"The New Dress" is Virginia Woolf's short story about Mabel Waring, who attends a social gathering wearing a new yellow dress. The story is written in a stream-of-consciousness fashion as it describes Mabel's thoughts and actions while she is at the party.

Mabel is wearing a yellow dress that she designed with her dressmaker specifically for this particular occasion. She has taken an image from a old fashion magazine from Paris and has spent countless hours with her dressmaker attempting to get the design just perfect for this social gathering, where she wishes to make an image of perfection of herself.

As she arrives at the party and removes her cloak, Mabel sees herself in a mirror and immediately announces to herself that the dress is not right. There is just something wrong with it, although there is no indication of precisely what the problem...