Years ago, when I had money (because I was still trying to pretend to be a man), I used to buy magazines like Cosmo and Marie Claire and study the fashion pages. I even, for a while, wrote a fashion column for the Beaumont Society magazine. It was probably quite bad. Post transition, I found that I was much better at writing about books than about clothes, and in any case fashion is a young woman’s game. However, playing Covet Fashion has re-kindled my interest. It turns out that while you can take the fashionista out of the journalist for a while, you can’t take the journalist out of the fashionista. Hence this article.

Two of the best scores I have had in the game thus far have involved the same dress. You can see the outfits above. The one on the left is for a tea party, and the one on the right for going shopping in Barcelona. They are very similar, but also have some important differences.

The hair difference is an artifact of the game. When I did the tea party outfit I had only just started playing. Since then I have leveled up and now have access to a wider range of hairstyles. The one on the right, while not exactly like my own hair, is pretty much what I’m aiming for, and can more or less achieve if I devote enough time and styling product to it.

The other differences are deliberate. The pink shoes in the tea party outfit keep it feeling light and summery. In the shopping outfit the black shoes and the belt add a sharper edge for impressing the staff in designer clothes shops. And there’s the big tote bag to carry all of my purchases.

The dress in question is this one by Kaii. At $130 it is fairly reasonable for designer wear. IMHO it looks much better on my dark-haired model than on the blonde on the Kaii website. But what if I wanted this look for myself? Well my hair isn’t that dark either. More importantly I’d have to lose about 5 inches off my waist to fit into the largest size that Kaii has available. I could probably do with losing most of that, but that’s a separate story.

On the other hand, that style of dress is very much in this spring. For example, there’s this one from Next. It has roughly the same silhouette (sleeves obviously excepted), and the same impressionist aesthetic. It is also only £25, and is available in sizes well beyond what I need.

So yeah, that’s how I’m amusing myself these days. I can assure you, it is much more fun than getting into online fights, which is what lots of other people I know seem to be doing.