Dresses are one of the staples of any woman's closet, but with so much variety to choose from, it can be hard to know where to start. Prom dresses, summer dresses, workwear dresses - whatever kind of dress you're looking for, The Fashion Police will do our very best to help you find it, and will also highlight some ugly dresses to be avoided. What's your dress style? Casual, smart, sexy, trendy? You'll find a dress for every occasion in the section below...
Well, there’s a lot going on here, isn’t there? For one thing, this dress looks a bit like it’s on fire. Or at least, it does to us, but that could be because we’re slightly blinded by all of the eyeball bleach we instinctively reached for as soon as we laid eyes on it.
Topshop describe it as a “wallpaper” dress. This, of course, made us wonder what kind of room would have walls like this? And who would live in such a room? You can leave your answers to that one in the comments box. Mostly, though, we just want to know whether it would be a super-stylish someone, or the type of someone The Fashion Police should be thinking about arresting. You see, we thought the answer to this one was obvious… but then we noticed that although this dress has only been online for a day or so, it’s already started to sell out in certain sizes, so we need to know what we’re up against here: will we soon be fighting off entire armies of wallpaper-wearers? And if so, should we fight back, or let them win?
This is £65 at Topshop. But is it innocent or guilty?
The Fashion Police need your help in ID-ing the item shown above. It’s currently being sold at New Look, where it will set you back £19.99: but is it a very short dress, or it is simply a rather long top? That’s for you to decide.
As far as the evidence goes, the model is helpfully demonstrating to us that this item does NOT pass the “fingertip test” often applied to hemlines, in which a dress which fails to reach the end of your fingertips is deemed to be too short. That doesn’t tell us much, though, because rules are made to be broken (sometimes), and, well, what if you just happen to have particularly long arms?
What do you think? Would you wear this as a dress, or would it only be useful as a top? What do you think New Look are selling it as? Click here to find out…
Well, we can ignore it no longer: the emails declaring that “Christmas is just around the corner!” are growing in number on a daily basis, so we guess we may as well bow to the inevitable and start looking for a Christmas party dress. We should probably make a start on the Christmas shopping, too, but then again, what else is Christmas Eve for?
(We’re joking. Maybe.)
Anyway, we know many of our readers are on a budget right now, so when we sent our officers out to hunt down five Christmas dresses for you, we imposed a £50 budget per dress on them. We’re mean like that.
When it comes to buying a party dress on a serious budget, our main tip is to keep it simple. There are exceptions to every rule, of course, and we’ve tried to find some for you in this roundup, but in general, the fussier, or more embellished a dress is, the harder it is to get away with cheap fabrics or less-than-steller workmanship. Bright colours can also tend to look garish on very cheap items, so if you’re on a serious budget, don’t be afraid to stick to the little black dress, which can be made to look good with the help of a few accessories.
All of that said, here are five dresses under £50, in a range of different styles: click on the image for product information!
We’ve talked before about single-sleeved dresses, and whether or not they constitute a crime of fashion, and the consensus generally seems to be “Well, not really, but they’re worth the watching.” In those cases, though, the dresses in question tend to be the standard one-long-sleeve-one-missing-sleeve affair, like this one:
The ASOS dress at the top of this post, however, is different. Unwilling to commit fully to the one-sleeved look, it’s chosen to be half-hearted about it, going for one short sleeve, and one three-quarter length sleeve. The effect is a strangely unfinished, lopsided kind of look, which makes us weep for the simple, stylish dress this could have been – and probably WANTED to be – had the designer not decided at the last minute to make it “edgy”. Too many good clothes have been lost to the scourge of “edginess”, readers. It makes The Fashion Police weep.
That’s how WE feel about this dress, then, but luckily for it, we’re not the jurors here: YOU are. We simply report the suspect and let you decide whether it’s guilty or innocent – which is exactly what we’re about to do.
Dammit! Now why couldn’t we have discovered this dress BEFORE Halloween rather than after it?
To be completely honest, we’ve never really trusted maxi dresses. In the right hands, they can look fantastic. In the wrong ones, however, they can make the wearer look like an extra in a costume drama.
We don’t really need to tell you which type of hands this dress has been left in, do we?
(Clue: the WRONG hands. Oh yes.)
There’s nothing good about this look. The severe neckline combined with the long sleeves, harsh, head-to-toe black and scraped-back hair, all combine to make this poor model look like the evil governess in a gothic novel. If you don’t believe us, when you go to bed tonight, switch off the light, close your eyes, then imagine her standing at the foot of your bed, watching you. And if THAT doesn’t scare you, perhaps the price tag will: $1,540, anyone?
We’re curious, though? Where would you wear something like this? HOW would you wear it? Normally we’d suggest adding some bright accessories to lighten things up, but this one has us beat: we can’t really imagine how you could wear it and NOT look like you were going to a funeral in 1856. (Or, you know, some other time: back off, History Police!)
Yesterday afternoon, Officer Emily filed a report which forced us to instantly declare a Fashion Police State of Emergency. Here is the suspect in question:
You’re possibly wondering what the problem is. Is it because it looks a bit like nightwear? Because, OK, that’s not good, but LOTS of dresses look like nightwear without meriting so much as a Fashion Police Caution. So what is it?
Perhaps THIS will make things clearer:
To quote Rolf Harris: Can yer see what it is yet?
As Emily put it: this dress looks like something else.
If you can see what the “something else” is, great: at least we know it’s not just us and our filthy minds.
If you CAN’T see what the “something else” is, well, good for you. Your eyeballs are safe.
This is by Suzie Wong, is £125 at ASOS, and it’s well worth looking at the product page to view the video: people, you haven’t lived until you’ve seen this dress in action. There’s something in the way it moves…
P.S. While we’re on this particular subject, let us just take the opportunity to show you THIS again:
Aqua are becoming serial offenders in the real of Strange Skirts: and Strange Other Items, too, to be perfectly honest. We think they’ve outdone themselves with this Half Maxi/Half Mini, though. Come on, Aqua, make your minds up! Surely no one is THIS indecisive? Look, even the model is starting to get all huffy:
Not content with a skirt that will leave one leg out in the cold, however, Aqua continued the strangeness with this Shirt-With-a-Tail:
They call it a “dress”. We call it “what a Fashion Criminal Superhero would wear, if there actually were Fashion Criminal Superheroes. Which there isn’t: there are only villains in the world of Fashion Criminals.”
And just to prove that we’re not totally biased against dresses with weird long bits attached to them, we don’t hate this one:
Oh, who are we kidding? We DO hate it. Just not as much as the other two. Because once you’ve looked at those, even this starts to look not-so-bad, don’t you think?
