Toughen up your feminine dresses and light chiffons with heavy-duty leather, biker accessories and lots of attitude.
You know I love a good dichotomy. there’s just something so very fun about mixing up clashing styles and I for one love doing it on this blog. So any longtime readers of this blog really shouldn’t be surprised by this shoot. It’s a heady mixture of this girlish embellished, baby pink, chiffon dress and my trusty old leather biker jacket, these ancient River Island leather fingerless and the decidedly un-ladylike Chanel le Boy mini bag. To the bag I’ll get to in a minute.
The dress was a wonderful find from ASOS’ Salon collection. Most of the collection for ASOS Salon wasn’t that impressive this season, but this beautifully embellished shift dress just caught my eye. I kept it in my saved list for about a month waiting for the right time to do this shoot and almost lost it because ASOS hid the dress on their website. Thankfully I always keep copies of the links so I managed to grab it before it sold out again.
The accompanying shoes to this dress are a pair of strappy heels are also from ASOS that strangely remind me of some Alexander Wang ones from a few seasons ago. Originally this dress was meant to be paired with some tough biker boots, but they are almost impossible to get at this time of year. The jacket is an old one from my closet bought back in Berlin in 2008, it’s that old. The gloves are real leather from River Island and were probably bought in around 2010, and still useful to this day. And the bag, oh the bag, is brand new. It was a little 30th birthday present to myself back in May and it’s absolutely adorable and amazing. That is now the second Le Boy in my collection and the first time I’ve ever bought a second version of a bag.
I didn’t want to get the standard one, any of the mad colours or fabrics, so this chevron stitching and the antique silver fixtures was the perfect alternative. And it’s so small it just about fits my wallet, a pair of sunglasses and my travel cards. But who cares when you’ve got a mini Le Boy?
Lastly this was shot at the Lloyds building the heart of the City of London amongst all the bank HQs and a wonderfully urban and cold place to be, but it just fitted perfectly with the idea for this shoot.
So as always let me know what you think? There’ll be a special Behind the Scenes blog post on this shoot tomorrow as I really need to start doing them again. It’s always fun explaining the behind-the-scenes action that goes into making the finished images.
Embellished dress: ASOS Salon, found here – Leather jacket: Peek & Cloppenburg, old – Strappy high sandals: ASOS, found here – Bag: Chanel le Boy chevron stitching – Fingerless leather gloves: River Island, old
