OOTD: Looking Glam on the Cheap (£36 to be Exact)

EDITED TO ADD: Thanks Yi Mei for all the awesome outfit advice! (She's the one who helped me to coordinate my outfit, YAY!)

I don't usually like doing OOTDs (Outfit Of The Day), because I have a pretty much non-existent fashion sense. I mean, I'm still at the top-and-a-jeans stage, so obviously I haven't quite graduated from college casual. But over the weekend, I was invited to my friend's postgrad graduation, and the dress code was formal. I don't know about you, but when my own university had our graduation boat party for us postgraduates, we went as casual as possible, despite the formal dress code listing (some of my friends showed up in jeans, woohoo!). So I hoped that for my friend's event, I could just make do with whatever I had, since I'm kind of on a student's budget now (aka not too far from being flat out broke).

Turns out I had no such luck. Thanks to the awesome stalking power of facebook, I was able to look at photos of people at graduation dinners from previous years and other programmes. Holy moley, some of them were wearing floor-length gowns!

And thus began my (first-ever) unwilling shopping trip. I found out just a few days before the event, so trust me when I say it was all one mad scramble - and on a shoestring budget too! I trawled through the sales racks of high street stores, looking for a knee-length gown-like thing that would carry me through the evening (I didn't want a floor-length gown, as they would probably have been more expensive, and I just KNEW I'd trip up in them). And then I had to shop for accessories. And shoes. It was a stressful couple of days. I think it was the first time I've ever been stressed out by shopping!

So how did I do? Here's what I managed to cobble together, for all of £36:



Such beautiful, lush greenery in the background. Why doesn't MY university have such opulent gardens, darnit! :P

And here's a closer shot of my outfit with my friend:



Obviously it's not the most put-together ensemble you could choose, but I think for only £36, I did a pretty good job, if I do say so myself! The dress was from Mango, and it was 50% off (woohoo!) and it was £25 (it could have been £24.99 or some weird number like that, but my brain remembers it as £25). The clutch was from Claire's, and it was 75% off (double woohoo!) and it was £4. And the necklace was also from Claire's, and unfortunately I paid full price for this (blah), but it was still decent at £7. So that made up £36 altogether!

Okay, I kind of cheated. The £36 didn't include any shoes, because I used the ones I currently had. Ideally I would have liked open-toed strappy heels, or something not close-toed, but there wasn't anything I liked that had a low enough heel (I'm a klutz!) and that was cheap enough, LOL. So I made do. The shoes themselves were the Dexter Auburn Patent Pump from Payless, which I bought a summer ago because it was all the rage among the fashion bloggers then. That, and the fact that they had a buy-1-get-the-2nd-pair-for-50%-off discount when I was in the store. LOL. But a quick google shows that they're still sold online.

Here's a screenshot of the shoes from the Payless website, HERE:



Anyway, here's a shot of my awesome cheap £7 necklace on:



This one is a bit more blingly than I usually wear, but I thought it was perfect since my entire outfit was all black, and I needed something to dress it up. So I thought a some nice bling was perfect. The necklace itself actually consists of four strands, with something different on every strand.

Here's a closer shot of the necklace detailing. It's a bit messy, but I guess with an all-black ensemble it worked:



And here's a photo of the £4 clutch. As you can see it's really cheap, and it kinda looks a little cheap, but I figured from far, and in photos, no one would be able to tell the difference :P



Anyway, that's my Glam-on-a-Budget (and when I say budget, boy, I mean it!) OOTD. I hope you guys have liked it. It's a little different from what I normally do, for sure, but I hope it wasn't too bad! We'll go back to makeup and nail polish in the next post, I promise!