Old Navy Spring Dresses 2012

I usually shop at Old Navy. No matter who throws up and calls it fashion, they still carry the plain t-shirts and tanks. When I saw an opportunity through Crowdtap to try a dress, I was excited after browsing online. There were some that were right up my alley – plain and simple. Then I went to my local store. The dresses there hit every branch of the fugly tree when they were made. Not my style at all. The dresses that would have been OK, were n0t my color or cut.

So I waited. I thought maybe they’d get more. They didn’t. I waited some more. We were taking a day trip. Maybe we’d see another store in our travels with different merchandise, and I could avoid the Old Navy store in the mall in our area. Nope. We didn’t see an Old Navy store during our day trip (not that we looked that hard). I looked to see if I could maybe shop online. There were several dresses I liked online. They were also marked online only. I hate when stores do that.

The store at the Capital City Mall had a much better selection than the store just three miles from my house. There were several dresses that looked great on the rack. Then I went into the fitting room.

I wasn’t impressed. You can see by my pictures. I was most excited by the gray dress, but it just made me look fat(ter), and that’s not the look I wanted. Especially not when I’ve lost 11 pounds, and I’m still losing. I’m down about two pants sizes, so that was highly discouraging. None of the other dresses really fit that much better. The cotton dresses were really thin jersey fabric that was clingy and bunchy. It’s quite a feat to make a dress that’s saggy on my linebacker shoulders (see: red wrap dress). The quality of Old Navy’s clothes has quite frankly gone to crap. The prices are the same or higher, and the fabrics are much thinner and cheaply made. Target has better or clothes of equal quality these days.

Gray "fat" dress

Red warp dress - bunchy in the shoulders.

I finally decided on this dress, but in the black. I don’t have a picture because the smell in the store was so bad I had to leave before my headache got worse (my headache was also contributing to my “get me out of here look”). The red fit well enough, so I just grabbed a black in the same size to use as a cover up at the pool over my swim suit or around the house this summer. I look so thrilled in the red because I love red, but was so disappointed how this dressed looked on my body.

I got this in black.

*Yes, I got a free dress from Crowdtap and Old Navy, but as always, my opinions are my own.