While I was wearing this outfit, it came to me that I could upgrade the tone by changing my shoes. Normally, if I were going someplace dressier, I would stress right on out, especially if the someplace dressier were on the cusp between "casual" and "really really dressed up like for the opera." Dressy casual is my nightmare zone, as in I have an actual recurring anxiety nightmare in which I have to be somewhere, and I keep obsessivly changing my clothes, and nothing is ever right. In reality, my wardrobe has tended to divide pretty neatly between those two categories of dressed-up-ness, with a nod to the Sunday obligation (read: some dress or skirt I could throw on before dashing out the door to choir practice).
I don't wear heels often. I find them uncomfortable, especially with a bunion on my left foot, which I'm trying to avoid doing anything about for as long as I possibly can. But I do have a couple of pairs of heels: one really old pair of black heeled Mary Janes which I do wear several times a year, plus a pair of beige/nude heels I bought for my daughter's wedding three years ago. The black Mary Janes have a square toe box and are, I think, actually leather despite being cheap. The beige heels are cheap, period. Let me just reiterate that buying stuff like this is exactly what I am committing myself to not doing anymore, and for practical reasons as well as ethical ones. But at the time I needed some shoes, and I needed them fast, at the last minute, so here we are. Now that I have them, I might as well at least contemplate wearing them.
I don't know if I could sustain the look pictured below, because if I had to stand up for any amount of time, these shoes would be coming off. But I hadn't thought before about wearing them with jeans or trousers or anything else that isn't a mother-of-the-bride or possibly an Easter dress, and I like what they do to this otherwise casual ensemble:
I also tend to think of half-updo hair as dressier: just a simple claw clip, nothing fancy, but it seems more polished than my normal flowing wavy hair, especially if my bangs are trimmed, which they're not right now. Overall, this is not really at ALL what I would have thought of as my signature look, but you know, if I were going out someplace, I would consider it. So I don't know, does this count as an extra "styling?" Or is it just more like Outfit 1.1, as opposed to 1.0?
Maybe for each styling I could try dialing the outfit up or down in dressiness, so that each one becomes a twofer.
TUESDAY
1x5 Challenge 2.0:
Pardon the wet hair. Here again are the thrifted purple skinny jeans. Today is colder than yesterday was, so I thought I'd try them with my camel boots, which are furry inside and very warm. The tunic top is a thrift find from several years ago – I think the label is something like MST, which means nothing to me, but it's a nice flowy top. It works well tucked in, but I wore a cami under it today for extra warmth and coverage, and I figured that tucking it would be bulky and uncomfortable. So this is the First Lewk.
Here's 2.1, the warmer-weather Lewk, featuring my clearance-sale Crocs "Sexi" sandals. My husband likes these and feels that they are aptly named. Your mileage, naturally, may vary.
I don't think this works that well as a whole outfit. It might do in a pinch, but the shoes and the top seem wrong for each other. I could replace the top, though, with something maybe a little more romantic and cottagecore, and it would work. I can stand up in these shoes for a lot longer than I can in the lighter dressy shoes I tried yesterday. I can walk in these, though I'm not sure I'd go hiking in them. I do love a good Mary Jane shoe. I could see putting together a date-night or party outfit incorporating these trousers and these shoes and feeling good about it. I might choose tomorrow's top with that in mind, though I probably wouldn't keep the shoes on all day.
Note that midway through this round of experiments I did clean the mirror. We are not complete barbarians here.
Also, my hair did finally dry, just in time for the podcast interview. Not that anybody was going to see me with wet hair, but I felt more together once I didn't have cold soaking-wet hair stuck to the back of my shirt. Funny how that works.
Am I ready to knock it out of the park? Sure I am.
I mean, ha ha. Sure.
Also still grappling with THE major existential question: bangs? no bangs?
WEDNESDAY
Mittwoch. Not bothering with multiple iterations of today's outfit. I need to grind out another 150-200 words of my Paul Mariani essay and continue reading Jeanne Murray Walker, the next poet on my essay to-do list. Why am I writing these essays? Perhaps when I have actually signed the contract, which is for sure forthcoming but I haven't seen it yet, I can tell you . . .
So I need to do that, and pick another new-to-me poetic form to try, since I think the clogyrnach has about defeated me.
All that, and a dermatologist appointment this afternoon to look at a weird mole.
Today's 1x5 outfit ...
... started with this base. The same thrifted purple skinnies I've been wearing all week, and a thrifted white tank which always gets a lot of wear when the weather's warm.
It's supposed to be 64F today: not exactly summer, but I'll take it. The sun is shining, and I plan to go for a good walk, in the course of which I might get warm enough to strip off layers and just wear this tank. But in the meantime:
I bought this shirt dress at Goodwill sometime last fall. I like it as a dress all right, but today's revelation is that I REALLY like it as a duster. Old Converse: can't remember how many years I've had them. I don't always feel good in them, but I think the shape works with this outfit. My theory is that you have to have a really balanced leg shape – either skinny from thigh through calf, or more or less equally thick from thigh through calf. String-bean shapes look good in Converse. Heavier legs, or legs with really muscular calves to equalize the thigh-calf proportion, also look good in Converse. If you carry weight in your hips and thighs, but your calves are thinner, then it gets tricky. Possibly it's just that you have a more traditionally feminine, curvy figure, which means sporty, sort of boyish clothes as a general rule don't hang as naturally on your given frame. Anyway, I love my Converse, but find that I have to figure out some kind of balance in my outfit to feel not-weird in them. The line of the dress/duster seems to help here.
I also like what I guess is the color-blocking in this outfit. Teals play nicely with purples, as anybody who remembers the 1980s Alexander McQueen-designed uniform for the Charlotte Hornets basketball team will remember. Teals – whether they tilt toward blue, as this dress/duster does, or a little more toward green – play pretty nicely on me, too. I wasn't going to put on makeup anyway, but these no-filter head shots make me feel pretty good about what my color choices are doing for me today. You can also see that I got some sleep; yesterday was a powering-through-post-insomnia day, but today is better. I never use filters, just fix the lighting when it needs it so that colors show more clearly, but I haven't even done that in the following photos:
Head shots also play up my earring choices. Here I'm wearing some yellow glass earrings which my youngest daughter helped my husband pick out for me for some gift-giving occasion. My husband is, in fact, really good at choosing gifts, much better than I am. But he's going to miss his resident personal shopper when she goes away to college in the fall. She excels at earrings. Yesterday's earrings (scroll back up) are my current favorite pair. I bought them in a neighborhood charity shop and wear them almost every day, as a default choice.
***
Incidentally, all this focus on my appearance does make me feel very strange. Posting photos of my outfits on Instagram filled me with such crippling, anxious self-consciousness that I stopped doing it. I do actively worry that I'm being vain and silly in focusing on my clothes. At this writing, I have not told a soul that I've started (yet another) blog. I might or might not ever tell another soul. Haven't decided. If you're reading this, you'll know what I decided, but I don't know yet whether you, whoever you are, will ever lay eyes on what I have to say here.
At the same time, it has helped me immensely to document in photographs what I'm wearing daily. That's been one useful takeaway from Nat Tucker's Make It Look Easy free mini-course, which I did last fall. As I've seen how I look through the camera's eye, I've been able to cull things from my closet that don't work (sometimes even when I thought they did), and to be more purposeful in my shopping – even though thrift shopping never turns out quite the way you think it's going to! In my Google photos, I have my daily outfit photographs sorted into folders according to color (blue, green, purple, gray, white, etc), according to style or item (skinny jeans, denim, dress, skirt, cardigan), and according to occasion (Sunday Mass outfits). I also have a "Winner Outfits" file for each season, so that if I need to grab something in a hurry, I can reference what I know has looked and felt good and just throw that on without thinking.
As I might have mentioned before, I've never felt good about my appearance. How I look has been a source of anxiety for me my entire life. A friend on social media the other day was (quite rightly) decrying the online "meme-ification" of parenting, as exemplified by some new rule that says you're not supposed to tell a girl she "looks lovely," because she'll come to think that all her value lies in her appearance. Well, I am here to tell you what it feels like not to have been told you look lovely. It feels like being convinced that you don't, and can't, ever, look lovely – because if you could, then surely somebody would have said something. It feels like not believing your husband, who has been telling you for thirty-plus years that you are beautiful and that yes, actually, he likes what you have on. It feels like defining yourself by derogatory things adults in your life said in your presence when you were eleven or twelve. It feels like defining yourself by the things your classmates said at about the same time about your eccentric outfit choices. It feels like being convinced that no matter how you try, you're never going to look right for an occasion, and that people see you, especially as you age, as some kind of weird old bag lady. It feels like being convinced that what you could maybe get away with, when you were young and fresh, as arty and creative (if weird and not right), just makes you look like a hag in your 50s. You are convinced of all these things at least in part because they are the dominant messaging you received all your childhood, because someone either honestly thought you looked like a fright or was afraid of giving you the big head if they praised you, so that you have literally nothing in the arsenal of your subconscious with which to fight off all the negatives. Go ahead, don't tell a girl she looks lovely – don't give her anything to hang onto. This is what you'll be doing to her.
One one level, of course, these messages are just what St. Ignatius of Loyala called Desolations: lies of the Enemy. You defeat a Desolation – which in the terminology of contemporary psychology might be called "negative self-talk" or "identity lies" – by reminding yourself of what is true. Of course the challenge is to discern clearly that the truth is something other than what the Desolation is telling you, but if you can do that, then you step from bondage into freedom. It sure does help if someone else all your life has given you some truth to discern about your appearance – that there is beauty in you, that they have seen it, that they love you enough to tell you. In the absence of that reassurance, however, you can figure out ways to reassure yourself that good things are true of you, including the way you look.
None of this is about knowing what's fashionable, really. If it were, I'd just buy a lot of black and leopard-print clothes like every other fiftysomething lady and be done with it. None of it is about style tips, though those can be helpful. What it's really about is knowing who you are, from your skin to your soul – and knowing that as long as you inhabit this life, you can't separate your skin from your soul. If you're a Catholic, as I am, or any kind of Christian, then you are, by definition, not a gnostic. The body matters. God made it and gave it to you, and you don't have a self apart from it. Yes, you're more than your body and your appearance, but those things aren't not you. That is why this is important to me – that knowing myself, which includes being aware of and dealing with my appearance, is paradoxically what sets me free from the paralysis of self-consciousness. If I want to contemplate the goodness of God, then it helps to see how that goodness makes itself manifest in me.
***
WEDNESDAY UPDATE: I wasn't going to change anything about my outfit as pictured above, but then my new-to-me/Ebay Dansko clogs for Easter turned up in the mail, and I just had to.
I love these. They're so comfortable, and in almost-new condition. Fit is perfect. And the color means I can wear them more or less year-round: light enough for summer, but good with winter outfits as well. There's literally nothing in my closet that I can't wear them with, which is exactly the sweet spot I want to hit with my purchases. You can accomplish this goal, of course, if all you wear are black and gray (or brown), as in a capsule wardrobe. As you can see, however, what I have is not a capsule wardrobe at all. It IS a smallish wardrobe – I live in an old house and have a small closet. My clothes are contained in this closet, two drawers of an old dresser, and two under-bed bins that hold sweaters (one for colors, one for neutrals). Yet what I find, continually, as I cull things out and add items judiciously, as well as studying color combinations, is that I actually have almost more clothes than I can wear. I'm not sure I've repeated an outfit exactly in the last five or six months. I have a file of winners, as I said, that I can reach for if I need to know that I look good for a given situation, but day to day I find I don't repeat things. At some point I will cull harder, because I can. I'm not sure I need four or five navy dresses, for example, even though they're all different shapes and potentially good for different occasions. Still discerning what else to let go of, even as my outbox is filling up, and I need to make final decisions about what's in it.
Meanwhile, the more different kinds of shoe I have (not more pairs – my shoes are also overflowing, and I need to cull them, too) that will go with all the pants, all the skirts, and all the dresses I have, the more possibilities I have in terms of combination, to dress the same shirt/pants/skirt combo, or the same dress, up or down as the occasion requires. These are ideas I've gleaned from that Nat Tucker style course I mentioned above (no, I'm not affiliated with that program; I just like style courses, and this one was helpful in these particular ways). These ideas feel so much more liberating – I can work with the clothes I already own – than the idea of a capsule wardrobe. It's a lot less monochrome, a lot more creative, a lot more like the person I am.
You can see at a glance the colors that are the basis of my wardrobe: blue mostly, some gray, some sage-green, some pink, some purple. I have one red pair of jeans for when I'm feeling really sparky, and the silk kimono at the far right, which I have had since childhood (another rescue from the dress-up collection) includes some bright red and yellow, also good for when I feel sparky. I'm not quite at the point where everything goes with everything else, but there's literally nothing in my closet right now that makes one outfit and one outfit only – even the mother-of-the-bride dresses, which you can't see because they're tucked behind the kimono, have some flexible possibilities. I wore the one from my daughter's wedding, the one I did actually wind up in (I have two because they were on clearance, and up to the day of, I wasn't entirely sure which one I would wear), on New Year's Eve with a denim jacket and boots, instead of the matchy very-mother-of-the-bride jacket it came with.
I'm sorry I didn't take a full-length picture, but I liked the look a lot, enough that – depending on the weather and what we decide to do – I might wear the same ensemble for our anniversary next week. We didn't go anywhere on New Year's Eve, mind you, but I did feel just the right amount celebratory. Anyway, I am also committed to not buying anything that can be worn only one way, or for only one particular kind of occasion. For that ain't nobody got time.
This post is getting long. I think I'll go ahead and publish it, and make Thursday-Saturday's segment of the 1x5 challenge a second installment.
Happy Wednesday!