It was a work event. Not a party, not a private view — a dinner, hosted by a client, at a restaurant in Mayfair. Forty people, most of whom I knew professionally. The kind of evening where the dress code is unstated but understood, and where the understood version is conservative.
I'd planned to wear something else. I changed my mind about an hour before I left.
The reasoning at the time
The piece I ended up wearing was a black latex midi dress — long sleeves, high neck, no cutouts, nothing that read as costume. From across a room it looked like a very well-fitted dress in a material with an unusual finish. That was the reasoning. Not that it would go unnoticed, but that it would read as clothing rather than statement.
I'd worn it twice before, both times in contexts where it required no justification. This was different. The question I was asking myself while getting ready was whether the piece would work for me in that room or whether I'd spend the evening managing it — aware of it, explaining it, conscious of it in a way that would make the evening about the dress rather than anything else.
I decided the answer was that it would work. I was mostly right.
What actually happened
I arrived. A few people looked twice. One person, someone I'd worked with for three years, said the dress was beautiful and asked what it was made of. I told her. She said she'd assumed it was some kind of coated silk. We talked about it for about two minutes and then talked about other things for the rest of the evening.
That was the extent of it. The dinner was about the dinner. The dress was part of the evening in the way that any considered piece of clothing is part of an evening — noticed, registered, moved past.
What I noticed was the lighting. The restaurant had the kind of warm, low lighting that makes latex look its best — the surface caught it and held it in a way that wouldn't have happened under fluorescent office lighting or flat daylight. The piece looked better in that room than it had in either of the previous contexts I'd worn it in.
What I'd been wrong about
I'd assumed the conservative dress code meant the room would be hostile to anything outside it. It wasn't. The people in that room were adults with enough visual literacy to register an unusual material and move on. The anxiety I'd had while getting ready was about a version of the evening that didn't happen.
This is the thing about wearing latex somewhere it isn't expected: the anticipation is almost always worse than the reality. The piece either works or it doesn't, and if it fits correctly and reads as clothing rather than costume, it usually works.
The fit is the thing. A latex piece that's pulling at the seams or wrinkling across the hip requires management in a way that a well-fitted piece doesn't. I was comfortable in the dress in a physical sense, which meant I wasn't thinking about it, which meant I wasn't projecting awareness of it to everyone else in the room. That's most of what wearing latex in an unfamiliar context requires.
Whether I'd do it again
Yes. Not to every work dinner — context still matters, and there are rooms where the calculation would come out differently. But to that kind of evening, with that kind of lighting, in a piece that fits and reads as clothing: yes, without the hour of deliberation beforehand.
The deliberation was the unnecessary part. The dress was fine.
Mayfair Latex — Made in Britain, fully bespoke.