The Dress For Bookworms

I love clothes that reference my interests without being too obvious about it. For example, I want to wear clothes that remind me of libraries but I'm not as excited about a tee that reads "bookworm" on the front...I want my clothes to say book worm without the literal writing. Which is why the Leannan Sidhe dress I created with Nour & the Merchant is a bookworm dress, but it doesn't say that anywhere. Rather the custom embroidery we created for this dress is inspired by vintage book covers and we even buried a little gold-threaded book within the pattern that isn't immediately obvious. Your eye is probably first drawn to the dragons and swords and the vines that tie everything together, but there's more than one hidden detail in this embroidery--tiny moths, hawthorn blossoms, books, stars, and even a little "quiet in the wild" lurk within the folds of tulle. I see it as a dress for bookworms that are set on becoming the main character of the stories they read; a dress fit for the adventures in novels or stumbling across the fae in the woods.   

Since this dress was inspired by beautiful vintage books it felt infinitely appropriate to wear it to my favorite library of old books, the Armagh Robinson Library. Floor to ceiling shelves of old leather bound books with gilt lettering and marbled edges, the very type of book that inspired this dress. That type of book always looks like a bit of magic to me. While this dress is very opulent, it can be styled a few different ways. Cristina of Nour and the Merchant wore it recently on a weekend trip with ankle boots and a leather jacket. Today I styled mine with an old belt and my favorite pair of beaten up flats. It still feels quite elegant, but not too overdone for everyday when paired with more simple accessories. I think sometimes we wonder "what occasion do I have to wear this dress" rather than how can I make my every day feel more like an occasion. Sometimes wearing something a bit whimsical can add a bit of magic to your day. Just like a book is more than words on paper bound together, this dress feels like more than a combination of threads--it's adventure in dress form. I can't gift you a dragon to ride off into the sunset, but I can make you a dress with golden dragons and twisting vines that captures some of the magic of a good story so you can wear dragons on your sleeves and swords hidden between the folds of your skirt...