Animal Monday

Hello everybody! I hope that you had a great weekend and that you have transitionned seamlessly to DST (as for me, with a toddler around there is no risk to wake up too late).

I don't have any pic of the outfits that I wore over the weekend (it was a low-key weekend and basically I wore jeans and a casual top non stop). However, tonight is going to be an exciting night, for a Monday. We have a parents meeting at school (where we will be introduced to the painful process of applying to kindergarten in NYC) and because we had to call a babysitter anyway we decided that we would "maximize" the night and go out for dinner after the meeting. We booked a very upscale restaurant in the neighborhood and I am very excited (the last time that we had a romantic dinner was during the holidays. Sigh!)

The challange is to come up with an outfit that is appropriate both for the school meeting and the restaurant. I wanted to break out my moonbeam sequined jacket to the restaurant but it is definitively too blingy for a school meeting.
As you know I am not much of a dress person. Not that I don't like dresses but they are a little bit impractical for my lifestyle, so I don't have many, especially fall/winter dresses. But I have one dress that I truly adore and I never have the occasion to wear (in fact I think that you have never seen it). It's a Tory Burch leopard-print silk dress that I had bought a few weeks post-partum at a sample sale. Strangely this dress fitted perfectly my new "mom" body and made me feel like no baby had ever grown in my belly (not that that I wanted to forget, you know what I mean).
Because my body has changed in the last few years and I haven't worn this dress in a long time, when I took it out this morning I feared that it wouldn't fit any more (there is nothing worst than finding out that a piece that you love and had planned to wear doesn't fit any longer, especially if you haven't worn it as much as it deserved).
But it still fits perfectly, yay! It has a little vintag-y feeling:

I love the Tory signature faux buttons under the seam at the empire waist:

Because it is a little bit over the top, I am going to wear it with a Theory blazer at school to break the total animal-print look and then alone at the restaurant:

It is easy to accessorize with gold and bold jewelry. The chain necklace is actually a very cheap one that I had bought from a street vendor (it had a cheap-looking leather string interwined with the links but I managed to get rid of it). The result is not bad for a $5 necklace:

The shoes are made for this dress. They are Prada (iconic Prada, actually, I remember the buzz when these came out and the plethora of knockoffs that they generated. I always wanted to own a pair and I just love that you can find stuff like that on Ebay).
Well, apparently I managed to create a "zero Jcrew" outfit, which is very rare for me these days. As much as I love the Crew sometimes I feel like I am the living incarnation of a page in the catalog and it makes me feel good to see that I have other stuff that I can wear in my closet.
I hope that my husband likes it and won't want me to change. My daughter who was watching me during my "try-on session said "Mom, you can't wear THAT". But it wasn't a fashion statement because she added "It's too cold outside". So cute.

Do you have an animal print dress? Would you wear it as school?

Have a nice start of the week!