Celebrations in a green lace dress

Nothing like dressing up for a semi-formal event in February, right?

Really though, one of my favorite nights of every year is my company’s annual awards banquet and ceremony: The Jones-Beck Awards, or “the Becks” for short.

At the beginning of every year, the entire editorial department of the Tribune gets together to celebrate our accomplishments from the year before. I’m really lucky to have amazing coworkers that are not only great to work with, but also great to hang out with outside of work.

And of course, I always love a good excuse to get dressed up.

(Pst, affiliate links in here, guys.)

Entrepreneurs out there, if you’re listening, there’s an entire market for work-appropriate (knee-length with sleeves) cocktail dresses at a price point of less than $100. Seriously. Almost everything fun I found was either too tight, too short, too low-cut or too expensive. On the other hand, everything I found that was conservative enough to be worn in a work environment was too boring or frumpy.

The dress I ended up wearing to the Becks was actually my back-up dress. Ironically enough, I ended up using the same Rent-the-Runway-but-actually-not-really thing I did for last year’s Becks.

I found a beautiful sleeved, knee-length sequined dress available as a rental through Rent the Runway for $55. Then, I found the same dress on sale at ModCloth for $45. This was actually better than last year’s experience, where I had the option to rent from RTR for $70 or buy from Nordstrom Rack for $99.

Seriously, NEVER stop Google-searching before you click that checkout button.

Because I’m one of those people that will totally pile an extra $30-whatever worth of junk into my online cart before I’ll pay the $4-whatever for shipping, I decided to grab a back-up dress, just in case.

I ended up picking out this green lace dress, because it met all my requirements: sleeves, knee-length, available in my size and under $100. (Even better: on sale for $20!)

While I really liked the sequined dress, I was actually surprised at how much I loved the back-up dress. I decided to wear the back-up, and save the sequined piece for New Year’s Eve.

So, now I don’t have to shop for a NYE dress after all that holiday spending in December. Talk about thinking ahead of time. 

I went simple with the shoes and accessories so I could keep the focus on the lacy texture of the dress. The dress lining itself is blue, and the lace overlay is more of a green. I really liked both put together. I felt kind of like a (work-appropriate) mermaid.

Shop the outfit (affiliate links):

And, of course, what’s the point of wearing a pretty dress if you’re not going to have some fun in it? I took more drinks than photos at the Becks this year, so these are just about all the receipts I have proving that the night actually happened.

We had the ceremony at River Roast, before heading to both Rossi’s and the Billy Goat for the afterparties.

And, a HUGE congrats to my phenomenally talented boyfriend Armando, who — for the second year in a row — was awarded for his photography! He took home two separate awards this year, for his work on the overnight shift, and for his work to document the Cubs’ season and World Series win.

Kinda bummed this is the only photo we took together, for some reason.

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