Coming down the mountain in moonlight last night. The moon was actually not full, though you could have fooled me: it was still waxing gibbous. This was about 9:30 last night, the sky dark but luminous. We had had a lovely dinner with the Fire Son at the Berliner Kindl restaurant in Black Mountain (small, friendly, excellent German food), then a walk around town in the beautiful clear evening light, talking about this and that, before we handed over his belongings and hugged him goodbye for the rest of the year. Then we drove home, and I went for a longish late-night walk with Dora around the neighborhood, and so to bed.
Today's agenda:
*dog walking
*essay writing
*reading
*bed making
*this and that, I guess
Since we went out last night, I'm assuming we're in tonight, which is fine with me. I have some leftovers that I can make up into something, and we can eat on the porch and enjoy the beauty of another evening.
Wearing today:
*Wool& Willow dress (M/Long) in Ocean Teal, bought October 2023
*Secondhand Birkenstock Mayaris, bought April 2024
Team Basic today. If it transpired that the husband wanted to go out again, I might consider changing into my Crocs sandals for a tiny bit of something sleeker, but maybe not. It's hard to beat a swing dress and Birks. Plenty of air flow, plenty of ease, and my favorite color: what is not to love here (I mean, you don't have to love this for you, but you can love it for me, right?).
I wore this dress for 30 straight days last fall, and all my commentary about wear and tear on clothing notwithstanding, it has held up beautifully. I haven't washed it much, which I think helps, and I can't recall that I've ever washed it other than by hand, which I also think makes a huge difference in how things wear. I haven't worn this dress often with a belt, either. After seeing a lot of pilling on my old Sierra, which I'd taken to belting all the time, I am leery of doing that anymore. I won't get rid of my belts, but I don't wear them nearly as often.
They're apparently redesigning this style, which will be interesting to see, though I like it fine the way it is. The 3/4-length sleeves are nice, even in the summertime, and I find the open v-neck very flattering. Otherwise . . . if I had wanted a bodycon dress I would have bought a bodycon dress. If I had wanted a princess-seamed dress I would have bought a princess-seamed dress. And so on. I do not fault this dress for not being all the myriad other styles of dress that one might buy.
The swinginess of this particular style is its own appeal. You either like it or you don't, and I do. It has a simple shape and a good drape, flattering the body chiefly by not exposing it too much. It frames the face and flatters the leg, and the rest is just nice subtle movement. If you're a person whose vibe is more tailored and crisp, this is obviously not going to appeal to you, but if your personal energy is more fluid, and if tailoring (the crisp white menswear shirt, the straight jean) makes you feel constricted and does nothing for the contours of your face, then this soft flow might be more your thing. That is the thing about personal style, as opposed to fashion --- over time, you come to realize what makes you feel maybe not physically uncomfortable, but plain. Some of this is color, as the myriad color-typing programs attest (and I'm skeptical, honestly about them all, because your "season" or whatever can be freeing and illuminating, but it can also be limiting in unnecessary ways, and I still just frankly don't see colors in terms of "warm" and "cool").
But a lot of it is fabric type and shape. There's a certain kind of very symmetrical face that looks gorgeous in --- I'm trying to reach for a word other than crisp --- an immaculately tailored shirt in a starchy woven fabric. Usually in this face there's a fairly high level of contrast: dark hair with fair skin, for example. Or light hair, fair skin, but dark eyebrows and lashes. My theory is that for extremely plain tailored clothes to work --- the classic white shirt with jeans, for example --- you have to have a certain amount of drama going on in your face, or drama of a certain high-contrast kind, which is set off by the severe lines of your clothing.
Some people shine in that kind of setting. Others of us have a lower level of drama going on: lower contrast in our coloring, more curved lines in our face and body (or less body definition, maybe, is another way to put that --- like we're more likely to be apples or pears than hourglasses or rectangles). Often, though I'd never say always, this isn't just our appearance, but our whole personality --- we're more ruminative, less incisive, more inward, more fluid in our thought processes. Anyway, our kind of face and body, if not our whole personality, is better served by different kinds of textures and lines than the high-drama, symmetrical face and body type.
For me, flow is a better fit than structure. A too-structured neckline (again I reach for the image of the crisp white shirt) is going to overwhelm, not enhance the structure of my face. I can wear soft linen shirts with collars, especially if I wear the shirt as a top layer, not a shirt --- but my features, facial and bodily, will simply disappear if I wear something too white, too tailored, too stiff in its structure. I would have looked okay, I think, as a Regency lady, in those empire-waisted flowy Grecian-inspired dresses. I'd have been fine in the Middle Ages (assuming I survived at all) in a shift and kirtle. I'd have been okay at certain moments in the Edwardian era and the early 1920s, in clothes with flow and movement. In the eighteenth century, the Victorian era, and the 1940s I'd have been totally plain, the clothes doing nothing for me at all.
So, that's why I like this kind of dress and feel good in it. It's fun and easy and kind of ageless --- I liked dresses like this twenty and thirty and forty years ago (whether they were in style or not), and I could see wearing this particular dress just as easily at 80 as I can at almost-60. In fact, it'd be nice if it didn't wear out, and I could still wear it at 80. Better treat it gently!
And so to work.
SLIGHTLY LATER:
The mail has come and brought with it a goodie.
Again, I won a drawing at my friend Lindsay's Trades of Hope online party some weeks back. I'm in a no-buy month, and in a year when one of my two major resolutions was to buy nothing new. BUT. Sometimes things just happen, and it makes no sense at all to decline an opportunity when it presents itself, and so here we are. I'm wearing the silk-cotton kimono I chose and received at a half-off discount (I also bought coffee and a mug for my husband for Father's Day with the rest of my credits and discounts).
And now, contra every expectation, I have it --- and it's as lovely as I had imagined it would be. It's lightweight enough to wear all summer, but the silk content is enough to make it potentially fairly thermal, good to wear on the plane, for example. It will pack down to nothing in a bag. This is a pretty accurate representation of the colors:
If it doesn't go with every single item in my closet, it goes with easily 95% of my closet. It makes a perfect light top layer for sleeveless dresses, but I also like the look of these 3/4 sleeves with it. I can see wearing it through the winter, too, with longer sleeves. It would potentially dress up anything I wore it with --- see my dress above, but I'm also thinking how, after a day of hiking in my rather tatty old Camellia dress, I could toss this on to go to dinner and look instantly not tatty at all.
