Birthday Dress

For some odd reason, these photos have resized the wrong way, eek! As in, they should be 800 pixels wide, but instead they’re all 800 pixels tall, meaning the width is all off in them – the fact that we took these on the day of my birthday (29th September) and I’ve only just noticed (and got round to posting them) now is probably not a good thing!
I was obsessed with this Collectif dress as soon as I saw them release their autumn/winter imagery. In fact, I even lusted over it in this wishlist here. I’m not one to watch upcoming trends and releases, but when I spotted this one, I knew it had to be. I bought the three quarter length sleeve version of the Dolores dress (there’s a single picture of it here) last year, and I remember speaking to them over email at the time (because I had an issue with the stitching – excellent customer service though!) and wondering whether they’d be releasing any more with the longer sleeves, to which they responded very cryptically that there may be plans in future. Since then, I’d had my eyes on their social media constantly, waiting to see if it would come true, and it did! I love the fitted shape of the dress which surprisingly fits every part of my body in my usual size (usually I end up squashed on the bust or hips if the waist fits, or swimming in the waist and fitted everywhere else), and like I said, it has sleeves. On top of that, the fabric is a beautiful autumnal floral print.
Unfortunately, you can kind of see in these pictures that I was exhausted, still suffering jet lag! We’d arrived home from America on the Sunday, I went back to work first thing on Monday morning, and my birthday was the Tuesday. I, of course, dressed up in my birthday dress (story behind it: as soon as I found it had been released, I demanded Ben buy it as a birthday present for me. Me, diva? No, never! He ended up handing his card over to me to buy it for myself, a month before my actual birthday!). Anyway, so I got dressed up in my new fave dress, my denim jacket (from Animal at the York Designer Outlet, also worn on holiday here) and my eternal favourite black heels from ASOS, and went out for a meal locally with the family. Unfortunately, there was a slight hitch in the plan as my parents had, in their post-holiday exhaustion, neglected to pick up my presents as they left the house. Despite my protestations, my dad insisted on returning home to get them, so the evening got off to a bit of a bumpy start, but ended with us meeting George Clarke at the pub, so that was kind of awesome.