Can't get enough of these resplendent early-autumn marigolds. This particular set took a LONG time to mature --- I'd seeded them in a container with tomatoes and basil, so I guess there was some competition for nutrients, but look at them now!
The mornings and evenings have been marvelously cool this week. Midday is still pretty hot, and we're a long way from sweaters-and-tights weather, but it's starting to be visible, just a little, on the horizon. (and then it'll get here and I'll immediately be longing for summer again, because so goes the cycle . . . ).
A good email digest today from Nat Tucker of Make It Look Easy, on the transition from an active, outward working life to a life based at home. Some highlights:
Do not throw away your structured skirts, blazers and pants.
Your structured skirts will look amazing with a relaxed knit and long boots for a Friday night dinner catch up.
Your structured blazer will look awesome over a floaty floral boho dress on a winery tour.
Your structured pants will love and adore a white street sneaker!!
All is not lost in your "before" wardrobe.
As she notes, rather than purging everything from your "before" life, whatever that was (and for you, as for me, it might not have been "corporate" at all --- feel free to substitute your personal "before" here), it makes sense instead to hang onto your serious clothing investments, especially if you do actually like them, and build a new minimalist wardrobe around things you already own.
As always, she notes that paying attention to your skin tone is key.
Start with your skin colour, there are only four, pink, peach, blue and orange (more on how to work that out here) and combine that back with your current wardrobe by using My brilliant colour combinations e book to create fresh new looks.
The thing that keeps drawing me to Nat and her thoughts about personal style is this common-sense approach. What makes more sense than just paying attention to yourself, in your physical being? What color, actually, is your skin? What color, actually, are your eyes? What color, actually, is your hair? Rather than fretting about whether you're "warm" or "cool," or whether a given color is "warm" or "cool," what colors actually ARE you composed of? That's the first question to ask. The second: what other colors look good with those colors? This might be trickier, but with a good guide to combinations, encompassing both harmonies and contrasts, it's just not that hard to work out what's going to flatter you. You can pay Nat to tell you what color type you are, but she also encourages you just to work it out for yourself --- which you can do because there's no real mystique involved.
I do like that Brilliant Colour Combinations e-book, I have to say. It's been my most-used resource for buying clothes and putting outfits together. I don't always follow it exactly, and often enough I have to riff on the ideas, because the color I have in front of me isn't exactly represented by any of the choices on offer in the book, but the basic concepts of what can go with what, in often surprising ways, have really helped me to make outfits out of the clothes I have. When I'm contemplating a purchase, I always pull it out, to mull how that purchase would work with my existing wardrobe. I wouldn't consider buying a major clothing item without that process.
I also appreciate that she's encouraging people not to reinvent themselves from the ground up every time a life change comes along, but to work with what they already have, gradually, to build a new style that reflects that change. Again, this is just common sense, particularly financially. While we can hang onto things we truly don't want because we've bought into the sunk-cost fallacy, moving to purge old items shouldn't be our first step. Nobody's rushing us (except ourselves). We can and should take time to meditate on how an item we own, especially if we have made some investment in it, might work in new ways.
Meanwhile, although I've said that the whole "warm/cool" business drives me insane, it's not hard to connect Nat's four basic skin colors to that whole "seasonal" paradigm. Think of it this way: peach is spring, pink is summer, orange is autumn, blue is winter. If you need a shortcut, that simple connect-the-dots gives you a whole palette to work with, instantly. The colors in the palette should all work with each other as combinations. You can pull up a palette to compare with colors of things you're considering buying, to see how they match, without going through all the mental gymnastics of trying to figure out whether that's actually a "warm" or a "cool" gray. A given color that's good for you is automatically versatile, because it goes with all the other colors that are good for you. They balance in terms of their hue and saturation.
"True summer" works for me as a palette because my skin is pink, and my overall coloring and contrast are medium and not yellow- or orange-based. I have that combo of pink skin, grayed blue-green eyes, and brown hair that doesn't tilt red, though I do have some rose-gold kind of highlights. There are multiple "true-summer" palettes (a number of them are linked in my sidebar), which gives me an array of colors I really love to work with. BUT I can also, judiciously, include colors that aren't in those palettes when I feel like it (see: red shoes!), by having some sense of which of "my" colors they work with. I'm not limited by having "my colors" determined for me by a rigid paradigm that doesn't take the complexity of personality and moods into account.
Anywhoo, that was in my email this morning, and I thought it was worth passing along. I always appreciate these various digests, both Nat's and Elyse Holladay's, especially, because they're full of good thoughts for which I can find application in my own life, even though on the face of it, my style isn't like either of those women's. I don't find myself wanting to imitate them, just to work with the large ideas, which help me, ultimately, to put on my clothes and then forget about them.
To wit:
Wearing it forward today by repeating yesterday's shoes, but otherwise giving outfit elements a rest. Blue for Mary, since today is a Marian feast, but not, for a change, the royal-blue redyed Camellia dress I've been wearing all week. Instead I'm wearing this thrifted navy long-sleeved bamboo swing dress, purchased at the end of last year. It's soft and comfortable, and the weather is cool enough that I welcome long sleeves, albeit without, necessarily, the added weight of a cardigan or pullover. Braided Day-4 hair, because I haven't worn a braid in a while.
Time to eat some breakfast and gird myself to walk the dog. Then on into the day with whatever it brings.