Most people keep their best dress for a wedding. Elizabeth Shankland wears hers to Aldi.
The 46-year-old from Manchester has gone viral for swapping leggings for designer gowns on the weekly food shop, drifting past the trolleys in Sister Jane and Missoni.
A video of one supermarket outing has passed 14,500 views and pulled in hundreds of comments.
The dare that started it
It began with a challenge. Lizzie, a part-time teacher who also works as a stylist and runs the dress rental business The Didsbury Wardrobe, had just picked up a pink Sister Jane dress at one of her pre-loved pop-ups.
A friend admired it, then asked the question every woman with a full wardrobe knows by heart.
“It’s gorgeous Lizzie… but when on earth are you going to wear it?”
Lizzie said she might just wear it to Aldi. The friend dared her. Two days later she did.
“So I put the dress on and went to Aldi, and that was it,” she told Creatorzine.
Wear the dress
The £40 Sister Jane dress was the gentle start.
Since then she has worn a floor-length vintage Missoni gown valued at around £1,000, though even she drew a line at where that one belonged.
“[It] felt very extreme in comparison,” she said.
“I think that’s partly why I chose to wear that one to Marks & Spencer, it just felt a little bit more ‘appropriate’ and slightly more classy than Aldi.”
Her point is that the special occasion never really arrives.
“Why are we saving our best clothes for a life that doesn’t actually happen that often? Why not wear them to the everyday places, the supermarket, the school run, grabbing a coffee?”
She calls it liberating. The years of women telling her they had nowhere to wear their favourite things stuck with her.
Everyone’s on board except her daughter
Online, the response has been a wall of yes.
One commenter told her to channel Carrie from Sex and the City.
Another wrote: “Gorgeous always lead never be a follower.”
A third said they dress “dopamine 50s kidcore everyday” and never save anything for best.
The shoppers around her are far less moved.
“Nobody really seems to bat an eyelid, which honestly makes me giggle every time,” she said.
The best part, she reckons, is the people now messaging to say they have started getting dressed up for the most boring moments of their week.
One person remains firmly unconvinced.
Her daughter Nylah finds the whole thing mortifying, which Lizzie admits only spurs her on.
“It probably makes me want to do it even more.”
Why It Matters
Lizzie is not a numbers-game influencer, but the clip works because the idea is the content.
“Wear the dress” is a format anyone can copy with what is already in their wardrobe, no production budget required.
That is exactly the kind of low-cost, high-feeling video that travels furthest right now, and it doubles as a soft advert for her rental business without ever looking like one.
It also lands inside a wider mood. Dopamine dressing and the backlash against occasion-wear have been building for a couple of years, with creators increasingly turning ordinary errands into something worth filming.
She has no plans to stop, and hopes other women take the same swing. Her advice is simple.
Don’t get in your head about it, have a laugh, maybe drag a friend along the first time.
And just wear the dress.
