Three Great Reasons to Wear the V Neckline
Three fabulous reasons to wear a v-neck that don’t apply to me and one adaptation that does:
- the neckline echoes your jawline
- the diagonal lines visually break up a larger space
- the geometric shape formed by the neckline conveys something about your personality: activity level, power and purpose, conventional thinking, or … ?
- when combined with a Superman point collar (for some reason, wide point collars that stand out horizontally always say “flying” to me), the v-neck becomes something else altogether: a square? the bottom of a star? This adaptation works for me.
Two bad reasons to wear the V neckline:
- That’s all you can find in the stores. (Thankfully, we are now beyond that.)
- Everyone else is wearing them.
Why do you love v-necks?
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What’s Your Metal Strategy?
(Congratulations if you’re invested in gold, but that’s not what this post is about!)
If you’ve been reading any length of time, you know that I most certainly do not consider myself an accessory person. It’s complicated. I don’t enjoy thinking about accessories, I get overwhelmed looking at them, and don’t honestly think they are all that necessary. They kinda make me cranky. And they do little to cover my nakedness.
On the plus side, I have been able to clear away at least some of the mess in my mind, that mess relating to those extras that so many of you enjoy. This improvement should make accessorizing at least slightly less painful. I’m adding the following to the rules of my personal idiom:
- all metal hardware will be silver
- wear earrings or necklace, not both
- a necklace must be bold
Clearly I’m not there yet. But, since I adopted these guidelines I have had the energy to: clean out my jewelry drawer, biff through my belts, buy a new pair of gloves and a belt, and get dressed every day. Get dressed completely, as in, all the way to the right shoes, belt, and earrings; not just throw on a pair of jeans, a t-shirt (just to be clear, in my idiom this time of year that is a casual cashmere sweater), and comfortable shoes. While under the weather.
No doubt in time I will add to my “guidelines”, ever with the intent of simplifying my life. But what’s kept me from this simplicity before? Good question! For one, my favorite metal has always been yellow gold; my wedding and anniversary rings are gold, as is my watch (albeit with brown leather band). But now I’m not going to let that bother me. They are part of me and my earrings and belt buckles are accessories. For another, I find the hardware options on shoes and purses especially to be limited. Usually I’m just happy to find something that works that I can afford. But I expect silver to be easier to come by.
Do you wear a mix of metals or only one? Do you have any helpful suggestions?
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What to Wear to a Casual Christmas Party
Well, I’ll tell you right off the top what not to wear: American traditional holiday knitwear. 24 comments and the most commonly repeated word was “hideous”. Tiffany suggests the following reasons people wear them:
- love of that cutesy, “country” Americana,
- love of crafts and decoration (I’ve run out of things to make and decorate for the holiday, so I’ll decorate myself!), and
- “thriftiness”/pack rat tendencies (it only gets worn once a year, so it’s too nice to toss).
Do you see yourself in any of those?
I’ll be honest; if I were ever tempted to wear that kind of thing, it would be because that’s what my host(ess) was wearing and I wasn’t sure how to translate “casual” + “festive” into my own idiom. But I’m thinking, this year, that my new dark brown trouser-style cords will come in handy.
What’s your Christmas casual formula?
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Boots for Each Energy Type
While I’m cooking on the innovative approach Dressing Your Truth represents, perhaps a pictorial example or two are in order. To learn your ”energy type”, read the book It’s Just My Nature!
A flat boot selection for each energy type:
1. light, upward movement
2. fluid, flowing movement
3. active, reactive movement
4. constant, still movement
BTW, see boot #1? Those are my newest footwear! They are Puma’s and my hero bought them for me (for $45) from an online liquidator. Light colored footwear is generally a no-no for me, as is a mid-calf height boot, but for whatever reason, and I’m sure it’s more complicated than energy movement, they work for me.
Any insights?
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The Connection Between TV and Debt
Republished from Mercola.com.
Dr. Schor from Harvard University wrote the book The Overspent American: Why We Want What We Don’t Need
which provides some marvelous insights on television watching. She conducted a large-scale study of American spending and saving habits and correlated the results with other lifestyle factors.
She concluded that for every hour of television a person watches per week, the average American spends $200. Sitting in front of the television five extra hours a week (two sitcoms a night) raises your yearly spending by about $1000.
Indebtedness as an outgrowth of TV watching arises not so much from viewers repeated exposure to advertising, but from their attempts to emulate the lavish lifestyles enjoyed by fictional characters in soap operas and prime-time television dramas. The more television people watch the more they tend to believe that ordinary citizens have servants, limousines, and huge houses.
TV will show 24 year old waitresses with expansive lofts and exotic sports cars, not ratty one-room apartments and battered Geo Metros. In addition, folks who watch a lot of TV are more willing to go into debt in pursuit of what they believe is an accurate depiction of normal life. Consumers rack up heavy credit-card debt chasing the televised fantasy or in academic jargon “engage in competitive consumption for the purpose of image management.”
Contrary to popular conceptions, Dr. Schor found a positive correlation with higher education and indebtedness. The further people have climbed up the educations ladder, the less likely the are to save money.
The heaviest shoppers are women with graduate degrees, which may be attributed to their heightened awareness of the trappings of social status.
Those most likely to live within their means and save money are the millionaires next door, folks with less formal education who have worked hard building their own businesses. Not surprisingly, the more successful people are with their own businesses the less time they have for watching TV.
Kids are by far the most voracious viewers, A report in a recent JAMA claims that children in the US watch 15,000 to 18,000 hours of television between he ages of 2 and 17 as compared to 12,000 hours of school.
Many medical studies have correlated excessive TV viewing with childhood obesity and adult depression. Certain crime statistics also correlate well with the market penetration of television, larceny and burglary both increased as a corresponding rate following TV’s rise in popularity in the 1950s.
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It’s Just My Nature!
Is it possible that an Artist-Creator intentionally included hints of our personality on our faces? That is the kindest, gentlest, and most theologically correct way for me to introduce the idea that Carol Tuttle (proponent of ”The Law of Attraction” and other extra-biblical spiritual teachings) may have produced a helpful wardrobing tool in her system Energy Profiling.
Her premise is not unlike DISC, in that she divides everyone into four groups. Based on the “movement” of a person’s energy, her Types are noted by:
- light, upward movement
- fluid, flowing movement
- active, reactive movement
- constant, still movement
(I’ll leave it to you to decide whether or not those correspond roughly to disc designations or not.) The part that’s hard for me to buy is this: under the resulting Dressing Your Truth system, literally everything is suggested by one’s primary energy movement. Fabrics, prints, colors, career choices, all depend on the which of the four Types of energy expression predominates in you.
A paranthetical word about four division systems: when Carole Jackson came out with Color Me Beautiful, it worked for enough people to become a phenomenon. But it didn’t really work for me, or many others, until the twelve division system was introduced, adding chroma (color saturation) to temperature and value. With Carol Tuttle’s Energy Profiling system, I look forward to seeing further refinements. Will she describe how to incorporate a second-strongest “energy movement”? Can the four groups be somehow subdivided to be more specific?
The creepiest thing about this system is the assertion that one’s “energy type” is visible in one’s facial features. (What if my face doesn’t look like what I know I’m like on the inside? See this post’s opening question.) For the purpose of this review, the Dressing Your Truth professionals invited me to send in a photograph. Lo and behold! They agreed with my assessment of myself as a Type 1.
Applying the principles:
- over and over, the point is made: it’s okay to be yourself. How much of my wardrobe trauma could be done away with if the only voice I listened to in my head was my own?
- most of the specific recommendations for my “energy type” I could have worked out “longhand”, applying the principles taught in The Triumph of Individual Style : A Guide to Dressing Your Body, Your Beauty, Your Self
. But it’s nice to have it in “big picture”.
- the color system just doesn’t work universally the way it’s layed out. However, for the person who’s truly had it wrong, it may present an improvement.
- the big, BIG deal: HAIR CUT AND STYLE! I truly have not found anything better at suggesting hair-style, hair-style which has such a profound impact on one’s appearance.
Now, go back to the list of descriptive words for the four types. Most of the “types” suggest hair-style in the two-word description. Does one of those appeal to you? Personally, I am going to specifically instruct my stylist to make sure my hair never looks neat and tidy, ahem, that is, constant and still. And I’m planning on going a little shorter. Or upward and light. 
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Personal Style Profiling Revisited
As soon as I posted the illustration of my first draft of thoughts combining DISC profiling with style personalities, I knew there’d be a revision soon. Why didn’t it work for so-and-so? Entertaining the thought that some of those people were not authentically expressing their natural personality resolved some of the inconsistencies. But not all.
But - yikes! What if it’s me that’s not authentically expressing my natural personality?
Sniffing out the clues: a recent craving for pattern, a feeling of being restricted from expressing my personality more exuberantly until my “nest” is completely empty. Smells fishy!
(In the meantime, I’ve been investigating the Dressing Your Truth system. More on that to come.)
This diagram is roughly the same as the previous, but with the center axis flipped and with less definition of style types. Anybody feel it fits them better?
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