Tl;dr: Silver and Gold dresses are priced higher, and most varieties of black dresses available.
Holiday time, the time of shiny, festive dresses for holiday parties, galas, and more. I was curious to know how one of the top online retailers price their designer dresses by colors. This post is not sponsored by any company. I had access to net-a-porter prices from October 2013 thru Jan 2014 and this was used for this analysis and wanted to give a statistical software a test run.
Each dress is categorized into a dominant color by Net-A-Porter staff (white, pink, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, gray, brown, black, metallics, gold, silver, neutrals, and animal print). The data was broken down into samples by color - then the average for that group was calculated. The average is found by taking the sum of all the prices for that color and then divide by the number of dresses.
Note that silver and gold are not categorized as metallics, they are grouped into their own categories by NAP.
| Color | Range | Average Price |
| Silver (n=15) | 175-12990 | 3,520.07 |
| Gold (n=16) | 355-14570 | 3,201.25 |
| White (n=238) | 110-13000 | 2,648.01 |
| Neutrals (n=25) | 175-2600 | 2,635.12 |
| Metallic (n=5) | 795-5470 | 2,450.00 |
| Pink (n=146) | 180-2500 | 2,440.30 |
| Red (n=147) | 108-59600 | 2,184.79 |
| Black (n=596) | 95-17000 | 2,067.62 |
What makes these dresses priced so high? I picked out the most expensive dress of silver, gold, and black (original prices) to show you what each looks like… are they gorgeous or are they gorgeous? Notice the amount of detail - it shows a lot of labor and different materials went into making each dress. Beads have to be hand-sewn, and human labor is a lot more expensive than machine.
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| Oscar de la Renta // Beaded metallic silk-blend gown 12,990 |
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| Dolce & Gabbana // Embellished wool-blend mini dress 15,500 |
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| Valentino // Beaded cotton and silk-blend gown 17,000 |
Most expensive dresses of other colors: White Valentino // Beaded tulle and wool-blend crepe mini dress // 13000 Neutrals Valentino // Beaded tulle gown // 26,000 Metallic Roland Mouret // Perla Lurex and double-crepe gown // 5,470 Pink Valentino // Embellished tulle gown // 25,000 Red Dolce & Gabbana // Crystal-embellished tulle dress // 59,600
The dress colors with lower average prices include: yellow, green, blue, purple, gray, orange, brown, and animal print (2,001.31 to 1,106.07).
Here’s a preliminary chart of the distribution of colors found - there are more dresses made with classic colors!
| Assortment of Dresses |
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The results for this analysis comes from an independent study conducted by Dr. Katherine Y. Chuang, This work was not sponsored.