Outfit post: looks very 1950s, is actually 2014!

Woohoo, new dress! I got asked earlier this week if it was 1950s, and got quite a startled look when I said it was new. Yesterday I forced Mr Robot to take some pictures of me around Trowbridge



Splashing out on a brand-new frock feels a bit extravagant, but I fell in love with Boden's 'Nancy' dress as soon as I saw it. I originally wanted one in the seaside print based on a vintage washbag, but over time the more restrained, but still quite midcentury-looking, blue print became my favourite. Being a skinflint, I waited for the sale to buy it. I have a bit of a mental block when it comes to paying £70 for a day dress! £50 felt more reasonable – and it's down to £35 in some prints and sizes now.

That said, the dress would have been worth £70. It's made of cotton. It's also lined, so while it feels wonderfully floaty, there's no risk to your modesty. It has lingerie loops in the shoulders, so you can snap the straps of the dress over your bra straps. Even my chunky old bustenhalter is safely hidden underneath. The waist is perfectly placed on me (I'm five foot five, and wearing a size 16), and it actually makes me look curvy rather than blocky. The length is ideal. In an age when it's often hard to tell whether something is a dress or a tunic, this reaches my knees – a proper dress length.

Nice floaty skirt, but the whole dress is lined so not flimsy.

I'm funny about prints. I don't know what it is about them, but I'm really not keen on many of the prints on garments I see on the High Street. Possibly it's that there are too many colours and a lot of modern prints are very large, but to me an awful lot of them simply look cheap, as though an attempt to cram as many colours as possible onto the fabric was made without much attention to the shape those colours were making. There are exceptions; Oasis are usually reliable for nice prints (but not in fatlass sizes, grr), and Seasalt and Laura Ashley both have appealing ones.

Boden's print designs are often quite retro, with a midcentury aesthetic that I like, and while they do use very bright colours, they don't try to use every shade in the paintbox on one bolt of cloth, and there's enough regularity within the print to feel orderly. Does that make sense to you? There needs to be some cohesion and clear repetition or structure within a print, for me, it can't just be some scattergun thing splurged all over a garment in such a way that it's hard for the eye to make sense of it. The more I look at the pattern on this dress, the more I like it. It's geometric, but the shapes are not too perfect, being rough two-tone blue circles and scratchy black squares.

Here I've paired the dress with my me-made late 40s/early 50s navy cardigan, my grey pearl jewellery, and Hush Puppies 'Freya' shoes. A vintage 1960s MacLaren handbag completes the look. I love this outfit!

Chimping away on my phone - but you can see
how nice the print is.

Want more?
I don't do outfit posts often, but you can see a couple of my favourites in my Burgh Island oufit post (one 1960s lace dress suit, one repro 1930s dress) and my writeup of this year's Vintage Nostalgia show.