but she cannot stop inspecting her own body. She represents a woman who confronts the reality of gendered violence through a supernatural medium.
Willa: The coworker who laughs easily and has an eye for design. She is the first to suspect Noah’s violence (“I bet he beat the shit out of her”) and later becomes the narrator’s only confidante. Her wounds are less psychologically devastating than the narrator’s, but she shares the burden of memory.
Delilah: The boss who prioritizes profit after the first incident, deciding to sell the dresses to customers despite the harm. Her refusal to destroy the garments and her reaction after the later discovery—simply saying “What a shame”—highlight how greed and denial enable cycles of harm.
Noah Seidel: The misogynist who never killed but dreamed of killing. He weaponizes the dresses as a proxy for his hatred, manipulating women into wearing them. His name and backstory tie him to real-estate wealth and domestic abuse.
Susana Swanson (mentioned): The absent wife whose rejection sparked Noah’s rage. She is never seen alive, but her clothes become her body double, vulnerable to the violence aimed at her.

Thematic Links

The cursed dresses connect to several key themes in the collection:

Collective Guilt and Moral Reckoning: Delilah and Willa initially decide to hide the curse and sell the dresses. Their complicity implicates the whole vintage fashion system—clothing of the dead, worn by the living, carries hidden histories of violence. The narrator’s refusal to return to Isis and her silence about the full extent of the wounds suggest a form of moral paralysis.
Trauma and the Supernatural: The dresses act as supernatural vectors, turning psychological wounds into literal ones. The narrator’s later inability to menstruate without flashbacks shows how embodied memory outlasts the physical injury.
Bodily Autonomy and Transformation: Wearing a dress strips the women of control over their own bodies. The wounds materialize without consent, and the most intimate mutilation (the vaginal wound) specifically targets female sexual identity. The narrator’s act of trying on the dress a second time, after knowing the danger, suggests a compulsive need to re‑experience the violation.
Historical Violence and Ecological Decay: Noah’s mansion, like the Aguirre palace in “Hyena Hymns,” is a decaying structure that hides past atrocities. The dresses are artifacts of domestic violence preserved in amber, linking the personal with the historical.
Mental Illness and Social Isolation: The narrator’s gradual withdrawal from her job and social life mirrors the isolating effects of trauma. Her obsession with inspecting her genitals and her inability to talk about the experience except with Willa point to the private nature of sexual violence.

Changes in Meaning

At first, the dresses appear as objects of desire—beautiful, expensive, almost magical in their ability to transform the wearer. The narrator describes putting on the red dress as “like pouring a magic elixir over the body.” After the wounds appear, the dresses become instruments of horror. Noah’s email redefines them as deliberate weapons, not passive vessels. When Delilah finds the new box after Noah’s death, the dresses have shifted from personal artifacts to something akin to contaminated waste: dangerous even to touch, and still capable of mutilating a new generation of women. The meaning of the dresses is stable throughout the story—they are always conduits for misogyny—but the characters’ understanding of them deepens from ignorance to terror.

Study Questions

How do the cursed dresses function as a metaphor for the way gendered violence is preserved and transmitted through material culture?
Answer: The dresses show that violence can be embedded in everyday objects and passed on to new victims. Noah’s inability to physically harm his wife leads him to “draw” his fantasies onto cloth. The garments outlast him and continue to wound women long after his death, suggesting that misogynist hatred has a durability beyond individual perpetrators.
Why does the narrator try on the black dress a second time, knowing it will torture her?
Answer: Her second try-on seems driven by a need to test the limits of the curse and perhaps to face the worst violation head-on. She mentions that the word “hussy” reminded her of her own grandmother’s judgment, hinting that the dress activates intergenerational shame about female sexuality. By choosing to re‑experience the vaginal wound, she reclaims some control over her own body’s response.
What does Delilah’s reaction to the later discovery of more dresses say about complicity?
Answer: Delilah’s first reaction after her hand is mutilated is regret that she did not photograph the wounds, and later she simply says “What a shame.” She never destroys the dresses or reports the curse. This response illustrates how economic desire and denial can perpetuate harm; Delilah’s silence makes her an accomplice to any future victim.
Compare the cursed dresses to another supernatural element in the collection, such as the ghosts in “My Sad Dead” or the boneless creature in “A Local Artist.” How do the dresses differently represent the persistence of the past?
Answer: Ghosts and monsters are overtly supernatural; the dresses are natural objects that become supernatural through human hatred. Unlike the ghosts in “My Sad Dead,” which demand acknowledgment and care, the dresses are indifferent—they do not ask for help; they simply inflict pain. This makes them a colder, more impersonal symbol of historical violence, one that implicates everyone who touches them rather than a single witness.