How to Accessorize a Little Black Dress and Get More Mileage out of Your Cocktail LBD- Video Tips

How to Accessorize a Cocktail Little Black Dress with Sharon Haver from the About.com at Barney’s New York Style Video Series…

This entry is part 2 of 5 in the series Sharon Haver for About.com Video Series

Everyone loves a great LBD but sometimes we get a bit stymied on how to best accessorize it. Please look at my latest style video for About.com and learn some great tips to accessorize a little black dress and put more mileage in your very fashionable wardrobe!

How to Accessorize a Little Black Dress:

Transcript: How to Accessorize a Little Black Dress with Sharon Haver

Hello, I’m Sharon Haver. I’m the founder of focus on style.com. We’re here today at Barney’s New York for About.com and we’re going to talk about how to accessorize the perfect cocktail dress and how to get more mileage out of your LBD.

Nora, our model, and she’s wearing an absolutely gorgeous black matte satin cocktail dress. It’s a very simple little black dress. But you may want to change and try a couple of different alternatives, so, that’s what we’re going to show you how to do.

Belts for Little Black Dresses

What we did here is we added an evening belt that has a little diamante buckle, it still might be a diamond buckle, but it is a very simple clean line which doesn’t distract from the line of the dress and acts as an accent. Think of your belt as an accessory or a jewel and you don’t need anything else. But, if you want to brighten it up, there’s nothing that works more beautiful than a shot of color and we have this bright satin bag and it’s very, very brilliant magenta which just pops everything out of the dress and it’s really all you need, good to go, for a party and to completely change how the dress started to look.

Accessorize a Black Dress With a Coat

Another way to change the look of this dress is to maybe dress it down to dress it up a bit. So, what we have here is this really beautiful bold necklace. It’s very very bold and it makes a huge statement. And it’s something that changes the whole look of the dress and it’s a little bit unexpected. But, what I would do – because the most important thing is to make an entrance, and I’d follow sort of the advice of Audrey Hepburn at Breakfast at Tiffany’s and wear a beautiful trench over your cocktail dress. And roll up the sleeves a little bit. And just the combination of the trench and the big necklace it’s a very chic look. It kind of takes it down a bit as being a little more casual. But, I kind of think of it as being a little more downtown than wearing a fussy coat over a cocktail dress. It’s a little younger and a little fresher.

Versatile Black Dresses

Here’s another alternative for a very uptown kind of look. It’s the same dress, but she can wear it to lunch or she can wear it to the office. She can wear it to maybe a daytime event or occasion and we simply put on this little cropped beige jacket which you can also wear later with other things and dress up a pair of jeans with. A pair of white jeans. And, we’ve added a very, we’re not going for the kind of usual pearls, we went for, again, very simple pearls which are on a black chord. Which makes it a little younger and a little more fresh and more important, less serious. And it became a very elegant dress that you can get more mileage out of during the day.

Cardigans as Accessories

Now, depending on your black cocktail dress, this one has the little shoulder detail, but if your dress doesn’t have the shoulder detail, you can also put a simple cardigan on. Kind of ala Michelle Obama style and get the same feel or kind of dress it down further. But, what you need to think of is just the shape of the dress and what makes this jacket work is that it has a very slight sheen to it, even though it’s casual, it still has a sheen, which compliments the sheen in the dress.

Sophisticated Little Black Dresses

Here we have Nora looking very grown up and very, very elegant in a very sophisticated look and we’re using lots of verys because this is our very expensive edition. We have our gorgeous fine jewelry earrings, which whenever you get a gift like that you want to show them off and you have the perfect dress and this absolutely magnificent black satin trench coat. So, it’s something that’s so chic and sophisticated and it’s a completely different vibe, the same dress than the very young kind of way of throwing the off handed trench coat over it.

You realize if you start thinking out of the box you get so many more options. Thanks for watching, and for more, visit us on the Web at About.com.

 

>> Video and Transcript courtesy of About.com. Please see here for version.

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