Summary

In “The Dress” author Soraya Membreno recounts not understanding the unwritten rules of college graduation dress, and she wore a gaudy polka-dotted dress when others wore non-descript white. Her classmates suddenly changed from casual attire to pastel sundresses and bought out the rooms of entire inns for their families. Her father, travelling from Miami to this established small liberal arts college in the Northeast, spent the night in a dorm the school set aside for lower-income students. Although her father was proud to spend the day taking pictures of his daughter and the college campus, Membreno realizes that being the first in the family to graduate from college will set up a distance between her and her family members, with societal rules and etiquette that are hard to understand.

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