La Redoute Showroom, Prelude & Aftermath

On Wednesday, I took the Mermaid along to the bi-annual La Redoute Showroom to which I thankfully still had got an invite despite the fact that the nice marketing lady with whom I was on first-name terms has recently left the company. The PR event showcasing the current designer collection by Vanessa Bruno and keypieces of the new catalogue in addition to the coveted sample sale of the SS collection took place from 4-7 p.m. and when we arrived, there was not that much left on the racks. The clothes were either not to my taste or in my size, but I did buy something (surprise!). A pouchy blue leather bag for €20, for example:
It's a pity the original price tag wasn't on - it's even more gratifying to know how much you would have had to fork out originally...provided you would have bought it in the first place and not just been tempted by the bargain. I did research online, though, and found out that the original price was € 89.90. 

My other bargain was a long braided red (it is a much nicer red in real life, but I had to take the photos in front of the mirror without flash) belt for €5 (marked down from € 26.90). Believe it or not, I had been looking for a slim red belt anyway:
After we had been asked if we were bloggers (erm, yes, some of us, but this wasn't the reason we were invited, stuffed our faces with the beautifully presented fingerfood and perused the collection, we were given a €30 "journalists voucher". Unfortunately the small print revealed it not to be of the sort where you can just enter a code at some stage of the chekout process, but you have to send the hard copy to La Redoute by snail-mail after your purchase in order to get it credited to your account. Ah, well...gift-horse and all that.
Afterwards, the Mermaid, who had not bought anything, was itching to get rid of some money and - in the mistaken assumption that it was Thursday - wanted to go to Peek & Cloppenburg on Mariahilfer St. to buy a belt she had her eyes on. Once we arrived there, it was closed (well, it was Wednesday after all) and she was suffering from major shopaholic anticlimax syndrome. Thankfully, Promod turned out to be open until 8 and we both bought a cool lightweight cotton tunic, marked down from € 27 to a mere 7:
In case you were having any doubts regarding my "trendiness", among the few keypieces from the AW collection that were displayed was a blue dress. It comes in two colours and I had received the black one just the day before. I wore it yesterday and it is both comfortable and stylish: