Speaking of hard work, the more I understand how to design a beautiful look, the less I seem to be able to achieve it. Okay no longer is. This post from the blog’s infancy – just after Christmas, 2005 – actually contains one of the keys to effortless elegance.
Welcome back to reality, after a wonderful Christmas break. Okay, some parts weren’t so wonderful: the runny nose, watery eyes, sneezing, and swollen glands. Ever wonder about statistics for being sick on Christmas and/or the day after compared to any other day of the year?
But now that Christmas is behind us and most of you lovely ladies received new clothes as gifts, what next? You must “style them in” to your current wardrobe. To “style it in” is a term that I made up (this is my blog, I can invent vocabulary as I see fit) based on what professional stylists do in the fashion industry. In other words,
you must create great-looking outfits combining your new clothing and accessories with your existing ones.
The goal is to be sure that the outfits you envision in your mind actually work on your body. Try on every possibility. If you have a new sweater, you should try it on with each pair of pants and every skirt it might go with. Carefully recording combinations that work will save you time and trouble on mornings when wardrobe trauma threatens to overwhelm artistic inspiration.
Have fun with this project. Turn the heat up in your dressing room (for me that’s my bedroom), so you don’t mind repeatedly changing your clothes. Crank up some perky tunes. Older girl children may want to “play dress-up” with you, and pre-schoolers can sit on the bed and keep you company. (I don’t recommend inviting your husband, he’s likely to be too distracted by the sight of you dressing and undressing to be of any help.)
The downside to blogging about clothes is that now everyone is afraid to buy me any. On the upside, I don’t blog about fine jewelry.
I would be very interested to know the statistics for being sick the day of or after Christmas, considering I spent my weekend sick as well. Do you think your body just knows it has time off so it tries to make the most of the time? Is being sick a cruel joke that says “Aha! Now you have to stop everything and just lie there.”?!?