Year after year, velvet is always on trend during the fall-winter season: soft, shiny, with deep jewel tones, it’s hard to resist it.

However velvet is not the easiest fabric to wear! Worn from head to toe, it can look very formal… or sometimes quite dated. Here are a couple outfit ideas to wear velvet without looking like a curtain!

Let’s consider for instance this Zéphyr skirt and crop top set, made from a luxurious burgundy crushed velvet. Wearing both pieces together would be a little too much for me. So to incorporate them into my everyday wardrobe, I prefer wearing them separately, and associating them with more casual fabrics, like flannel or denim.

For the first outfit, I’m wearing my Zéphyr skirt with a plaid flannel shirt tied at the waist. The flannel adds to the cosiness of the velvet, while giving the outfit a relaxed, borderline gunge feel, counterbalanced with the retro and very feminine silhouette.

In order to make a velvet Zéphyr skirt, you’ll need to select one with at least 40% stretch. If your velvet is not stretchy, you can use it to sew a Chardon or Azara skirt. If possible, avoid patterns which include darts, especially if you are a beginner: velvet is tricky to press, so it can be hard to make good looking darts in this fabric.

The Zéphyr skirt is perfect for a first velvet project, since you’ll only need to cut out three pieces: front skirt, back skirt, and waistband. For patterns such as Azara which contain many pieces, you’ll need to be particularly careful to place all the pattern pieces in the same direction on the fabric when cutting. Light is reflected differently on the velvet depending on its orientation, so if the nap is not going in the same direction everywhere you’ll end up with parts of your garment in different colors. That said it can be interesting to play with this effect on purpose, for instance to get a deeper-colored waistband!

For the second outfit, I drew inspiration from the 90’s, by associating my Zéphyr crop top with high-waisted Safran jeans and a leather jacket, with dark lipstick as a finishing touch. I’ve been told this outfit looks straight out of “Buffy the vampire slayer” and I’m really happy about that!

To keep your midriff warm and toasty, replace the crop top with a Plantain or Givre tee in stretch velvet. You’ll need a fabric with 40 to 50% stretch for Plantain, and 50% or more for Givre. Here again you can play with the nap direction, for instance to make a contrasting neck band.

What do you think of these outfits? Have you adopted velvet as part of your wardrobe this season?