How to pick the perfect festive party dress!

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It is now the 10th of December and we are truly in the midst of the Christmas party season, finding that all important Christmas dress to wow at the office party is on everyone’s mind. I find at this time of the year there is two looks, either pjs on in front of the tv consuming far too many calories on all those Christmas pies, or dressed to impress on your festive nights out as this is the busiest time in our social calendars with almost every weekend booked leading up to Christmas.

Whatever it is we’r doing if it’s the Christmas dance, out for dinner with friends or its new year’s eve we have to be looking our most glamorous.  So start now the last thing you want to be doing is any more unnecessary rushing around and you don’t want to settle for anything less than the best so make sure you get out there first. This Christmas I think it is all about the sparkle and we have plenty to choose from with sequins, metallic and sparkles all being popular trends this season.

christmas dresses

Picture: Hot Celeb Trend: Sparkly Dresses superstarmagazine.com

Here we can see that even our celebrity friends are loving the sparkles this season, now these may be slightly out of our budget as it is Christmas so we can’t spend it all at once. But how about this dress only £40 from missgudied worth envying its cute and love the length perfect for all Christmas occasions!

sparkly christmas dress

Picture:  misguided.co.uk 

Match it with this stretch spike asos bracelet and you are ready to go!

to go with christmas dress

Picture: asos.com

Fashion Blur Will Return

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Hi, its been a while folks. What can we say to make it up to you?! :) Well, the good news is, most of us involved here have got out lives back to an extent that we’ll be able to start blogging regularly again. It should be quite interesting, although we can’t imagine much has changed in the last 18 months or so :P

We’ll be back very soon with some cool fashion content – in the meantime, what has been the main fashion event whilst we’ve been away?

Why We’re All for the High Street Fashion Awards

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Ahhhhh Lorraine Kelly – TV host of champs. She might have stylists and (what we imagine is) a generous wardrobe budget for The Lorraine Show, but she still advocates a thrifty lifestyle off set.

Take her show’s High Street Fashion Awards for example, it purposely ignores high end designers and focuses on stores like Peacocks, which the average girl could shop in every Saturday.

Peacocks have been nominated in the affordable fashion category of this competition which provides us with a perfect case study into the availability of value for money fashion on the high street.

The last few years have been kind to value for money retailers due to their ability to quickly produce designer inspired clothing at great prices has taken the UK high street by storm.

There are now ‘get the look for less’ features in magazines and television shows on almost a daily basis – including the segment that showed viewers how to capture the latest catwalk fashion trends with Peacocks garments on The Lorraine Show this morning.

Thanks to the rise of the type of high street fashion celebrity trends can quickly be taken up by anyone without access to a gold credit card, and if you take advice from the likes of Gok Wan there really is no reason that anyone should know the difference.

The High Street Fashion awards are a great way to highlight the huge range of affordable fashion available in Britain, and the best places to buy it - so why not give Peacocks and the rest a show of support and vote.

The Famous Dresses of Kate Middleton: Why There Will Be More

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The Famous Dresses of Kate Middleton: Why There Will Be More

The day before the Royal Wedding there’s really only one question left to ask – when can we see the dresses.

With rumours of an Alexander McQueen creation louder than all others, but no real inclination as to who will get the honour of designing the dresses for Kate and her wedding party all we can do is sit and wait. Which gives us time to reflect on Kate Middleton’s famous dresses.

The wedding gown will be the most important of all of Kate’s famous dresses, and she has had quite a few.

It all started with that see through number which has said to have won William over as she strutted down the catwalk at a student fashion show in St Andrews and her navy engagement attire spun the high street into a frenzy of similar dresses at a fraction of the price.

Just a few days ago her shopping spree in central London made the front pages as the retailers eagerly announced the several dresses she bought in tropical prints and colours – apparently intended for her honeymoon wardrobe. And just like her engagement outfit, the dresses she bought are also likely to be sold out across the UK by the end of the week.

Tomorrow may mark the beginning of the end for Royal Wedding fever, but we can assure you that it is only the start of the Kate Middleton fashion frenzy, which is sure to see many, many more famous dresses hit our fashion pages over the coming years.

SS2011 AND THE MAXI DRESS

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Jeans go from tight to loosely fitting back to tight fitting again – in a kind of fashion pendulum way. And it’s the same with hemlines and length in dresses and skirts.

It seems as if the further 2011 progresses, the longer the dress gets. of course it’s kinda part of that whole 70s vibe that’s going on right now – by the end of the year we’ll probably all have ginormous collared shirts and a glitter ball in the living room.

The long flowing maxi dresses of 2011 (such as the one pictured above) and other 70s inspired items are giving 2011 a much more relaxed and laid back feel than the preceding post-crunch years. There’s even a theory (invented by me a minute ago) that fashion is actually a powerful force on society and that the styles of 2011 could be a factor in the economic success of the country. So, get your get your plaited navajo feather headband, and gather round the campfire of grooviness that is the 2011 1970s revival.

You could even go the whole hog and get purple soft furnishings, an orange and brown carpet, a Soda Stream, a slo-cooker, and a VW Beetle.

Fashion by famous

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There are quite a few fashion lines done by famous folks – the most famous one possibly being the Kate Moss stuff of a couple of years ago, and other notable names that spring to mind include:

Pearl Lowe – increasingly successful work with Peacocks clothes

Fearne Cotton – has online range (pricey but nicely done)

Liam Gallagher – very well marketed, presented and designed. True mod clobber!

Here at fashion Blur we believe that celebrity clothes ranges – far from being a vanity ego thang or a short lived experiment – are vital to the continued success of the UK as one of the coolest places on Earth. So bearing this in mind, what other people of fametastic distinction would we like to see doing a clothes collection with a UK retailer? Ok, since you ask…

John Lydon – known for his love of tartan and his dislike of denim, this Pistol emeritus would surely play a fashion blinder if he was let loose in a design studio. Lydon has style smart – he worked in the original Westwood shop, and would apply the right level of philosophical principles, history and personality into his designs. Surefire winner.

Sigourney Weaver – for the sci-fi chops. John Hurt could do a collection too, although people might be too frightened to buy it!

Hayley Williams (Paramore) – for the rock’n'roll.

Any suggestions for more? Just drop us a comment below. Cheers!

The art of Shoes: footwear yourself maximum stylee

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A love of shoes is often characterised as a women’s thing, but is this true? There are enough trainer collecting blokes out there for it not to be the case. It’s just that men and women favour different types of shoe – for women it’s all about taste, glamour, beautiful lines – there are many shoes by the famous design houses (Laboutin, Jimmy Choo) that would probably look just as good in a glass museum case as on someoene’s foot. Women also want fun from footwear – a bit of colour, and an interesting design. Shoes with spirit. This YouTube clip sums up womens shoe design with clarity:

Bloke footwear is a different story – for an example of this think of the Oscars ceremony. The men’s shoes worn to the ceremony are standard formal black tie type shoes – you could wear the most expensive pair of formal shoes ever made, or something from the market in the Arndale Centre – and nobody would know, notice, or care. And that’s how it should be. Blokes blend in while women play a different role – giving colour, brightness and wamth to the occasion.

For male shoe enthusiasts it’s mainly all about trainers – there are bound to be some desi boot/ Docs/ Converse aficionadi out there but there’s nothing like a vintage basketball shoe site to get the pulse racing. Occasionally the Sunday papers will run a piece on a training shoe collecter – often a dude who works in the creative industries with the money, time and space to construct a kind of sneaker grotto in his house, a mad collection of trainers that can only be described as having a touch of the Imelda marcos about it. Me, I have two pairs of trainers and that’s it. If I had the money though I would definitely have three pairs though – why not, eh?

So what about you? How many pairs do you have? And what’s the least and most spent on a pair?