Before you start reading, just know that this is not meant to be an interesting post. It just illustrates how two little words, black tie, can make me extremely anxious.

Lip Service skin tight buckle dressI make that pact with myself, and Neil calls me a week later from work to ask if I want to go to the company Christmas party. In Reading. It’s black tie.

I’m no WAG wannabe, but as I said before, I’m not buying any new clothes. I spent all last night searching for second hand stuff on eBay, but I could only find very boring designs. If I was going to buy something new for this black-tie affair, I would go for something like this Lip Service dress (Neil’s response without even seeing the dress, but having heard my description: “Well, they’ll remember you.”), but alas, I have no spare patent veggie leather lying around, and I’m not that good at sewing anyway, so a call was made to my mummy in Singapore.

(Not a verbatim transcript, but reasonably close.)

“Mum, could you go through my clothes in the spare bedroom and see if I’ve kept any of my old dresses?”

“Hold on…”

(A few minutes pass. I really must persuade Mum to buy a cordless phone when her phones cark it.)

“Okay, I’m back. You’ve got a knee-length blue one, a knee-length black one, a long, asymmetric blue one, a slightly shorter asymmetric black one, and a knee-length red one.”

“Oh, the one in a snakeskin print?”

Ah. The dresses I’ve been wearing to weddings since the late Nineties. Seriously. I still wear loads of stuff that I bought while I was at Uni. People talk about buying a new black coat ‘this season’, I might consider it ‘this decade’, but only if the coat has started to fall apart* (it hasn’t. It’ll go for another decade, I reckon). I buy so few dresses I can remember them all**.

  • Knee-length blue one — Australia. Strange surf-y / girly shop in Fremantle. 1998.
  • Knee-length black one — Singapore. I suspect it’s a slip I bought at M&S to go under another blue one I bought in… Garden City mall in Booragoon (Australia). 1998.
  • Long, asymmetric blue one — Australia again. I think it was also at that shop in Fremantle. 1998.
  • Shorter asymmetric black one — Singapore. The newest one, purchased for Mark and Kristen’s wedding in 2003. From Chaos.
  • Knee-length red one — from Toronto when we went to my cousin’s wedding in 2000. Last worn in… gosh, 2003 to my friend’s wedding.

My mum promised to send three of them over to me, and offered to send me high heels, too. HA***! So I’ll be racking up carbon emissions by having clothes (and a bag) sent to me via airmail, but I won’t be buying something new that I don’t need. Oh the conflict.

* That said, I have a lot of coats. I’m referring to Old Reliable, my black wool coat purchased in Australia many moons ago.
** Yes. This is sad. I am so anally retentive.
*** No point.

It’ll make me self-conscious as well. All the wives and girlfriends will be glammed up to the nines, and I will be… me. With a dress on.