Category: Bardot Dresses

The mistake is buying a bardot dress a size up for insurance, thinking extra room will stop it slipping. It does the opposite. A bardot stays up through structure, not space, so a looser fit just means more falling down over the course of an evening and more tugging it back into place.
It doesn't sit well with anything that competes for the same bit of skin. A statement necklace looks like it's fighting the neckline rather than finishing it, and any bra with visible straps undoes the whole point of the style, so you end up either going strapless underneath or picking a dress with enough structure built in that you don't need to. Heavy jackets are a problem too, since most of them are cut for sleeves and end up pulling the shoulders of the dress sideways the second you put one on. A cropped cardigan or a jacket that sits on the shoulder works better than anything with a proper set in sleeve. On colour, plain and solid is the easiest version of this dress to live with. A strong block colour or a deep neutral photographs well and doesn't fight the shape, whereas busy prints tend to make the off the shoulder cut look fussy rather than deliberate, because there's already a lot going on with the neckline before you add a pattern on top of it.
The honest limit is that a bardot dress is not built for a day where your arms are doing a lot of work. Carrying bags, lifting a toddler, reaching for something on a top shelf, all of it pulls the neckline around, and you will spend the whole time resetting it rather than enjoying wearing it. It's also not the dress for anything with a cold wind in the forecast, since there's no getting round the amount of shoulder on show. Over a few months of actual wear, the good ones hold their shape through the elastic or boning at the top rather than through the fabric itself, so check that before anything else, because a dress that relies purely on tight fabric to stay up loses that grip after a handful of washes and starts sliding no matter how carefully you move. Hand washing or a cool machine cycle on a low spin keeps the elastic doing its job for longer, and hanging it rather than folding it stops the neckline creasing into a shape that never quite drops back out.
It earns a place for an evening where your arms stay mostly down. For anything active, it's the wrong dress, and no amount of readjusting changes that.
Picked by Megan Rees. More in Dresses.