The short answer on Hobbs Wren Dress: pick one anchor piece, keep the palette to two colours, and let the shoes decide how formal the whole thing reads. Repeat one element, a metal, a texture or a colour, and an outfit looks deliberate. One piece should lead and the rest should stay quiet; two competing pieces read as an accident. Lining is what stops a cheap fabric reading as cheap. The groups below run from the decision that matters most to the ones you make afterwards.

What decides this is shoulder fit, length and how the fabric moves. Everything else is preference. Two from the first group show the range: J.McLaughlin's Cerina Dress in Garden Isle at $150, and Spanx's SPANX AirEssentials® Collared Tie-Waist Midi Dress at $148. The first is the considered buy; the second is the one to start with. Check where the waist seam sits on the model against your own proportions. A dress that fits the shoulders can be taken in anywhere else. One that does not, cannot. A higher price mostly buys materials and finishing, and occasionally it buys nothing at all.

Let the dress be the loudest thing you own that day. A belt turns a shapeless dress into a deliberate one. From the second group, J.McLaughlin's Sophia Dress in Bamboo Lane ($140) is the one that earns its place, because it works in more than one context without being restyled. The third group is smaller and deliberately narrower, dresses, for the decisions you make after the main one. None of this needs the whole group. One piece from each is usually enough.

There are 20 dresses here from 13 brands, $99 to $398, all in stock when this was written. We would not buy all of them, and neither should you. Manymoons's In The Mood For Love Dress - Monochrome Magic at $99 is the low-risk way in, and Cinq À Sept's Layered Gemstone Zelina Dress at $398 only makes sense if this is a category you already use constantly. On hobbs wren dress specifically: the difference between the top and the bottom of this list is real but smaller than the price gap suggests. Nothing here is included because it is famous, and price is not used as a proxy for quality anywhere on this page. If you take one thing away: pay for the thing that touches your body and economise on the thing that sits on top of it.