A New Dress A Day
My aunt sent me the link to this inspirational blog, New Dress A Day. The concept, both creative and frugal, is this:
The thing that makes this girl happiest is scouring flea markets, vintage stores and garage sales for the perfect pieces to add to my wardrobe. I love finding vintage goodies that may not fit me perfectly or translate well with the current state of fashion and then make them work on me. (thank you Tim Gunn – “make it work” has become my mantra) I get out my trusty sewing machine to change hems, cut sleeves and tweak to transform a lowbudge piece that had its’ moment back in 1976 and give it another shot today, decades later. I have to say that whenever I wear my handmade pieces, I always get complimented and the best part is that I get to tell everyone that I bought it for $1 and just shortened it, dyed it or cinched it to make it chic and current.
So, that’s where my ode to no traditional shopping begins. This year, I will be foregoing trips to Bloomies and Nordstrom for brand new gear. Goodbye to H&M purchases and accessory grabbing at Forever 21. And seeing the “must have” French Connection dress in People’s Style Watch will just have to suffice as a cut out on my inspiration board.
Instead, the only shopping that I’ll be able to do is that of pieces that have been used and worn already. So long to mall trips and hello to sifting through piles of vintage pieces at flea markets and at neighborhood garage sales. Each day for the entire year, I’m going to introduce a new piece into my existing wardrobe that I’ve found from these places. On top of this, I’m giving myself a budget of $1 a day.
(excerpted from the blog’s “about” page)
I love these dress makeovers! 
Sadly, while I can come up with lots of cool ideas for making over garments, I’m not so fab with the follow-through. That is, I never actually get around to doing anything. Hence, the racks of garments hanging in my studio. It always seems there is ironing or dishes, blogging or painting, and before you know it, there’ll be homework. Someday.
In the meantime, hopefully this will be inspirational for you!
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Fashion Magazines Make Great Gifts
Just in case you are not finished with your seasonal gift shopping: Shop It To Me holiday friends & family perk — $5 magazine subscriptions! The price of a latte. Choose from Cosmopolitan, Esquire, The Oprah Magazine, Marie Claire, Harper’s Bazaar, Food & Wine and more.
Shop It To Me is a free service that will send you email notifications when your favorite brands go on sale at your favorite online retailers! Subscribe at this link: Shop It To Me.
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Establishing Credibility Visually
Lately I’ve been reading, researching, and meditating on alot of detail concerning appearance and perception. I admit it, alot of these thoughts initiate from comments to me; comments that show that they are unable to see my interior reality. (Perhaps this feeling that nobody gets me is indicative of a mid-life crisis? lol)
At any rate, while there is alot of information here on the blog already, there is still TONS I haven’t figured out. But I’m feeling ambitious, so I’m delving into researching the connection between certain visual elements and specific perceptions. Leave a comment if you have a clue. And I thought I’d begin with something relevant to career women, because I love them too!
Credibility: attitude toward a source of communication held at a particular time by a message receiver. It consists primarily of expertise, trustworthiness, and good will. (Dynamics of Persuasion)
Another source put it slightly differently: Expertise, Trustworthiness, Similarity, and Physical Attractiveness (I suppose the author of a textbook may find physical attractiveness to be too loaded a topic to address it).
Bernie Burson, Image Consultant, in her sidebar on Psychological Dressing, says:
When you receive your personal color palette, you learn that wearing your eye-related color makes you appear sincere and honest and wearing skin tones makes you seem friendly and approachable.
So, if credibility is a three-legged stool consisting of expertise, trustworthiness, and good will; wearing my recommended simple color palette (based on your own coloring) will get you two legs (and physical attractiveness as a bonus). Not enough. Establishing expertise, I suspect, is done through visual cues specific to the industry. Even if the industry is raising children.
What are the visual cues to expertise in your field?
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Do You Need Help Editing Your Wardrobe?
When cleaning out your closet, would you do better with the help of an objective second opinion? Your Myers Briggs code could provide a clue.
If:
- you are by nature or necessity frugal AND
- maybe you are interested more in things other than visual aesthetics AND
- you really don’t want your closet to resemble a thrift store AND
- the last letter of your Myers Briggs code (I took a free online version, but I can’t remember where) is P
The reason this makes sense: Judging or Perceiving (the fourth trait called out in this personality profiling system) describes one’s preferred “structure” of dealing with the outside world. In dealing with the outside world, do you prefer to get things decided (J) or do you prefer to stay open to new information and options (P)?
In other words, the perceiving person likes options and likes to keep their options open. (Probably this describes everyone to a degree. In our household, it sometimes looks like not getting rid of something that is worn out because it’s still good enough to wear for painting or gardening. And then forgetting and wearing it to church!)
In my wardrobe, problems are nearly always related to not having something I should have, rather than having too much or holding on to stuff I need to let go. I’m a J. How about you, is your challenge not having what you need or having what you don’t need? And could an image consultant or trusted friend help?
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To Dye For
In the “lab” this week, I’m dying. In the sense of permanently changing the color of my clothes.
1) I love the fit of these Levis, but I just don’t wear a medium tone except in the summer. They needed to be dark.
Using one bottle of “denim blue”, I simply followed the directions on the box for dying in the washing machine. The color is a bit bright; if there is a “next time”, I will try a different shade.
Now the creative juices are flowing in all sorts of colors! I think I’ll tea-stain some of my white shirts, try kool-aid on a boring blue cashmere sweater …
Have you ever dyed anything?
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Fashion Lab: Color Value Placement
Next week I’m going to be talking about how to develop a personal color palette. In the meantime, I’ve been thinking about what I consider the Great Northwest casual uniform: black top, army green pants, slip-on shoes. Or some variant thereof. And how, while I’m not so crazy about the ubiquitous black top, it is a good formula for some. Especially those who are curvier on top.
Which leads me to the general principle of wearing lighter colors where you are smaller and darker colors where you are larger. Let’s play with that using Gap cords, currently $15 off.
(I threw that last set in just for fun, but I’d love to know if you have any thoughts on neutral vs bright also.)
Speaking of cords (or perhaps I should say “speaking of body image“), I normally avoid them simply because they always made me feel fat, but when Spokane Discount had a deal where any pair of brown pants in size 6, 8, or 10 was so cheap it was almost free, I bought a pair of dark brown, trouser style, corduroy Dockers. For $3.
Application principle: aside from monochromatic outfits, I am focusing on darker bottoms with lighter tops. How do you employ color value placement?
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Jeans: Rigid or Stretch?
Update on my jean hunt: while I’m still hunting for the perfect pair, I picked up a simple pair of j crew button-fly, straight-leg, five-pocket, you know, just-plain-jeans. For $1 at the thrift store. Then I went back to the thrift store I mentioned previously and found that the jeans I had liked on me, but declined to pay $6.98 for, were now 75% off of the $6.98. These are gap long and lean, with flap pockets and the crease thing down the front. Not everyday jeans for me, because I don’t wear heels every day.
But back to the question at hand: rigid or stretch jeans?
Conventional wisdom says stretch. And I know all the reasons: you get a personally fit pair of pants, you can wear a smaller size without worrying about shrinkage (my husband wonders how many women prefer stretch for the primary reason that they can wear a smaller size), and so on, yada yada, ad nauseam.
But. Consider the wisdom of Clinton and Stacy
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July is Jeans Month
July is jeans month if, like me, you want to get the most for your budget by shopping thrift. After all, shoppers are working on their summer wardrobes and won’t start really thinking about jeans until August. (Hey, moms, is this a good time for general back-to-school thrifting too?) Take the time now to inventory your wardrobe of jeans and begin looking for what you need. If you don’t find it thrift, you can take advantage of the fall sales around the corner.
So, how many pairs of jeans do you need? Some of my most glamorous friends have only one, and maybe a back-up pair for laundry day. On the other hand, if your children are still in the spit-up stage, you may need a drawer full (like my friend from the post How Many Jeans Does One Mom Need).
My needs:
- straight-leg jeans for with flats (everyday jeans)
- trouser jeans for with heels (I got both of these first two thrift this week for a total of $13.25)
- a pair to tuck into knee boots (I don’t always need these, but I did this past winter!)
- a back-up pair
In my idiom, all jeans are dark.
Statistically, I’ve heard, most women own 8 - 13 pairs of jeans (and the numbers of pairs owned decreases as the one’s size increases). True confessions: How many jeans do you have? How many do you need?
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How to Shop for a Dress
Spring has sprung and that means dress season. There’s just something about a sunshiny day that brings out the girly in many of us, and for me, it also makes me a little more daring. All that to say, I am shopping for dresses.
Which, if online or even department store shopping were my usual practice, would seem easy; after all, currently LOTS of great dress styles are available: baby-dolls, sheaths, sundresses, shirtdresses. For me, though, it’s not so simple. Unable to bring myself to part with any real money most of the time, I generally shop thrift. Thrifting can be overwhelming, so I’ve identified some practices that make it easier.
How to quickly scan for dresses to try:
- Color is the easiest thing to scan for, so narrow down the colors you are looking for. This is how I was able to shop the entire Old Navy store while my hero was waiting in traffic to get out of the parking lot. And know that a dress is the easiest thing to wear in a flattering color that doesn’t work with anything else in your wardrobe. No mixing and matching necessary!
- Next, look at silhouette. If it makes you feel fat just by looking at it hanging on the rack, it’s probably not for you. Of course, if you are feeling adventurous, by all means use the opportunity to try on a new shape.
- Patterns should harmonize with the scale of your facial features AND appeal to your personal sense of style.
- With the current practice of layering dresses over leggings or other pieces, length may not be as big an issue, but it is something that’s easy to identify before getting to the fitting room.
- Finally, if it feels icky to the touch, don’t bother trying it on. This has to do with learning to recognize the feel of the fabrics you like to wear. Knowing I will never wear a polyester blouse, no matter how beautiful the color or pattern, has saved me literally hours in fitting rooms.
Of course, just because I shop thrift, doesn’t mean these techniques won’t help in traditional stores.
Look what I got yesterday for $15 (plus a pair of swim shorts and a pair of linen shorts thrifted last week for $10). Apologies again for the fuzzy picture.
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Friday Fashion Lab: Black vs White
Two summers ago, after Creationfest, I proved scientifically that a black shirt is up to 11 degrees hotter in the sun than a white shirt. Read on …
Why Superchick
I am so sorry I couldn’t get more pictures of well-dressed music festival goers. As the event wore on, the outfits seemed to get worse. Since when is ordinary beige bra + spaghetti strap top acceptable to wear in public?
Almost without exception, they violated my sense of propriety on one or more of three points:
- Visible lingerie straps.
- Pants with no (arms and no) legs.
- Dark colors.
Yes, one of these offenses is not like the others.
However, when dressing to be outdoors all day in 100 degree temperatures, it would be useful to know exactly how much difference the heat absorbancy properties of the color black makes. So I tested it for you.
First I bought two identical thermometers. I then put them side by side in the shade of my front yard to make sure they read the same. They did (86). But when I moved them into my south-facing side yard (”the hot-spot of the universe”), they varied a little. One went up to 106.5, the other to 104.2.
Using shirts which I bought at around the same time, Gap Short-sleeved favorite T - white and black, I set the white one over the thermometer which read higher and the black one over the other and went away for 15 or 20 minutes.
The results: the temperature of the thermometer covered by the white tee actually dropped a degree, to 105.4. The black? That thermometer read 109.2!
Today I repeated the experiment. My hero suggested that I try angling the thermometers toward the sun to get them to read more similarly, an idea which worked. Today, at around noon, when the temperature started out at 96, the results were even more dramatic: 103.8 vs 114.3! (BTW, msn weather says it’s 91 here today.)
How about you? I am totally convinced! And just in time, too, it’s great white hunting out there right now.
Behind me is the bathroom.
