Berry berry nice … dress!

My one regret about purchasing this most excellent dress from City Chic is that I lacked the funds to also get it in blue.  And then in leopard print.  And then in the third colour they released it in which has totally slipped my mind (what can I say, it’s nearly Christmas!)

The colour is amazing, the shape is lovely, the top is a nice basic black stretch fabric.  Although it can be a little transparent, I live in Wellington, so adding a singlet or short-sleeved top under it is par for the course anyway.

And above all, the height of clothing awesomeness as far as I’m concerned:  dress.  With.  Pockets.  At some point I should try to isolate why I find that such a gold star for clothing – initial hunches go to a combination of adding texture, adding utility, and breaking down stupid gender barriers.

It’s also a pretty casual dress, but fortunately I work in an office where casual/edgy looks are fine as long as they’re not sloppy, and it’s very easy to make it look more business-appropriate-but-obviously-still-bright-fuchsia.

First look:  with newly-cut straightened hair, which does frankly always make people read you as more “professional” or “put-together” (no racist/class assumptions here, no sir.)  But it was casual Friday, so I made it fun with the stripes and comfortable with my still-barely-hanging-in-there black Kumfs boots.

At this point, I’d sell baby-flavoured donuts for good boots.  And by “good” I do indeed mean “boots which perfectly fulfil my requirements regarding style and price.”

The fabric tie around the belly came with the dress, but I swap it out whenever a more formal look is called for (see below) or I feel the need for a little tension around my waist.

Thus to my second look, another product of that flash of inspiration I had about my wardrobe finally being in a somewhat-versatile state.  The fuchsia cowl-neck top I got from Staxs donkey’s years ago isn’t quite the same shade as the skirt, but I figured I could get all crafty.  And by “crafty” I mean “I figured I was wearing dark berry glasses anyway, so let’s just throw everything pinky-purple I own at this and see how it goes.”

I think it went well.

The belt this time came off a Jacqui E dress and looked frankly awesome as long as I checked it every now and then to check it was still nicely lined up and holding together – it’s entirely ornamental, so no buckles, no studs, the whole thing stays “belted” through the sheer friction of plastic on plastic.  Which is not much friction at all.

Long sleeves are another good way to fake office-wear-formality and the cowl neck simultaneously hides and draws attention to the potential for cleavage.  Cleavage =/= office wear, apparently, and I base that on a masochistic reading of far too many Stuff comments.

My stance, forged in the fires of working retail and facing borderline sexual harassment since these puppies showed up at the age of 11?  There is no hiding my boobs.  Sometimes they get squished together.  If their presence and the evidence of their squishedness is what makes me “look trashy” then I am condemned to looking “trashy” whether I’m in my pyjamas or a raincoat.

So … I’m going to dress how I like, and sometimes that will mean throwing a bone or two to the haters in order to decrease some of the stress in my life.

I’m also going to laugh myself silly/roll my eyes at the contradictions, as shown above:  yeah, hiding my bust by draping bright pink fabric over it, that’ll work.

The chief accessory was my beloved Diva’s Championship necklace, a gift from my bestie last Christmas and not-very-subtle signal to any other WWE fans out there that I am one of their kind.

Lipgloss is a pretty ancient Sephora purchase, annoyingly sticky yet the best purple shade I’ve managed to find.

Shoes?  My beloved checkerboards from Molly N, the one true way to take attention away from my cleavage.  Or my messy hair.  Or anything, really.  I could probably be wearing hot pink capris and a t-shirt saying “Fornicate the Constabulary” and no one would notice if I were in these heels.

Outfit 1: dress and shrug – City Chic
Boots – Kumfs

Outfit 2: dress – City Chic
Top – Staxs
Shoes – Molly N
Necklace – wweshop.com

OOTD: Smurfin’ smurfed

The sum total of comments I received on this outfit from workmates consisted of “you’re looking very colourful today” and “you look like you’re wearing a blue onesie under your dress”.  Which I suppose was 75% positive?

On a [turned out to be futile, but more on that another day] Kirkcaldie’s stocking run I bit the bullet and bought some “aquamarine” tights with my standard black opaques.  Fortunately, as detailed previously, my wardrobe is now somewhat approaching versatility, so I realised that with enough dark grey/black inbetween, they’d just match my blue City Chic top.

Add a bright-red belt, and well, I was being downright courageous with my outfit choices.

And, as I realised once I came to take this photo, I looked like a damn Smurf.  And we don’t want to get me started on the shitty gender issues about the Smurfs, or that damn annoying song, or how my partner occasionally comments that Gargamel “would be a lovely name for our daughter”.

Smurfdom aside, though, I was happy with this look.  A bit playful for classic business work attire, but as I’ve also mentioned previously, my workplace can handle a bit of playful/random/eclectic/call it what you will.

Unfortunately, it’s not a look that I can repeat any time soon due to aforementioned futile stocking shopping run.  But … really, more on that later.

The dress is a recent Jacqui E number, very dark grey with adorable detailing on the sleeves and that queen of features, pockets.  Got to love the dresses with pockets.  There’s something amazingly masculine about being able to slouch around in a twee little secretary dress with one’s hands in one’s pockets.

The belt is slightly problematic: being grade-A City Chic plastic belting, the buckle does not deal with strain well so I’m having to really work the elastic.  Plus, there’s little to no vertical strength, so when faced by such an awesome rack as mine, the whole thing tends to fold down over itself, especially when sitting at a desk for a while.  The solution for me is wearing it a little lower, more at high-waist level than immediately under-bust, but it’s still a bit of a constant-adjustment item.

The only question left is, does this count as colourblocking?  I would say not so much.  It’s a lot closer to colourblocking than certain Stuff “fashion” “bloggers” might dare to tread, but it’s still damn safe.

Until the coat comes on.

This is my pride and joy at the moment; a wool/poly blend bright purple coat from The Carpenter’s Daughter and a total deal at under half price.  I have been sceptical in my past of directing a big of scorn at some of the mainline NZ plus-size stores, largely on the basis of my instinctive, undying hatred for shapeless floral tunic tops.  Give me tailoring or give me death!  But when this coat came into my life, all was forgiven.

And I don’t think anything counts as safe when it’s purple, aquamarine, and red all up in there.

Outfit details:

Blue top/red belt: City Chic
Dress: Jacqui E
Stockings: Columbine but oh there’s a rant about those forthcoming
Shoes: Ecco
Jacket: The Carpenter’s Daughter

OOTD: ode to a versatile wardrobe

It’s been a very long time coming, but I am finally starting to have a semi-versatile wardrobe.

Back in the university days it was easy, of course:  lots of black skirts and blue jeans with a variety of black/red t-shirts and a few black cardigans, bog-standard black stockings, etc. etc.  It was fairly monochromatic and mainly just served the purpose of ensuring I wasn’t going to lectures naked (an especially poor idea in Wellington).

Then the need for a work wardrobe came, and it became a lot easier to just buy a whole outfit at a time – sure, I could get that dress, but I would have nothing to wear it with, so I’d also buy that cardigan and that belt.  And then I’d need another dress, which could go with the previous cardigan (anyway, everything goes with black cardigans) but would also be a completely new, vital-addition-to-my-working-week outfit if I got that top.

Long story short: lots of individual outfits, a bit of crossover (because everything was still pretty much black and red) but there wasn’t really much ability to say “right, this is clean, this hasn’t been worn in a while, and the weather’s crap so these boots too.”

(Also, no pants.  It was just hella easier on the mind, soul and wallet to forego pants for about five years, until the Great City Chic Jeans Revelation of a few months ago.)

But now!  Now we’re getting there, and I no longer feel quite so stressed about getting every piece of laundry done in the weekend to ensure I have sufficient work outfits, and no longer feel quite as bummed when my friends are playing outfit-designer with their far larger wardrobes.

So anyway, it was a Wednesday, it was raining, and I was feeling like a fairly relaxed look was called for.

Now, I feel like a bad budding-fashion blogger for saying so, but one of the secrets to my newfound ability to throw random items together and call them an outfit has involved limiting my shopping to about two stores: City Chic (I can feel your surprise from here) and Jacqui E, and keeping items to within a fairly narrow range: basically everything is a top-which-goes-under-dresses, or a dress, or a top-which-goes-over-dresses.  And a lot of it is black.  Or red.

I’m kind of talking myself out of this post here, but the fact is that I can finally get up in the morning without anal-retentively laying out my clothes the night before (and panicked doing handwashing to ensure I have stockings) and go to work looking entirely business-casual enough for the environment I’m in.

So that’s a blue top, black-and-white dress, and black bolero shrug from City Chic, over black stockings 101 and my trusty red Kumfs boots.  The necklace was a gift from the mother-in-law, and is lovely and chunky in green and purple, which … somehow ties the whole look together.

If there’s a moral to this story it’s that sometimes outfits just work and it doesn’t pay to overthink it.

Also, the dress has pockets, and dresses-with-pockets are basically infallible.

Here’s a closeup I prepared earlier, sans shrug:

 

I must say, the crossover on the bodice does wonderful things to The Girls.

All this post is really about is celebrating the strange milestone that is my realisation the morning I wore this, that I had many options of tops to go with this dress.  It could’ve been a pink or mint knit top with a white shrug over the top, a red singlet and a leopard-print shrug, whatever it was I felt in the mood for.

The modular phase of wardrobe-building is declared Mission Accomplished.  The dawn of a new buying-random-outfits-without-them-filling-a-specific-gap-in-my-wardrobe era has risen.

… Wait, can dawn actually rise?

OOTD: Take that, subspace! (where subspace = fashion “rules”)

Or rather, “Take that, silly mainstream notions about pattern-mixing!”  But only because I didn’t know how many of my … one readers would get a reference to the classic “PARTY PARTY PARTY / SUCK BITE SUCK BITE” flea-treatment ads.

Admittedly, for a walk on the wild side of fashion, where pink and orange meet in darkened alleyways to share moments of illicit passion and plaid shirts strut down the main drag yelling “COME AT ME, BRO” to passing cars, mine was a pretty tame one – there’s a lot of safe dark neutral between the leopard print belt and the checkerboard heels.

Yep.  Leopard print belt.  Checkerboard heels.

And one fabulous damn pose.

Like 90% of my outfits, this one is almost pure City Chic (though recent trips down to The Carpenter’s Daughter on Featherston are convincing me there could be two whole stores in Wellington which stock multiple things which I like and which fit me), but I have to give a shout-out to my besties down at Molly N.

This is as shameless a plug as I will ever make on this blog, promise:  buy shoes from Molly N.  Kiwi designer, ethical manufacturing practices, and the heels are so well-balanced you will pinch yourself to ensure you’re not in some Shoe Nirvana Dreamland.

The most important fact about this outfit, however, is the reaction it got.  Not the “my gods and little wizards you look awesome” reaction, though there was plenty of that (and I make no apologies for puffing myself up on my own darn blog) – it was the universal cry of “STEPHANIE.  YOU’RE WEARING PANTS!”

Yep, pants.  Jeans.  Things what are not skirts or dresses.  It has been quite some time – enough time that there’s probably a much longer post on The Eternal Quest For Pants in my future.  But the photographic proof is undeniable:  I am once more a member of the pants-wearing club (though certain friends of mine would definitely point out that the no-pants club is where it’s at).

Here’s a closeup, shamelessly taken in the bathroom while other [drunk] people hammered at the door:

But I couldn’t help it, their lighting is far better (and the nouveau backdrop is a definite winner).

And an even better closeup (taken at home, hence lack of stylish backdrop), so you can admire my hair’s height and actual done-up-ness:

I am not a doer-up-of-hair as a rule (she says, blogging post-shower with wet combed hair tied into two ponytails for ease of sleeping on) and the art of the beehive is a difficult one, especially for a lazybones like me who can’t be bothered remembering to buy a proper rat-tail comb.  The main secerets are (1) tease that sucker till your arms hurt, (2) all the hairspray ever, and by “hairspray” I mean that Schwarzkopf product that comes in the ridiculous, huge, threatening black cans and is technically termed a “lacquer”.  Trust me, you’ll spend all evening telling people to touch your hair so you can see the look of wonder on their face when they realise … it’s pretty damn plasticky, but doesn’t look it.

Other notes … the lippy is Gypsy Rose by Avon, previously teased in my September Swag post.  I love it so damn much you better believe it’s getting its own post, perhaps along with its pink mate.  Phwoar.

The leopard print belt is adorably fuzzy and has some good structure to it, so it doesn’t crumple horizontally the way some City Chic plastic belts do (another reason to save up for some TCD real-cow products).  People were petting my under-boob area all night, but fortunately that’s how my buddies and I roll.

The nails are Not Really A Waitress by OPI under, you guessed it, Black Shatter – and yep, more on that later!

Outfit:

Jeans, black tunic, leopard print belt – City Chic
Checkerboard heels – Molly N
Blue singlet – Farmers bog-standard brand