The Art of Dressing Up–The Black Tie Dress

While most occasions today are less than full-on formal, sometimes there is a case for serious dressing up in a black-tie dress.  Thank goodness there’s a great deal of choice out there now at reasonable prices, and although you may fall in love with that Marchesa ruffled silk gown at just a snip under £6000 if you can’t fly for that one there’s so much available that isn’t going to give your wallet or your bank manager palpitations.

Two problems; I rarely say that there are problems with buying online, but in this case you’re almost certainly going to want to try on more than one dress at a time but you may draw the line, as I do, at ordering more than two.  So you have two choices; either you trek out to the store and hope that they have the five specific dresses you’ve seen online in the same place at the same time (in your size) and try them all in one go, or you order slowly, discarding as you go.  Neither of these are ideal.  Best of all is to fall in love with just one dress and make it your own.  Wishful thinking?  Perhaps.

The second problem is the models and come over to www.webhints.co.uk with me early next week as I intend fully to have a rant about this one.  I believe we do not want to see skinny models with few curves trying to fill out a dress that is made for a curvy woman.   Nor (in my opinion) do we want to see an over-curved (being careful here) model in a dress that goes down to a size 10.  We want normal models, with normal curves, who really show how great a dress can look in real life.  If it is a dress that fits a curvy bosom and small waist then it needs to show that it will do that.  It’s not surprising that so many great clothes end up in the sale.  The picture sells, every time.

Hopefully you know what suits you shape wise and here is some of what’s about right now in the sexy, glamorous, black tie dress stakes.  There will be more, of course, as it’s only September………

   

If you feel that you can get away with cocktail length, these are from the new collections:

      

One thing I would say particularly when buying a dress for an occasion is really make sure that you love it and will want to wear it again, however much it costs there’s no point in buying anything you will only wear once.