Love Quote by Suzanne Farrell

Childhood dress-up usually gets filed under cute nostalgia, but Suzanne Farrell frames it like training: a rehearsal for becoming the kind of woman the world would later demand she perform. “Chic, sophisticated ladies” isn’t just a kid’s fantasy of adulthood; it’s a vocabulary of polish, poise, and coded status. Farrell’s genius here is how she smuggles a serious truth through a gentle memory: in dance, especially ballet, “preparation” starts long before formal instruction. You don’t only learn steps. You learn how to carry yourself as an object of attention.

The subtext is that femininity is choreographed. Pretending to be “chic” teaches the body the small disciplines that later read as effortlessness: posture, restraint, smiling on cue, the ability to look composed while feeling uncertain. Farrell links play to professionalism, but she also hints at the cost: the “lady” is a role you try on until it fits, or until it constricts.

Context matters because Farrell came up in an art form that sells refinement as destiny while demanding punishing labor behind the scenes. Ballet has always been obsessed with the illusion of the elevated, untouchable woman. By calling dress-up “preparation,” Farrell casts her own origin story as both charming and quietly strategic: a young girl learning the social performance that would let her survive, and shine, inside a famously exacting institution.