Today I wore the outfit above to Mass: my Ebay/secondhand long-sleeved dark-blue swing dress en bambou, with Snag tights in "slate," camel boots bought last year, pink dotted-Swiss infinity scarf from Goodwill, and this very long cardigan bought on a B/S/T Facebook group this fall.
I have to say: this dress is pretty short for a church dress for me, and I probably would not wear it to Mass without the addition of something long: this cardigan, which I can kind of swirl around me while in church, or a maxi skirt underneath. I have no qualms generally about wearing above-the-knee dresses, and do wear above-the-knee dresses fairly routinely to church . . . all of which to say that I try to balance not-obsessing-about-purity-culture-modesty-standards with some-notion-of-traditional-cultural-appropriateness, the impulse to feel attractively put-together with the impulse not to call undue attention to myself.
Anyway, I did wear this dress to church and felt comfortable and un-self-conscious, which is my general goal. Now that I'm home, and my husband is upstairs doing his usual Sunday routine of listening to sermons and reading, I thought I'd resume shopping my closet as a Sunday feature (I mean, it's not servile labor . . . ). And I thought that since I am already wearing this dress, and I haven't had a chance yet to wear it in too many combinations, it would make a good shop-my-closet focus for this week.
To make things easy on myself, and because I don't want to spend the whole afternoon thinking about clothes, I'm going to keep the same basic core of dress-tights-boots. We can experiment with what other tights colors would look like against the blue of this dress, but I don't think I'm going to do that much clothes-changing. And honestly: now that the weather's finally starting to turn, some basic combination of dress-tights-boots is going to form the foundation of a lot of outfits through the long cooler season now upon us. The question is to how not to keep wearing the exact same outfit over and over. How many different ideas can I come up with, building on this one foundation? Let us seek to answer that question now!
Here's the basic paper-doll we're going to be dressing this afternoon:
The variations are going to be limited to third layers –– cardigans, pullovers, jackets, shirts worn as jackets –- and accessories, chiefly scarves. In real life, I might opt to wear different shoes: my standard winter choices are these boots, my gray-green Doc Martens, and my Birkenstock Madeiras, which lately have been my everyday shoe.
I did hold up an array of tights to show my range of color choices. The ones I'm wearing are a dark blue-gray called "slate." I really like them as a low-contrast item in this outfit: not matching exactly, but not calling attention to themselves, so that the boots provide all the contrast to frame the outfit. I could do more color-blocking, however, for a more high-contrast effect, with any of the following tights colors:
Mustard-yellow would be the highest, loudest contrast. This is right at the edge of my comfort zone, but it is fun and energetic. It's maybe more fun and energetic than I am in reality, but sometimes I like the way that feels.
Then there's burgundy, less attention-seeking but still a fairly high level of contrast with the dress:
I'm really itching to wear this dress with my "thicket" tights, for the aaaahhhhh of blue and sage-green together:
And of course lighter grays are nice, as my "silver lining" wool tights demonstrate:
So, I not only dry, but often quasi-store my clothes on that drying rack in the bathroom. As you can see in the photo above, my thrifted green J. Crew cotton cardigan was hanging literally at hand. Reaching for it, I began a series of experiments involving cardigans, with the idea of tweaking each look a little bit to see what different effects were possible without changing clothes.
Here's the cardigan just as she comes, over the blue swing dress:
Yeah, so, wow. I love blue and green together: not just sage green, but this more emerald green as well. I could have my St. Patrick's Day outfit all taken care of right here. This isn't a lot of high contrast, but to me there's a lot of interest in the interplay of these colors. The green seems to make the navy dress brighter and maybe even a little purpler. And it glows against that darker color. I really love this.
Here I've tweaked the look simply by buttoning the top two buttons of the cardigan, for more of a nerdy vintage librarian look:
Again, I like this just as is. I often like buttoning the top buttons of little cardigans like this to create more of an inverted-v line with whatever I'm wearing underneath.
I like the outfit as is, but I like it also with the addition of a scarf:
Sometimes a scarf just feels like one thing too many to me –– if the rule is look in the mirror, then take one thing off, a scarf is usually the one thing I take off before I leave the house. But I like this. The rest of the outfit is simple enough that the patterned scarf does add some polish, without making me feel overdressed.
Next, I moved from green to blue. Now, I have a lot of blue sweaters, but I wasn't about to try all of them on. They get a lot of wear and airtime on a regular basis –– but somehow I tend to overlook this thrifted duck-egg-blue cotton open Loft cardigan, even though it's a great favorite. It's a good weight for transitional weather, and the color is delicious to me.
I like it a lot over this dark-blue dress:
It also knots easily at the waist, for a completely different effect:
If there's anything I have more than blue cardigans, it's gray cardigans. Again, I wasn't going to wear them all here, and I did already wear my duster-length one this morning. But blue and gray are such a nice combination, especially in the winter when you want a kind of snow-day mood in your clothes. You can be warm, yet icy-cool at the same time, in a dark, muted blue with something silvery on top:
I love this thrifted cashmere-blend cardigan. It can be a little boxy, but it tends to elevate an outfit, just because it's silver, rather than, say, battleship gray, or the color of porridge. It's got lovely silver beading, too, and dresses up nicely. Here I've just thrown it on, which is okay. I like it better with the top button done, for a little more interesting, graceful line:
I might wear this, in fact, with silky stockings, heels, and maybe some slightly blingier jewelry, to be very dressed up, say for a New Year's party or a winter wedding.
A luxe scarf dresses it up, too, like this thrifted slate-gray pashmina, worn over the cardigan with more buttons done up:
Before moving to another cardigan, I tried the pashmina as a layer by itself:
Of course, the question in my mind at this time of the year is: what can I wear with purple in Advent? Fortunately navies play pretty well with soft, grapey purples like this cardigan:
I bought this cardigan, a cotton Eddie Bauer number, for a quarter at the Good Neighbor Shop down the street. With its cable knit and pretty ruffled detail, it's one of my favorites. I like it just thrown on over this dress, but also buttoned:
And with a scarf. I got this linen scarf at the now-defunct factory-seconds shop on Main Street some years back and have worn it and worn it:
The scarf also makes a decent belt:
Or whatever this is (an experiment I'm not sure I'd wear in public, but maybe it's not as weird as I think):
Now for a couple of pullover sweaters, to see how that kind of thing works with this dress. First my thrifted open-work cotton sweater in off-white, on its own:
And with a scarf, knit for me by my cousin about ten years ago:
And my gray-blue wool pullover, from the same recent thrift haul:
I wore this sweater recently over my Camellia 100-day dress –– I think I like it better here, with the darker blue.
Now let's leave the sweaters and look at more structured third-layer options. How does this dress do with blazers and jackets?
Here's Jacket Look #1, incorporating a moss-green pinwhale corduroy Calvin Klein blazer I got off ThreadUp last year. It's a very tailored jacket, a real contrast to the kind of thing I most often wear, and I was surprised, frankly, to discover how much I like it. It makes almost anything look sharper and dressier –- all I have to do to look as though I tried is put it on.
Here I think the fitted, tailored, masculine-ish blazer works really well as a contrast to the fluid swing of the dress. Nat Tucker likes to talk about putting "masculine" and "feminine" elements together in an outfit: a gypsy blouse with boyfriend jeans, for example. I really like this, too, because I think the tension between the elements, whether you want to think of them as gendered, or whether you want to think of them as bringing a particular kind of energy (structured, straight, restraining vs. unstructured, curving, fluid) into tension with a completely other kind of energy. Either way, that's one strategy for putting an interesting outfit together, and I can see it at work here. I didn't bother from this point forward with scarves or other accessories, but I could see wearing this outfit with a scarf or with layered necklaces as a night-out ensemble, and I could see feeling great in it.
For something completely different, yet still tapping into the same dynamic, here's the dress with a denim jacket:
Again, the jacket adds instant structure to the fluidity of the dress. I like the way the medium denim shows up against the darker dress here.
I also tried the dress with this deep periwinkle long-line blazer I bought for 50 cents at the Good Neighbor shop earlier in the fall. I'm not sure it's the greatest combination –– the colors are maybe just close enough to be off –- but then again, I could probably wear it, and the colors would be close enough that nobody would really notice that they're off.
Again there's the tension between structure and fluidity, and I love the line of this blazer on. I definitely plan to wear it with my patterned purple dress, featured the last time I shopped my closet, but I would at least consider it as a layer with this dress.
While I was pulling things out of the closet, meanwhile, I thought I'd also try some less-structured third layers, because sometimes you do want to feel soft and fluid all over in what you're wearing –– at least, if you're me you often want that. Here's a silk velour shirt I found in a thrift store and have had forever, though it spent some years in the dress-up box, for reasons I can't now recall. When I was rummaging around for my kimono last summer, because I needed a wedding outfit, I found this as well, pulled it out, and hung it up to air. I don't remember whether I've ever worn it in all these years, but I really like it with this dress:
Again, the dark midnight-blue of the shirt really makes the dress look lighter and brighter, but I think it works. I love how the effect is casual but luxe –- you could wear a combination like this in just about any context and not feel either over- or under-dressed. Here's a better look at the shirt fabric:
Here's the kimono as well with this dress:
Again, I could wear this just about anywhere and feel that I'd dressed just right: not fussily overdone, but not under-dressed for whatever the occasion was.
Finally, I've tried the dress as a layer with a longer skirt. Here are two takes on dress-as-tunic-with-maxi-skirt:
And one take on dress-as-top/slip with a midi skirt:
Finally, some miscellaneous scarf action:
This is a thrifted scarf I haven't worn anywhere yet –– I'd bought it back in the summer with a wedding ensemble in mind, but the colors didn't look quite right with my blue Camellia. I think the aqua blue here looks better on the more neutral, dark background of the navy dress. I could just wear it like this as a dressy kind of stole, or as a shawl:
Last, but absolutely not least, here's my longest-wearing, most favorite scarf, bought in a T.J. Maxx when my 17-year-old daughter was a baby:
It doesn't show up that vividly against the dress, but it's silk velour, and it's just gorgeous:
It's an instant upgrade for any outfit, and has been my favorite winter piece all these years. Again, it doesn't just pop against the dress (though I think it's a bit more visible in real life than it is in the photo above), but it adds some luxurious sheen and texture.
Really finally, for dressing down in autumnal style, here's my son's flannel over this dress:
I guess I've missed all the pumpkin patches, and I would pay good money not to have to go to a football game, but I do have the right outfit for those kinds of fallish pursuits.
So, with one dress-tights-boots base, I've made, let's see, how many discrete outfits? A bunch, that's how many. For a secondhand dress that cost me $12, this is not bad at all. The dress itself is so soft and comfortable, in breathable, thermally-regulating bamboo fiber. It's a complete outfit on its own –– in warm weather I would totally wear it in "team basic" mode with a pair of sandals. I would absolutely wear it to hike in cooler weather, with leggings and whatever outer layers I needed. I'm really happy with its ease and versatility, to dress up or down. While I've left a couple of other navy dresses hanging in my closet for now, it will be interesting to see how much I reach for either of them compared with how often I might reach for this dress.
I hope to reach for this one a lot. And I'm glad to have made this record of outfits built around it, for future reference.