The embroidered velvet slip dress

 

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.

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.

Observe, the secret leggings revealed!

Honestly, layering ingenuity aside, I'm none too proud of this outfit, and am happy to have checked it off my list! Now I'll just remove the patches and save them for something better! Anyone in the market for a used velvet slip dress?