Dress Shopping

By the title you can tell that this is going to be a fun post.

So Paty was just invited to an awards dinner for IT professionals in West Ireland. But the invitation said 'This Is a Black Tie Event'. We found out yesterday about the dinner that is tonight, Thursday. So I was thinking, "not a problem, Paty has tons of nice clothes. She will enjoy the night as she always likes to dress up."

Of course it can't be that easy. Because of course Paty has 'nothing to wear'. What was I thinking? Now you are thinking that we could just go out Wednesday after work and pick out a dress. Not so fast, all the stores close in Galway at 6 PM. And I don't pick up little miss workaholic until 6 PM at the earliest. So we have a crisis on our hands. This is what I call a Paty problem. Something that I consider very trivial, but is HUGELY important to Paty. So important that she had a tough time sleeping last night because she was so worried about the outfit.

Thus, I spent today Dress Shopping.....Alone.

In order to not look like a crazy stalker guy hanging out in a women's clothing store, I shaved and put on my one pair of designer type jeans, a button up shirt, nice leather jacket and my one pair of non tennis shoes. Just to complete the outfit I carried my man purse. That way I would look like I have a little metro tendencies and no one would look at me funny in the women's clothes store with no woman.

Here is a photo journal of my day:

Brown Thomas:

All dresses here were 250 Euros or more. And they weren't even that nice.

Monsoon:

Dresses here were more for the early 20's clubbing crowd.

Nestor's:

Great if you want a dress for your daughter's wedding, not Paty's style.

This was one of my suggestions:

Rent a dress for the night! Needless to say that idea flew like a lead balloon.

French Connection:

Nothing at FCUK

MEXX:

I actually almost got on here. My second choice in the end.

Who wouldn't want a dress from Beverly Hills? And 50% off no less:

My guess is Paty would not, as this store was doing a great business selling Halloween dresses last week.

Benetton:

Like every other Benetton, more style than substance. Although the ever present United Colors of Benetton pastel shirts were at the entrance of the store as usual. Except being Ireland the shirts were actually wool sweaters!

Identity:

Nothing here.

Three stores all together all with a big fat ZERO:



By this time I was getting frustrated and the sad thing was that I could not take advantage of the beautiful day and partake of a beverage at one of Galway's many fine establishments:

I still had to pick up Paty from work and tonight I have soccer practice (aka football training).

Style Room:

A little to 'outside the box' for Paty, but some nice options here.

Sisley:

We have a winner! Sisley dress:


Invariably there is going to be something wrong with my choice, she probably won't like the belt and silver buckle that come with. But since I had to perform this wonderfully exciting chore by myself, Paty will be wise to not complain. Plus you would think that finding a black cocktail dress would be easy, that there would be a lot of options. Think again. I honestly chose between this dress and one other at MEXX. I did find a cool one at the Style Room, but only size Medium and Large.

Follow up to this post:

Here is us going to the store to exchange the dress.

Don't despair, Paty actually loved the dress! We just decided to go with the extra small instead of the small. She was slightly upset in this picture because I made the tactical error of showing her the blog post before we went to exchange the dress. Thus my pictures were not as good as they should have been.

The final product: