JINGLE BELL FROCK

It might be December but that doesn't mean your outfit has to compete with the Christmas tree. Olivia Petter is here to help you ace office party season dressing - minus the sequins

- Olivia Petter

If there's one piece of advice I can dispense this festive season, it's that you spare your sequins. I'm serious. Nothing is worse than showing up to a Christmas party and being blinded by the sight of seven silver dresses. It's an amount of sound and light that is frankly excessive. Yet come October the shops are already brimming with the stuff, signalling that this is an essential item in the festive wardrobe. I’m here to tell you that it is not – and fashion’s insiders and “it girls” agree with me. “Don’t be tempted to compete with the Christmas tree,” says fashion designer Amanda Wakeley. “There is only one winner there and it won’t be you.”

Christmas party dressing has been “a thing” for as long as I can remember. At least on the high street, anyway – no designer in their right mind would ever send anything resembling tinsel down the runway. And yet, every festive season this lurid, mawkish way of dressing suddenly becomes ubiquitous. There are those cartoonish jumpers with slogans that make me wince. “Sleigh the patriarchy,” anyone? Then there are the ludicrously bright greens and reds, which, when worn together, are deeply unflattering. And then, as mentioned, there are all those damn sequins. Not all of it is terrible – I’m a firm fan of crimson hues and all things velvet. But most of it absolutely is. And nobody who has any sartorial sense will be caught dead in any of it.