Last Monday I posted a review of Dolly & Dotty’s Tessa dress with you all, a review that happily served double duty launching a giveaway to win a Dolly & Dotty dress of your choice! Well, lovelies, the giveaway ended last night and now it’s time. Let’s find out who the winner is!
The Tessa dress isn’t a new style for Dolly & Dotty, who first released it in black several months back, which is when I first fell for her. A simple and chic swing dress with a cut-out lace neckline and sleeves? Come on now, you know how I love overlays and mixed texture design details! This dress is all about that.
Now Tessa is here in some new colour options and it’s time to go green for spring!
Do you ever find that, out of nowhere, you unexpectedly become a bit obsessed with a certain colour, print or motif that never much moved you before? That’s me right now with red rose prints. I don’t know how or why my love for them appeared so suddenly, but it’s here nonetheless and so is my need to have a dozen rose themed items in my wardrobe, you know, because I can’t do anything by halves. Lucky me, then, that this Annie dress from Dolly & Dotty arrived at this most serendipitous time.
As much as I love colourful prints and patterns, I’m always a fan of any classic swing dress in black and white that can function as a style comfort blanket in your closet. Got a last minute invite to an event with a vague dress code? Trusty classic backup dress to the rescue! Not sure if anyone else will be wearing colour where you’re going? Trusty classic backup dress to the rescue! Feel like everyone else is going to be fairly casual, so you don’t want to be too extra but you’re also not willing to compromise your style entirely? Trusty classic backup dress to the rescue!
And one such dress is the lovely black and white Aurora by Dolly & Dotty. It’s swing, it’s striped, and it has pockets. What more could you ask for?
I’m one of those people who’s pretty bad for encouraging others to buy the extravagant evening dress even when they don’t have a special event on the horizon. The way I see it, life is too short not to do the things that make you happy, and if one of those things occasionally is buying a fancy dress that actually made you gasp or groan or swoon a little bit when you saw it, that can’t really be a bad thing. Putting on a special dress that is too fancy for every day life has a certain kind of feeling that comes with it, a grandness, a fizz of excitement, a bubbling of childlike wondrous joy that you get to wear something so wonderful and look great in it.
Even if, like me, you own far too many dresses, there’s still something extra special about putting on an evening dress that makes you feel like a princess, a lady, or an old Hollywood screen siren. The latter is the realm of fancy we’re entering into today, with a floor length velvet gown from Dolly & Dotty that makes me feel like laying atop a piano and pouting my way through a breathy solo number.
I am all about stripes. If they’re white and navy? I could not be any more about stripes, no way, no how. A striped vintage style dress is so chic and classic that it literally never goes out of style. Add in how easy it is to style a dress like that and you’re laughing. It’s surprising to no one, then, that I’m pretty loved up with this Dolly & Dotty offering that’s new in their summer range.
At this point it’s got to be redundant when I talk about how much I love all things nautical, right? So I won’t. I’ll say instead that while this Lana dress by Dolly & Dotty is striped and fits a nautical themed styling easily, beautifully even, the dress itself technically isn’t nautical. It’s just a lovely white and navy striped number that comes with a red belt, fitting that red, white and blue colour scheme that’s so closely associated with all things seaside, beach front and sailing that it’s evocatively on trend in that area without so much as a flash of an anchor or glimpse of a sail.
Oh, huh. I guess I utterly failed at talking about nautical things after all anyway. Damnit!
But, still, you get my point. This Lana dress isn’t technically a nautical novelty, it’s just a comfortable striped sun dress that I couldn’t help but style with a nautical flair because I am a predictable red, white and blue loving maniac. Sorrynotsorry.
We’ve had plenty of sparkles and sass so far in this year’s party dress series. We’ve had some understated tartan, an irrepressible LBD, and some shimmering metallics. So it’s time, with our last party dress, to reach for something truly classic and monochromatic. Ladies who like to keep it simple and chic, who don’t like frills, glitter, bows or prints. The ladies who feel Audrey got it right the most of any woman throughout history, this dress is for you.
(…And for any ladies who like things simple but also don’t mind a touch of adorable Christmas fun, I’ve thrown in a red cape too, because it’s the holidays and I cannot be stopped.)
But seriously, this is the classic, understated elegance dress of the series, and best yet? It’s a total bargain.
