Fashion: What I like

So. Clothes. Fashion. That stuff. Today I've been thinking about the personal style thing.

For the past several years, my personal style could have been expressed as, "What does Eddie Bauer have on sale?" Or L.L. Bean. Or Lands' End. Mom jeans, tees, no-iron buttondown shirts. Whatever A-line or straight calf-length skirt was on sale when the last one wore out. On my feet, Merrels or whatever black leather flats looked most interesting when the last pair wore out.

Whee.

What do I like? What could influence a personal style? I tried ambling around the web, looking for and at pictures of clothes that speak to me, trying to find clues. And I found a few. I seem to like:

Architecture

This is one of those "I know it when I see it" things, but it's often about  seams--seams that do something unexpected, or inspire the response, "Clever!"

I want to show you examples, which is where I run into the problem with (1) blogging about fashion while (2) being obsessive-compulsive about copyright. I don't dare actually include the images. And there just aren't enough clothes on Wikimedia Commons. Ah, well--I link.

First to a gorgeous and distinctly clever dress worn by Mad Men's Christina Hendricks. Look at the tailoring traversing all those curves, with no excess fabric, no artless gathers, nothing cute. That's architecture.

Then there's the similarly clever gingham dress worn by Elisabeth Moss, again tracing every curve perfectly. I can't help thinking that in the fifties, there'd be better pattern matching at the seams, demonstrating even more jaw-dropping workmanship. But isn't it glorious all the same?

What else am I drawn to?

The Weird

Remember, when someone complains that a particular perfume smells like, say, a tire fire sniffed through a handful of mildewed mint leaves, my response is, "Ooh! Where can I get a sample?" My response to clothes runs along the same lines. I rarely have the courage to wear the truly weird, but I love it all the same, and the longer I look, the more my taste for weird grows.

Designer runway shows are always weird, I suppose. This one, Dior, 2011, particularly appeals to me. I can easily imagine these clothes being worn in Oz.

This glamour-steampunk look is also weird. Rich and detailed and surreal and combining so many inspirations in one.

And so is this one, in a crisper, calmer way; it's really just the hat that tumbles it into Weird. I'd like it even better if the cuffs and peplum were pleated instead of ruffles. Better architecture, see?

As I was sitting here trying to think of likely sources of Weird, I thought of NCIS's Abby, here in one of her calmer looks, with its own steampunk vibe.

Are you seeing the next pattern along with me?

Fantasy

That is, travel through time and space and fictional worlds. Clothes that are spot-on-in-fashion right now don't usually make me happy; I like a gesture toward another place or time. I think that this is partly perpetual rebellion against memories of the junior-high expectation of to-the-letter fashion compliance, and partly joy in drawing from a wider history of inspiration.

My examples above are from the Sixties, steampunk/Victorian, and Oz--OK, OK, I called it Oz, but can you disagree with me? And then there are these Cylons in big hats. Of course, don't forget Downton Abbey. And Downton Abbey Meets Vogue. Wow.

I'll keep looking. I'll be back.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.
Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Fashion: Trapped in the Eighties

The 1980s took me from age fourteen to age twenty-five. I'm guessing that those are the critical fashion-imprinting years, especially for those who, like me, never update their fashion eye. The decade seems to have provided me with a set of style guidelines that my mind persists in seeing as "right," no matter how emphatically modern fashion disagrees.

Mom Jeans: For example, have you seen the page "Mom Jeans and the Dreaded 'Long Butt'" on Grasping for Objectivity? It's a great piece of writing. I should find it persuasive. The problem is that when I scroll through it, looking at the Before and After photos, the Before photos are the ones that look "right" to me. Yes, they show a "long" line for the hips. A longer line that starts narrower and then curves out. To my eye, this makes the wearer's hips look narrower, and narrow hips seem to be a universal desire. Plus, it just looks "right" to me, but of course I can't trust that fact. Modern hipster jeans, by contrast, produce a sort of wide slice-of-paving-stone hip shape, a shape that may well look "right" forever to anyone going through their teens and early twenties in this decade.

Now, just yesterday I nudged Himself to tell him, "There's the one girl who looks good in hipster jeans!" I was referring to a young woman wearing a slightly but not excessively form-fitting knit shirt that followed the curve from her narrow waist to the point where it was tucked into jeans that were almost at the widest point of her narrow hips. She looked great. Having her waist and a large portion of her hips outlined by a simple shirt made that curve far more visible than it would be if it were broken in the middle by a pair of jeans. But the whole look was a death-defying act that required absolute perfection of tone and curves, and not a millimeter of abdomen fluff. I could appreciate it the way that I appreciated the street performer juggling a chainsaw the day before. But to me, it has no more to do with real life than the street performer did.

(No, my town doesn't have people juggling chainsaws in the street. I'm on vacation. Woo! Nearing the end of vacation. Grumble.)

So I continue to wear Mom jeans. And, even more offensive to modern style, I sometimes tuck my shirt in. Which leads to another eighties imprint:

The Tucking Issue: When I was growing up, shirts with curved tails were tucked in. Period. Now, that's not to say that they really were always tucked in, but they were supposed to be tucked in. If you cared even a little bit about looking neatly and properly dressed, you tucked the thing in. I continue to be startled by beautifully-dressed women who, by evidence of being beautifully-dressed, obviously consider an untucked curved tail to be entirely appropriate.

The Sticking Out Issue: And then there are all the women, sometimes it seems a majority of women, who layer a shorter shirt on top of a longer one. I know that the line of fabric below the shorter shirt is a conscious choice, but I can't seem to get over the assumption that the wearer put on her layers in the wrong order, or forgot to tuck them in, or both.

What else? What else? That's all for now, but no doubt I will have further evidence of fashion backwardness on my part.

Fashion: The Huh? and the Predators and the Reality TV

My mother more than once said that it was a bad idea to enjoy food too much. Because we won't get to eat after we die. Because she read that someone who communicated with the dead through automatic writing was told (by the dead) that one of the reasons that Heaven was so great was because they (the dead) didn't have to cook.

Blink.

What the...

...What?

Now, there are a lot of "Huh?" levels in that, so many that it's hard to pick one. There are plenty of people who won't stumble over the belief in Heaven, though I have my agnostic doubts. I suspect that a lot of those people would, however, have trouble with the automatic writing. And then there's the idea that a God that can create Heaven and Earth can't create food without having to employ cooks. That, of course, ignores the whole side issue of people who take joy in not just the eating but the cooking, and for whom a Heaven without butter and garlic and saucepans and a good nimble gas burner would be Hell...

I'm ignoring all that.

The part that I'm addressing is the idea that we should refrain from experiencing joy because we might lose it. That, I fear, is an area where my mother's genes sometimes show themselves in my thoughts. When I make fun plans, there's always a part of my mind telling me to wait. Wait until it's safe. Wait until that "Hmm...probably nothing, but go in for this test just in case," from my doctor has been resolved. Wait until I don't blow that work deadline. Wait until I've survived the layoffs. Wait until I have a guarantee of safety and stability. Wait wait wait.

Ignoring the foolishness of panicking at every tiny threat, and the fact that there's never such a guarantee, isn't the fact of an unsafe world a good reason to snatch at good times and enjoy them right this minute? But that's not the logic that my brain instinctively goes with. My brain, of all things, seems to fear that if I have fun today, and then the world falls apart tomorrow, I'll feel...stupid.

What the what?

All that leads into the fact that I've been watching What Not To Wear.

Yeah, you didn't see that coming, did you? See, for the first time I've been seeing clothes and their companions (like vintage rhinestone jewelry, say) as a possible source of joy. And even as I buy a silk blouse here and an above-the-knee denim skirt there, I still find myself feeling the threat of...feeling stupid.

What Not To Wear--the American version, not the British one that, by the way, got a lovely brief little parody on Dr. Who, with Captain Jack's clothed state being threatened (Have you seen Captain Jack? Even clothed?)...

...Where was I? Did I mention Captain Jack?

Ah, yes--What Not To Wear, despite its sometimes-over-the-top mockery of the participant's original wardrobe, despite my doubts about reality television, seems to be doing a fine job of unpacking and sifting my own thoughts about clothes and fashion and self-presentation. And touching on that whole fear of joy. When the sociology graduate talked about clothing as being misleading and false, my head said, "It's communication. Aren't you supposed to care about communication?" When the rounder people talked about losing those last ten or twenty or fifty pounds before they started thinking about their clothes, my head says, "Is there a law that you can't be happy in your clothes right now?" And the women who are afraid to look like they're trying--that, yes, I really understand.

In junior high and high school I saw fashion as a competition to find out who could most slavishly and expensively copy the style of the instant. It was what the mean girls did in those lazy sunlit moments stretching on the savannah as they picked their teeth and bonded after eating the unpopular.

But now, well... I begin to see that style doesn't have to be a predatory act. Some of that realization comes from the beauty bloggers. A lot of you don't just write about perfume, and when you're talking about the more visual elements of beauty you're not resting up after the kill or trying to make yourselves into a clone of the leader of the pack. You're expressing yourselves. Enjoying yourselves. Finding something to say about yourselves and your society and your identity as women and your sense of whimsey and...well, stuff.

That all feels like an introduction, but I don't seem to have more to say just now. Perhaps there will be fashion posts in this blog, as time goes on; perhaps that's what I'm introducing. Wouldn't that be... well, really weird?

Table image: Wikimedia Commons
Chef image: Wikimedia Commons
Captain Jack image: Wikimedia Commons
Hat image: Wikimedia Commons
Lion image: Wikimedia Commons.

Rambling: More Graverobbing

I almost bought an above-the-knee skirt the other day.

OK, let's back up.

I've mentioned that writing "belonged" to Mom, in the context of our family. To an even greater degree, so did femininity and feminine attractiveness.

Mom once mentioned that when I was a baby, she dressed me in all the fanciest clothes, but that after I was old enough to have input into what I wore for the day, she lost interest. That must have been early, because I don't remember a time when she was interested in what I looked like or how I related to my femininity. Clothes, hair, jewelry, glittery hair toys, princess wands, all of the girly stuff--nope. Was Mom even involved in finding my first bra? I can't remember.

For the events associated with Mom's death, I wore clothes that were more carefully chosen than usual, clothes that, uncharacteristically for me, more or less fit. I chose them for decent appropriateness, for respect for the occasion. But I remember getting dressed for the visitation, looking at myself in the mirror, and thinking that I looked good.

It's hard to express how unprecedented that thought was, and how wrong it felt. It felt as if I were looking with new eyes. And it felt like robbing the dead. And it still does. The bubble of interest in girly things that I've mentioned now and again in my blog, has been bubbling rather more since Mom died. But those bubbles feel like betrayals. Do you remember the bit in Twister?

He didn't keep his part of the bargain.
Which part?
To spend his life pining for you and die miserable and alone.
That so much to ask?

OK, it's just a mood thing, but that bit of dialogue reflects the absurd-but-I-feel-it-all-the-same mood of the thought that if I were a decent daughter, I would continue to shun femininity after Mom's death, just as I did it in her life, because femininity belongs to her.

But there was that moment, that "Huh. I look good," moment. As if a part of my brain was waiting to seize on my feminine identity, and wasn't prepared even to wait a decent interval, not even until the funeral was over, before doing so. The woman is dead, long live the woman. Treason.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Rambling: Meh.

Meh.

Something's wrong.

I don't really have a name for it. Waning interest? Hobby fade? Flat creativity?

See, once in a while I look at all of the things I do, and my eyes glaze over and I wonder why I do them, and I suspect that they're all an utter waste of time. But not a waste of talent, because part of the experience is the belief that I have no talent and that aspiring to demonstrate any is amusing. Funny. Ha.

I assume that it's a form of depression, but I don't know where it comes from. Last time, I theorized that it was a result of eliminating online perfume shopping--not on the theory that online perfume shopping is an urgently important thing, but instead on the theory that shopping, even when it doesn't often lead to buying, produces dopamine.

But last time wasn't as bad as this time threatens to be. Then, I was, I think, adequately confident that there was talent in there, and I just lamented that I was too disinterested to do anything with it. This time? Meh. Why bother? I'll never produce anything worthwhile anyway, at work or in my hobbies.

Yes, there is a part of my brain still saying, "Stop that! Of course you have talent, you're just wallowing! You just have to put some work into...something. Remember that ten thousand hours thing?" Then another part of my brain is replaying Danny DeVito in Matilda saying "Some will only be really good at making Jell-O salad," and telling me that I'm not even good at making Jell-O salad and I'm probably fooling myself about the fried chicken.

Writing? Feh. Flat burblings; a waste of time.

Gardening? Meh. I prepped too much ground and I can't even take care of it. And all those flowers in the yard at home come from other people's work.

Sewing? Pfft. I don't even press the clothes that I sew. Everybody else is doing Me-Made May, and look at what I'm wearing--some no-press white shirt that I bought from Eddie Bauer.

Perfume? Eh. I've fallen behind. I have nothing original to say. I know nothing.

Meh. Feh. Bleah. Pfft.

Maybe I need to eat a great deal of chicken.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Rambling: Grown up, not so much

A little while ago, a cool, well-dressed girl--well, woman--complimented the brooch that I was wearing. My instinctive reaction was to feel wary, as if I'd been complimented in junior high gym class, but I managed to thank her properly.

A few minutes after that, another cool, well-dressed woman smiled at me when we happened to make eye contact as I was driving. My first thought was, "Why is she smiling at me? I'm not cool."

Wow.

Apparently I'm still in junior high, at least when it comes to self-esteem with female peers. I even look nervously at that word "peers", because I don't feel like the peer of a cool, well-dressed girl.

This is the kind of thing that I would normally burble about for a dozen more paragraphs, but it seems that I'm just going to leave the thought right here.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Sewing: Getting what I want

So, one of the advantages of sewing is that I can make whatever clothes I want. Sometimes I forget that.

Now, "whatever clothes I want" has limits. It doesn't include, say, a strapless silk taffeta ball gown. But even my current moderate skill level gives me a fair bit of control.

For example, the other day in the garden, I realized that I would really like to be wearing:

• A fairly loose-fitting woven shirt
• in a color or pattern that won't emphasize stains
• made of a coarse-woven linen or cotton 
• with three-quarter length drop-shoulder sleeves
• with long tails
• and velcro-closable pockets
• that are lined with light-colored China silk or fine-woven cotton.

Why? Well, I guess loose-fitting and concealing stains doesn't need explanation for gardening. Coarse-woven fabrics let air in and are therefore cooler. That sleeve length will save me from perpetually rolling my sleeves up while still mostly keeping my arms from sunburning. The drop sleeves give me maximum arm movement, and the long tails will keep me from wondering if I'm showing an inappropriate amount of back skin when I bend over. The velcroable pockets will hold seed packets or even naked seeds and keep the seeds from falling all over when I bend. The tightly-woven China silk will keep the seeds from falling right through the loose weave of the rest of the shirt.

See? What are the odds that I could go to a store and demand that? Oh, and I'll stitch down every facing and seam so that nothing flaps around in the wash and I can wear the shirt without having to press it. Because pressing a garden shirt is just silly.

Then there's pajamas. I don't really have any fancy demands for pajamas, other than insisting that they not have those annoying loose lapel-style facings that flap out. For pajamas, I mainly want silliness. I think I want a simple round neckline with a faced band in a contrasting color. And similar outside-facing contrasting cuffs. In circus colors. Imagine Easter-egg blue with a yellow neck facing and cherry red cuffs. Or maybe polka dots should be involved.

And I already made that cooking coat. It's working just dandy, but I need a least one more so I have something to wear tonight while the chicken-scented coat that I wore last night is in the wash.

That is all.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Gardening: Dryfarming Tomatoes

This is supposed to be a bad water year. The reservoirs are at...er...sixty percent? Sixty percent of normal for this time of year? Somewhere low. The snowpack is lousy. It's gonna be dry. So this seems like the perfect year to try dryfarming techniques--dryfarming being the growing of crops without any added water.

So I'm going to plant a few tomatoes tomorrow according to the following plan:

• I'll space them at least four feet apart. Each tomato will "own" the entire width of its four-foot-wide wide row, and will be at least four feet from the next tomato down the row. The paths between those four-foot rows are two feet wide, so that means that they'll technically be six feet apart in that direction, though path footage doesn't quite count.
• I'll put them in rows that march toward increasing afternoon shade--at least, I will if I get around to tilling a little more land; the shadier area probably won't get planted until next weekend. This isn't necessarily a dryfarming practice, but it'll be interesting to see how the plants fare with more shade versus less.
• I'll plant them deep, with foliage along much of the stem snipped off and the stem buried up to the last big tuft of foliage at the top. When I Google dryfarming tomatoes, this is recommended, I assume so that you can get those deep roots started from the very beginning. (And maybe having minimal foliage during transplant-shock time is also good?)
• I'll plant them into weed barrier/landscape fabric. The soil has already been amended with some manure and fertilizer and tilled. I don't know if tilling is good for dryfarming, but it's done.

An aside: The landscape fabric is not actually a dryfarming practice--I think. Dryfarming recommendations are that you prevent absolutely all competing plants--no weeds, no cover crop, no nothing. But the usual method of doing this is to grow in bare frequently-hoed dirt, and in fact a few inches of "dust mulch" to break the capillary barrier between the deeper soil and the surface, so that water doesn't wick up and evaporate into the air.

I was a little concerned that landscape fabric would keep that whole capillary thing going. However, there are studies that dispute the dust mulch theory, and nobody seems to dispute the idea that weeds will steal water from the crop. And I know my slack weeding habits. So weed barrier it is. We'll see how that works out.

• I'll stake... OK, I'm not sure what my plan should be here. I don't have to decide before tomorrow; tomorrow I'll just pound a tall stake in the ground near each plant. But does dryfarming care whether you do the one-stem thing, pruning off extra branches? Or does it prefer a bushy plant? Or does it prefer that they just flop on the ground? More research is called for.
• I'll water deeeeeeeep the day that I plant. That seems vaguely counter to the dryfarming thing, but nobody seems to be suggesting that you don't water when planting, and I don't want a shallow layer of damp soil encouraging shallow roots, and I'd guess that the longer that dose of water lasts, the better for the plant trying to recover from transplant shock. Now, in theory I should discover that there's retained winter water a few inches down, so I shouldn't have to add that much water. We'll see. I'm also thinking maybe I want to water at each plant's spot, maybe with a bubbler running low for a good long time, rather than watering deep and wide and covering each tomato's whole four-by-four space.
• After planting, I'll have to restrain the urge to keep dosing the seedlings with water. If they do look on the verge of death and I decide that I must water, I'm thinking that I want to water deeeeeeeep again, after as long a wait as possible, to keep them from getting addicted to regular fixes of water.
• According to my reading, I should have started with early tomatoes, like Early Girl. I didn't. Oh, well.
• I'm hoping for at least one more good rain, while the tomatoes are settling in.

One thing that will reduce the validity of this as an experiment is that the tomatoes will start just a few feet from where the strawberries end, and the strawberries are going to be given a decent amount of water, some of which will no doubt drift toward the tomatoes. For tomato survival, it's probably good that the tomatoes with more sun will be closest to this stolen water, and the ones with more shade will be further. For scientific purposes, there are too many tangled factors to make this a decent experiment.

That is all. Please wish my tomatoes luck. They're eyeing me suspiciously from their pots on the deck.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Sewing: Sewing

I should be sewing.

Well, maybe not right this minute, because right this minute I'm writing, and I approve of writing, even when I'm just babbling. But during a lot of those times when I'm idly clicking through online forums and watching TV, I could be sewing. It's after dark, after all, so I can't be gardening. And, well, looking around I can see that I could certainly be doing a little housecleaning, but that wouldn't take that much time if I actually did a little of it reliably, and then we'd be back to should-be-sewing.

I was just reading one of those "use your stash because someday we all die!" threads. That's what made me think of it. Plus, I really want to wear the key-lime-pie-green Liberty Shirt that I cut months ago.

I did more babbling on this subject, but I read it over and found it really boring, so I'm going to find a nice cat picture and click Publish.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Perfume: Resolutions. And, by the way, Youth Dew.

So I've been declaring perfume acquisition resolutions.

Rule 1: Buy the smallest available bottle.

I have no need for 100ml of perfume. Or 30ml. Heck, I have samples of things that I love that I haven't used up. I would have said before that there's no reason to own more than 15ml; now I'm concluding that for most fragrances, there's no need for me to own more than 5ml.

Rule 2: Spend my money where it counts, in terms of encouraging the market to produce the perfumes that I want.

Right now, I've decided that "where it counts" for me is small and indie and artisan perfumers. (What's the difference between those three? I dunno. A number of houses seem to qualify on all three grounds.) Perfumers that rebel against annoying regulations--for example, participants in the Outlaw Perfume Project--get bonus points.

Why am I telling you all this? Because, for once, I've actually followed some of my resolutions. My perfume purchases of the nearish past are;

• Aftelier Honey Blossom in the itty bitty "Barbie fifth" 2ml bottle.
• Providence Perfume Co Moss Gown in the small 7.5ml size.

Yay resolutions!

Today, on the other hand, I wore Estee Lauder Youth Dew. The perfume, not the bath oil. New. (Ish; I bought it a few months ago.) My first thought, when I sprayed it, was "hairspray." Except, I can't actually identify any hairsprayish note in Youth Dew's fog of spicy, er, spiciness. My theory is that every beauty parlor that I entered as a child was filled with women wearing Youth Dew.

That is all.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.