You never enter a room intending to conquer it. The desire to be liked is easy to recognise even in the hallway: the glance in the mirror lasts a second longer, the laugh sounds slightly louder than the joke deserves. You simply enter. Everything that follows remains on the conscience of those who looked.
Scarlet flickers like a spark on the rim of a glass; silver recalls a thin frost forgotten in the middle of July. There is enough scarlet here for a scandal, and enough silver for the scandal to be accepted in good society.
The light, soft knit lets air through even in real heat. That generosity, however, extends only to the air. Curious glances are considerably less fortunate.
The short asymmetric cut brings together scarlet and silver sections, cutouts of different shapes, and deliberately loose edges. Everything looks careless — with that rare precision that cannot be achieved through carelessness. Accident rarely succeeds on the first attempt.
Front and back differ in cut, pattern, cutouts, and the proportion of scarlet to silver. Worn back to front, the top looks entirely different; inside out, the texture changes. A slight shift allows a little more shoulder to show. Just enough for wholly unfounded conclusions to appear.
Ready-made conclusions seduce no one. People are especially fond of those delusions they arrived at by themselves.
Someone, of course, will decide that the bare shoulder was meant specifically for him. Vanity is touching precisely because it is incurable. You do not disabuse him: courtesy sometimes consists in not depriving a person of his only happy delusion.
You have no need for the attention of the whole room. Everything available to everyone quickly loses value, even admiration. One glance, turned away a second later than it should have been, is enough.
The reason will, of course, be found: scarlet shimmer, silver, the bare shoulder. It is easier for a person to blame circumstances than to admit that he simply could not stop looking.