Wednesday Wanty: summer shoes

So, that whole getting-back-into-work thing kind of hit me like a big scary truck full of unanswered emails.  But I figured you’d all be here when I got back anyway (those of you who aren’t, you know, friends from Facebook.)

Speaking of Facebook!  A Large Pink Woman now has a page there, for your convenience and my own self-aggrandizing.

Anyhow, to the topic at hand:  summer shoes.  Always a problem in Wellington, what with summer being pretty nonexistent, or at least appearing only in 6-hour snatches in between gross humid rain and cold sleety rain.  Generally, one spends half the summer months still in stockings on the offchance, or in the same waterproof closed-toe flats one is bored sick of through constant winter use.

Add to that my personal list of criteria for summer shoes:

• some heel
• not too much heel
• super-comfortable yet super-cute
• preferably on sale for under $100
• “looks right” (massively subjective call based on pure gut instinct)
• fantastic enough that I am happy for them to be my single pair of summer shoes for a few years to come, given the aforementioned crap weather and thus lack of chances to wear the damn things

… and you can see where I might have a wee problem.  Thankfully I have a smaller-than-average shoe size which is usually in stock or I’d be right up shit creek.

Plus it seems that comfy flat sandals are basically forbidden from being cute/edgy/punk; compare Ultra Shoes’ flats-and-sandals page to their high heels and you should see what I mean.  Ziera, always in conflict between its comfortable-shoes-for-the-older-demographic and young-and-funky-but-coincidentally-really-comfortable styles, is definitely channelling the former this season.

Molly N, my beloved Molly N, provides a beacon of hope.  But they’re not in bloody Wellington any more, thank you so much Mr Recession, so my shopping ability is curtailed.  This makes me a little grumpy, because really, nothing should ever be seen as a positive reason to move back to Auckland.  So you Aucklanders can just have your pretty bright comfy summer shoes.  I shall remain Wanty.

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: Voting in style

On 26 November NZ got its election on!  And though walking a few hundred metres down the road to the local primary school to vote was about the sum total of my house-leaving for the day, I was damned if (as a new and eager fatshion blogging girl) I wasn’t going to throw together something passably cute to wear.

The City Chic military dress is one of my favourite purchases from there over the past year, given its decent tailoring and good thick fabric (though I must admit I’d overlook lesser fabric and construction in a heartbeat for anything with epaulets on the boobs.)

Red singlet, red shoes, red lippie, I was good to go.  And probably broadcasting my political alignment less subtly than if I’d just put on a sandwich board reading “PROBABLY VOTES A LITTLE TO THE LEFT” (for any random US readers out there:  our political alignment colours are the opposite to yours.  Which, incidentally, make no sense.)

But anyway, if we did follow the US political colour pattern I’d just be ironically wearing red all the time.  Because red = best colour 4 EVA.

Dress and red singlet – City Chic
Shoes – Kumfs (now Ziera)
Sunglasses – SpecSavers

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: Somewhat-casual Friday

This outfit has become a staple of Fridays once I noticed just how many of my coworkers wear some variety of black-and-white-striped knit tops – knocking out my main casual-Friday contender (my wardrobe cannot be described by honest people as “casual”).

It definitely calls for the purchase of black leggings (a new frontier for aforementioned not-casual wardrobe) to be worn with amazing heels once the current icy snap has passed.

Until then: black top – Zebrano Kakariki organic cotton range, blue tunic and belt – City Chic, stockings – generic and black boots – Kumfs/Ziera.

The tunic is an amazing shape on me and has a cute modesty-preserving crossover panel at the front.  Also, BLUE, because I am finally defeating my last “ew, school uniform-esque” inhibitions about dark blue.  Not quite there with navy.

The boots are very much on their last legs (the top elastic on one leg has now given out twice, offering irrefutable proof that my left left is ever so slightly fatter than my right), and certainly given the years of service they deserve a quiet retirement; they were basically my everyday winter footwear through five years of stomping up disgusting Wellington hills to university.

But they’re so damn comfortable, and I have just had such little luck finding suitable replacement (for under $400) that I force them to carry on filling that flat-black-boot niche on the shoerack.  I am a cruel mistress.