How to wear your dresses as skirts and tops.

I'm excited to show you how to wear your dresses as skirts and tops today! I know most of us are savvy spenders and can always use a little stretching in our wardrobes. Wearing dresses in a new and fun way has helped me to see so many more possibilities in my closet and makes getting dressed in the morning a happy challenge when I ask myself "How can I wear this other than the obvious way?"

Wearing a dress as a skirt (or a top!) doesn't take any magical powers. It's probably a lot simpler than you are thinking. It just takes a little finagling and choosing the right pieces that work together. Here are my top three tips for making the most of your wardrobe in this way. 

{1} layer it up.  Depending on the style of the articles of clothing you want to marry, you can sometimes layer your pieces. For my outfit above, I wore the dress like normal and layered the blouse on top. Since my blouse is suuuper thin, I just folded the bottom  of the blouse up and covered that up with the tightly-cinched wide belt. 

You can also turn dresses into tops by layering. For the outfit below, I simply wore my mustard yellow skirt over my patterned dress. Since the dress is shorter than the skirt (and it's not bulky), the look is pretty darn seamless. 

{2} fold it down. Sometimes the top you want to wear doesn't work when layered over the top of your dress. For example, maybe you want to wear a spaghetti top tank over a halter top. In that case, I usually fold the top of the dress down and slip it under the dress. This works best if the top of your dress is somewhat thin fabric. 

For the outfit below, the top portion of my dress is hiding under the skirt portion. Since the skirt is loose and the top of the dress is not bulky, you can't see the extra fabric underneath. 

 {3} belt it around.  Most of the time when I use dresses as skirts and tops, I use a wide belt to cover up the weird stuff going on in the middle.  A wide and tight belt can also do wonder for actually holding up your skirt when you are using tip #2. I love buying cute and inexpensive belts at places like Forever21, TJ Maxx, and Marshall's.

For this last outfit, I used the fold-down method. Again, the top portion of my dress is hiding under the skirt portion. This skirt is full and lined anyway, so the extra fabric doesn't add much to the already poofy skirt.

Pretty simple, right? The keys are knowing which pieces will work (ie. bulky fabrics probably won't work) and creating the illusion with a wide belt. Have you tried this before? What are other ways that you make the most out of your wardrobe? 

Hope this helps! I'd love to know if you try any of these tips!