And the winner is…..(part 1)

To celebrate Frocktober 2013, I teamed up with North Shore Mums to run a competition celebrating the fabulous dresses we have in our wardrobes and what they have meant to us. Below is the story of the runner up.

Enjoy!

 

 

Buying an expensive dress on a whim, without even trying it on is not something you would expect an accountant to do. But that’s exactly what one North Shore Mum did.

Meet Julie. She’s a chartered accountant who runs her own business on Sydney’s north shore.

One warm Spring day a couple of years ago, Julie and her friend found themselves watching a fashion parade at a fundraising event at the races when out came this gorgeous silk dress:

It swished up the catwalk on a teeny tiny size one model, and for Julie, it was a dress she just had to have. When she got home from the races that day, Julie went to work, only she wasn’t using her sleuthing skills to find every last cent for one of her client’s tax returns. Instead she went looking for that dress.  Success! She found a photo of something that she thought was the dress, sent it off to the boutique who had sponsored the fashion parade, and a few days later that very dress was hanging up in Julie’s home.

Now let’s just pause the story here: Most people would have written that the dress was hanging “in Julie’s wardrobe”. Why say “in Julie’s home”?

Here’s where the story gets interesting.

You see, Julie bought the dress a couple of sizes too small. It didn’t hang in her wardrobe, but rather in front of her treadmill, and fitting into that dress became the incentive for Julie’s training for the next two years.

And here she is, looking fabulous in the dress.

You’re probably thinking that Julie wore the dress to death once she fitted into it, but you’d be wrong. It was a splurge item, made of delicate silk, and Julie thought she would be devastated if she wore it and ruined it, so even though she could fit into the dress, it didn’t get much of an outing. Then came the work Christmas party, the perfect opportunity to wear a gorgeous dress! Julie pulled it out of her wardrobe, got herself all dressed up and swished out to the party, only to feel over dressed and two years out of fashion!

“It felt great to fit into it,” Julie says, “but I just didn’t want to wear it.”

And the moral to this story? “Life’s short, so don’t be precious. Just wear the damn dress!” says Julie.

Julie won second prize in the Frocktober competition 2013, which included a full couture photo shoot with me. Here are some other images from the session the session (which we held earlier this year).

If you’d like to see what a couture session like Julie had looks like, click here to watch a behind-the-scenes video of a session with me.