The Alt Summit event for work had a dress code of “green cocktail attire.” I was going a little crazy thinking of what to wear when my mom said, “Didn’t you make a green brocade dress a long time ago?” As moms tend to be, she was right:

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I made this pre-blog (!) in either 2004 or 2005. It was for my roommate’s black tie Winter Solstice party and I made him a matching cummerbund and bow tie. (I wish I had pictures of the two of us.) It was a Vogue pattern and I remember Mom had to help me engineer a lining. It was one of my first major projects and seemed to take a long time–this was back when I sewed at the parents’ house on weekends because I didn’t have my own sewing machine (!!). I think I kept the dress all this time for that reason, and because you’ll obviously never know when you need green cocktail attire in the future.

Here it is in action on the fancy carpeting of the hotel. (The shoes are old, too. Oh J. Crew, you had the best shoes in the mid-2000s.)
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