Have you ever had a piece of special-occasion clothing so special,
that you waited so long to wear it, that it just plain went out of
style? I have!
It all started with the slip dress wave of 2015. I wanted so bad to hop on that bandwagon, but my budget kept me away until the next year
and beyond. I took so long to adopt the slip dress trend, in fact, that
several other big trends had a chance to surge in the meantime.
Beginning late 2016, it was velvet. I mention this because, when I finally succeeded in acquiring a slip
dress, it was made of crushed velvet.
However, that was in May of 2018.
By that time, velvet had already reached the end of its trajectory
(which probably explains why I was finally able to buy a tags-on velvet
dress at my cheapskate price point).
Fortunately, slip dresses were still a stylish option, and another, newer trend was going strong: embroidery.
I had a collection of patches that I'd bought as soon as I realized
embroidery was going to be big, so I figured I'd use the largest and
most ornate of them to embellish the plain pink frock, and help give it a
more up-to-the-moment look.
The
hardest part of the project was deciding where to put the patch. It was
originally one large piece, but it didn't look quite balanced just floating on the side, so I decided to cut it into two parts. To help me
decide what to cut and where to paste, I photographed the patch and
the dress, and played around with them in Photoshop so I could
experiment with placement without actually making any irreversible cuts.
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| Design by Photoshop |
That
done, I went ahead with the cutting in real life, and attached the
patches to the dress with water-soluble glue—the idea being, as always,
that after I was done with the decorated dress, I could separate the
patches from the dress and reuse them (and then resell the dress!)
My original thought had been to wear the dress to a wedding, but the only weddings
I attended after the completion of the dress were in the
summer—entirely the wrong weather for velvet. No semiformal occasions
presented themselves over the next few months, and I decided that the
colors and floral motif lent themselves better to spring than the winter
holiday season. Valentine's Day was a good contender, but by that
point, my relationship with my boyfriend was on the rocks, and we did
not celebrate Valentine's Day in our usual style.
Before
I knew it, spring had come and gone, then another hot summer, and by
the time fall rolled around and events worthy of a velvet slip dress
started occurring again, I realized that, by now, even the embroidery
patches were passé, and there was no way I was going to wear this dress
to a function without feeling behind the times.
So, I did what I always do with special-occasion clothes that are no longer so special: I wore it to work.
The
outfit is, if nothing else, a masterpiece of layering. It's too cold to
wear bare shoulders this time of year (and spaghetti straps are
inappropriate for the office anyway!) but I couldn't wear anything over
it, because that would obscure the lovely flower detailing on the
neckline! So I took a page from the Fashion Girl Playbook, and put a
long-sleeve shirt underneath. This had the effect of toning down my
dress from cocktail attire to something more casual.
Unfortunately,
the pale pink fabric is quite translucent, and the demarcation between
where the deep purple shirt ended and my underwear/legs began was
obvious. So I added a pair of burgundy leggings, which I folded up to
stop just below my knees, providing a consistent undertone the entire
length of the dress.
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| Observe, the secret leggings revealed! |
