- Doubleknit Blazer: Halogen via Nordstrom’s
- Dot-Matrix Dress: Target
- Belt (worn backwards): Forever 21
- Black Tights: HUE
- Brown Riding Boots: Franco Sarto via Zappos.com
- Teal Earrings: Mall vendor
When my late, great advisor in graduate school (the first time) thought I needed a little prompting to get going on a writing project (not that that ever happened. Ever. Of course not.), he would say, “[S.], the tempus is really starting to fugit on this one.” Or sometimes he’d just an e-mail with the subject heading, “the tempus is fugiting!” and a description of what I was supposed to be working on in the body of the e-mail. (Knowing now how little time he had left when he sent some of those e-mails, I wish I had spent more time just listening to him and less time frantically responding to those e-mails, but that somewhat cruel irony is better left for another day). It wasn’t really all that funny a way of trying to get me off the dime (again, that was never necessary! ever!), it was just one of those sort of classic things about him: that he was the kind of person who felt so strongly about your needing to meet a deadline that he had to express it partially in Latin.
But that time has come, now, on a number of projects, as I hurtle towards graduation (a word that never sounded so sweet). Time really is flying by, and there are days that I struggle to break through the deep procrastination that comes from not having a realistic plan for getting it all done on time and in a way that I’m proud of (note to Congress: your inability to resist the temptation to change federal law regarding religious refusals in health care is not helping. Settle down so I can finish writing, already!). But some days are better than others, and I’ve been glad to have some time during this “spring break” (hah!) to work in more uninterrupted blocks than I would normally be able to. We’ll get there, even if I have to just keep breathing through it sometimes. And who knows, being overdressed for a day in the library can’t hurt, right?
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- Black and Red Faux-Wrap Dress: Express, circa 1999
- Red Cardigan: Vintage Michael Kors, mommed
- Black Tights: HUE
- Black Croc Wedges: Stuart Weitzman via Bloomingdale’s
- Necklace: gifted
I didn’t plan it this way, but this outfit is doing the time warp in a serious way, blending a dress I got in eleventh grade with the first ever pair of “grown up shoes” I got when I had a job that could pay for food, heat and rent at the same time with a sweater that was the first of many workhorse items I’ve inherited from my mother. It’s one of the great—and continually surprising—things about clothes: I’m willing to bet every item in your closet has a story, and they come together in often-hilarious ways that reveal things about us. For example: if this outfit could talk, it would say, “yup! Still kind of into red. And still here. Really. If I were a person, I could have had a bat mitzvah by now, and I’m still in your closet.”
Setting aside for a moment the absurd age of this charming fire hazard of a garment aside (seriously, folks, the biblical prohibition on poly blends is there for a reason!), this last red-out look is another red-on-black combination. Instead of red on white and black, though, it’s red on wine and black, giving this red topper a slightly different kind of emphasis. And instead of using a neutral base to mute or calm a bright colored accent piece, here, I’m doubling down on the brightness, using the interplay between the sweater and the dress to downplay the slightly goofy pattern and make the bright sweater pop even more. It’s not a strategy for the faint of heart, but I liked the way it worked out here, making an outfit whose demure silhouette says “I know how to play by the rules” into something much more special.
Remixing a beloved and boldly-patterned dress can be a trick, no matter how versatile the piece originally seems. Drawn as I am to these items, after a few iterations, I often feel like I’ve run smack into the wall of cardigan-and-blazer rotation and am fresh out of new things to do. But it’s in the ability of these kinds of pieces to function both as blank canvases and as one-and-done standbys that their real value lies; as I was trying to get out the door this morning, knowing that I could combine this dress and a pair of black tights and end up having something to wear, no matter what else I did, gave me that little extra oomph to try something new, and end up wearing a 13-year-old dress in a way I’d never tried before. Partying, I suppose, like it was 1999.
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- Necklace: Swapped
- Sweater/Jacket Thing: Vintage Piazza Sempione, mommed
- Maroon Maxi Skirt (worn as a midi dress): Old Navy
- Black Boots: Born ‘Mallory,’ gift from husband D.
- Brown Woven Belt: Loft
- Not Pictured: Black Tights: HUE
Well, hello there! We’re back from two (two!) trips with our big-girl 5-month-old (yikes!) in one week (about which more later), and though rejuvenated by visits to friends and family, we’re all a bit exhausted and facing a monster case of the Mondays, so I’ll keep this one short and sweet. This is another attempt at remixing this Old Navy maxi skirt as a midi dress, using some of the same techniques I used here: a topper to hide the nursing bra straps, a belt to provide some waist definition and hold the whole thing in place. This version is a bit more obviously wintry, but has a bit of a funky, country vibe with the boots overlapping the skirt hem. Though I’m not 100% sold on the proportions (which somehow managed to feel slightly Hey, Dude! (dare I date myself), and give me a serious case of distressingly-flattened hindquarters), I love the combination of cream and maroon here, with the pop of turquoise from the necklace. This boxier-than-I’d-normally-wear jacket has also become an MVP of my new-mom days, at the right level of formality for a bigger range of situations than I’d have initially imagined. All in all, I think the first attempt was more successful, but for a combination of not-quites on a crazy Monday morning, I’ll take it and run.
Midis with boots: awesome or a little too cowgirl for big city life? I’m thinking of chopping the hem on this skirt to turn it into a proper high-waisted midi skirt in the near future. Thoughts? Tips for hemming jersey?
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One last thought: I’d be so honored and thankful if you’d take a minute to vote for me in the Circle of Moms’ search for the Top 25 Fashion and Beauty bloggers! You can click here to vote (or the button in the sidebar), once per day until February 28, 2012. (No registration required).
- Chambray Shirtdress: Target
- Burgundy Tights: HUE
- Red Scarf (worn as cowl): Malo, mommed
- Brown Riding Boots: Franco Sarto via Zappos
- Brown Woven Belt: LOFT
Last week, Lex asked me about my adventures with crocodiles that I teased a while back. The resulting tale sweeps broadly enough to link together this outfit (and yet another analogous-reds combination), forty days of wandering in the desert, new parenthood and yesterday’s misadventures. If it had a twee soundtrack, it would be the stuff that Wes Anderson films are made of…or a reason to call the Society the for Prevention of Cruelty to Metaphors. It’s also something I’ve never shared. Here we go:
* * *
It’s mid-July of 2004 and though it’s “winter” in the Northern part of Western Australia, you wouldn’t know it: here, “winter” means no flooding, soaking rain, a few extra hours in the morning before the temperature tops 100F, and an entirely different cast of hazardous characters. It is the most beautiful place I have ever been, desolate and open and undisturbed, but also terrifying, like a hot version of Antarctica, like living on the moon. We are deep in the King Leopold Ranges of the central Kimberley, where we have been for some fifteen days. Other than the morning we hiked out to the road to meet the re-ration truck, we have seen no other humans since we left Broome. We have seen no other humans because there aren’t any: the population density of this part of Western Australia is .247 people per square kilometer, vastly outnumbered by sheep, kangaroos, cows (feral and domestic), and snakes. We’ve been assigned random spots along the banks of a stream for twenty-four hour “solos,” so here I am, all alone with a copy of David Amsden, my journal, and a camera. Probably, there are pictures of my desperately swollen feet to mark the occasion sitting on a memory card somewhere in our house.
* * *
I am, at this precise moment, more alone than I have ever been in my life, and more than I ever will be again. Six months ago, in what I have to fairly describe as a fit of late-adolescent pique, I decided to follow through on a longstanding ambition to take a National Outdoor Leadership School course, and because I was petulant and generally pretty aggravating and sick of being in Charlottesville and nineteen, I picked the one that sounds furthest away and most dramatic in the catalog. Broome, the tiny town on the northern tip of Western Australia we left from, is nearly 14,000 miles from home: it is almost literally as far away as I could possibly go.
Of course, life has changed since then. Whatever the great crisis of the winter of my second year of college was, it has more or less subsided, I’ve wrapped up the term and come home, and I’ve met D., and with the heady self-assurance of being young and strangely more reckless than either of us usually are, we’re oddly serious and confident about each other almost immediately. When it finally comes time to get on a plane and fly half way around the world, I am excited but also almost mournful. I land in Auckland after a day and a half worth of plane flights and feel like I’ve landed in Lost in Translation without the ironic distance.
I wander around New Zealand for three weeks in a haze of late-teen angst and insecurity, staying in hostels and riding buses through a landscape that really does look exactly like the establishing shots in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Thanks to cheap international phone cards, I talk to D. most days. I climb a mountain that appears in the opening sequence to The Two Towers, and jump out of a low-flying airplane, but those are both tales for another time. I watch a lot of rugby, re-read A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius in anonymous restaurants, and don’t drink even though it’s legal. I write in a journal. A lot.
There are twelve of us on the course, and two instructors. Eleven women and three men in total. Mostly American college students, with two friends finishing up a year volunteering with Americorps and doing this as a stop on a world tour they’re taking together. We fall in and out of alliances, but no one can get voted off the island. We are it, we fourteen strangers, in the desert, for 35 days.
We start out with hazard training. The take us to a snake farm and try to teach us to identify poisonous and non-poisonous snakes (and because there are 10 college girls and snakes, there are embarrassing pictures). The highlight of the afternoon is the trip to the croc park, though, where captured, ancient saltwater crocodiles laze about in caged sections of a muddy stream. They look like dinosaurs. We talk about how to identify one in the water without disturbing it, about safety precautions when setting up campsites and gathering water. An attendant torments an eighty year old croc with a ball. The croc suddenly leaps from the water and runs for the large, pink ball, which deflates in his jaws. The image haunts me. A few times during our 35 days in the bush we see eyes in the water, and one night a small monitor lizard wakes me up running up the beach to the rock I’m sleeping on. I won’t forget them. Ever.
The NOLS philosophy doesn’t generally involve a lot of explaining why you’re being asked to do what you’re doing. There’s also a resistance to the use of technology that’s either quaint or incredibly aggravating, depending on your point of view, so here we are, wandering in the desert with topographical maps and compases and nary a GPS or a marked hiking trail in sight. Every day, when we divide into two groups to hike to our next campsite, each group is given a “snake beacon,” that will send off an alarm to summon a Medivac if necessary. We take on increasing leadership roles in baby steps: first rotating who leads the group with an instructor to assist with navigating, then being “leader for the day” with no instructor assistance but the instructor present, then off on our own in groups of six for the day, with instructions to meet at an X on the map by evening, then, eventually, on our own in groups of six for the last five days.
* * *
The first day that I was the “leader for the day” was oddly like my first days as a parent. I muddled through in a haze of self-doubt, worrying that I wouldn’t do “well enough,” with no idea what well-enough meant. I remember wanting nothing more than for someone to make decisions for me, to tell me I was “doing it right,” for feedback of some kind that would guide me. I wanted absolution for my unknown and assuredly myriad failings, to have someone show me what to do and how to do it. Unsurprisingly, whatever it was I was looking for—in either case—was not forthcoming.
I’m an ambitious person, but I’m also an instinctual conflict avoider. If something doesn’t work out well, it often doesn’t take me long to develop a once-burned, twice shy approach to insulate myself from the possibility of future failure. I change course, radically if necessary, to try to give myself the best shot, to evade the hot, buttered boiling sensation of having screwed up. I do my best to fight this instinct, but there’s no denying I feel it. Even yesterday: I received some mildly disappointing news and remember that feeling flooding my senses, the desire not to even try again, to close doors, to hide.
But there is no running away in the desert, and there’s no “doing it right,” either. There’s only getting from here to there, only finding the X by nightfall. You have to live with the person you are and the things you do every day, to keep putting one foot in front of the other in the face of embarrassment, failure, misstatement, sunburn, severe aggravation. There is no such thing as conflict avoidance, and there is no one to make decisions for you. It doesn’t mean you do everything perfectly—we miscalculated our remaining food supply and ended up so hungry we fought over the crumbs out of the packet of cake mix our instructors gave us to celebrate my 20th birthday—but you do it. And you discover, at the end, that you’ve been doing it all along.
* * *
I’ve never written before about this time in my life, though that in and of itself is a strange realization. Physically, those days changed me: I broke my wrist when I tripped carrying a 70-pound backpack, I may have gotten a mild case of Ross River Fever, I came home with some stress-related GI problems that have never really gone away. But more than that, it very much was the emotional turning point in my life, the moment when I began becoming the person I am today, when my life began to take the shape it now more or less holds.
I didn’t plan on it being the case. Or at least, not in the way I expected. In my teenage frustration I had planned on exhausting myself to the point of clarity, on drowning out the noise in my head with the clear air of long, difficult days. And I suppose that happened, but the real kicker was what all that noise was replaced with. At some point, maybe after that first miserable day trying to lead the group or maybe on that dark night with the monitor lizard or maybe that morning that we were out of food and the stream had run dry and we had to keep going, anyway, I stopped being the person who always ran away and started being the person who ran towards things, who trusted her ability to put one foot in front of the other and keep going.
I am not always that person, and I certainly wasn’t yesterday afternoon, but I’d do better to remind myself—as a parent, as a scholar, as a friend—that I can be, that I pride myself on being the kind of person who solves problems in life, who makes things happen. Someone who doesn’t just want, but does, who doesn’t wait for things to happen to her. Who remembers that there’s no one coming, but knows that that’s okay, anyway.
* * *
If you’ve read this far looking for the kicker of how this relates back to the outfit I’m wearing in these photos: the folks from the Society of the Prevention of Cruelty to Metaphors did indeed call, and suggested that stretching it any further was just inhumane. So I’ll just say this: the aesthetic reminds me of those dusty days and the baking sun, of a climate for which there isn’t really a right thing to wear to protect you from the heat and the vegetation and the sun and the snakes all at once. Call it outback-inspired. Call it a very, very odd kind of power dressing, drawing on a very strange, and often hidden, source of power.
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One last thought: I’d be so honored and thankful if you’d take a minute to vote for me in the Circle of Moms’ search for the Top 25 Fashion and Beauty bloggers! You can click here to vote (or the button in the sidebar), once per day until February 28, 2012. (No registration required).
- Patterned Shirtdress: Target
- Red Jacket/Sweater: Cabi, gift from MIL
- Black Tights: HUE
- Black Croc Wedges: Stuart Weitzman via Bloomingdales
- Necklace: gifted
- Earrings: Old Navy
In the spirit of the season (and, okay, it also might be my favorite color!), I’m featuring a series of red-inspired and red-inclusive outfits this week, with hues from wine to tomato to magenta and back again. For yesterday’s “Everybody Everywear” challenge, I paired bright pink and maroon. Today, I’ve gone for perhaps a more classic combination, the stuff of cute firehouse Dalmatians and newspaper jokes: black and white and red all over.
As promised, I’ve been remixing this shirtdress, which I love for its slightly swishy swirly shape and fun, pop-art-like pattern (for some reason I seem to be collecting Target dresses that invite art-history allusions. I must miss the chics!). It’s continued to impress with its versatility, and with its surprisingly wearable shape: though I can count the number of actually-well-fitting button-ups I’ve had since puberty on one hand, the dress fits well and comfortably, with no awkward gaping or need for crazy fashion-tape experiments. I think it will work well in the spring with bare legs and fun shoes, but I like the slightly modish feel of black tights into black shoes.
This version pairs it with one of the more misunderstood pieces in my closet: this red quasi-blazer cardigan my MIL gave me a few years back. It’s the kind of piece that should be a standout in my closet: it’s my favorite shade of slightly-bluer tomato red, the collar has an interesting shape, it has a built-in belt…yet I’ve struggled to find good ways to wear it. I think that may come from one too many attempts to remix it with pants, since this version seems much more promising. It’s yet another reminder to be mindful of proportions in context: sometimes it’s not the piece itself, but what you pair it with.
Have you had a piece that you’d struggled to style for a long time that just clicked when worn a different way?
However you marked (or didn’t mark!) the occasion, I hope you all had a wonderful, affirming, love-filled February 14th. I’d give you all a big hug of thanks for all your inspiration and insight, but my arms don’t reach that far!
Like what you just read? You can subscribe to Narrowly Tailored via RSS or bloglovin’, or follow me on Twitter to be the first to know what I’m up to. Note: Google Friend Connect will be discontinued in early March, so please shift your subscriptions to RSS or Bloglovin’ before the end of February!
One last thought: I’d be so honored and thankful if you’d take a minute to vote for me in the Circle of Moms’ search for the Top 25 Fashion and Beauty bloggers! You can click here to vote (or the button in the sidebar), once per day until February 28, 2012. (No registration required).
- Necklace: Swapped
- Black Tights: HUE
- Tweed Sweater (again!): Ralph Lauren, mommed
- Black Jersey Dress (again!): Ann Taylor
- Boots (again!): Born “Mallory,” gift from husband D.
- Black Nursing Tank: Bravado Designs via Figure8Maternity.com
I’m breaking several style-blogger rules at once here, using such oft-remixed elements, but I’m hoping it ends up being more “positive testament to unexpected wardrobe versatility” than “wow, could you wear a different sweater?” In my defense, these photos were not taken on consecutive days (sorry: performativity alert! Where’d that pesky fourth wall go?). On the other hand, it’s hard to blame yourself for wearing things you love in different ways: this dress is a constant standby, this boxier-than-usual sweater has been an unexpected postpartum superhero, and the necklace is precisely the right shape to keep baby m. intrigued without a huge risk of her accidentally choking me whilst expressing her enthusiasm for it. (Who said getting dressed with a small child wasn’t exciting?)
But there’s a broader point, lurking behind this meta-remix of an outfit, and it’s one worth reminding myself of: even my old-favorite-ist of old favorites still offers new possibilities. And in a way, that’s both challenging and comforting.
And well-timed. Although I’m not doing anything as organized as a 30-for-30, I am taking a little break from shopping this month. Time and budget are part of the reason, but not all of it. I’m hoping a little time consciously resisting the desire to acquire will give me a little mental clarity and re-energize my creative muscles a bit.
When you’re surrounded by fashion inspiration (thanks, bloggy friends!), and when your body is in a state of flux (not such robust thanks, pregnancy), it’s easy to convince yourself that things that are really “wants” are needs. More times than I’d like to admit, I’ve looked at something and thought, “if I just had…” I’d never need to shop again! My wardrobe would be complete! But it’s like the myth of the last big score (okay, okay, we’ve been watching to much White Collar): the house always wins. And that’s fine! It’s the great thing about fashion, the idea that there are interesting things out there waiting to be discovered and to be used as raw materials for creative styling. But it does mean that the idea of wardrobe completionism (or its more insidious cousin, wardrobe-completionism-as-sense-of-self-completionism) is pretty unhelpful.
The much-ballyhooed piece in this weekend’s WSJ about the superiority of French parenting referenced the Stanford Marshmallow Experiment, where young children were offered two marshmallows if they would wait, in the presence of a single marshmallow, for fifteen minutes. While I’m not a small child with a desperate urge for a sugar high of painful proportions, I have been feeling my own sense of fragmented distractability lately, a strange desire to be constantly adding new things and doing new things. Not shopping isn’t really the solution to this broader problem of needing to be able to sit still and focus on just. one. thing. in a more effective manner, it’s a piece of the puzzle, somehow. I’m hoping that the discipline of the exercise will give me a little breath of fresh air, though, a sense that for a few weeks, nothing new will be jammed into the sometimes-hopelessly-overfull of my days, that I’ll learn to say “that can wait,” or “I don’t need to.” Or at least, I’m crossing my fingers that that will be the case.
Have you ever taken a hiatus from shopping? Just for clothes or for other things? Did you find it clarifying?
Like what you just read? You can subscribe to Narrowly Tailored via RSS or bloglovin’, or follow me on Twitter to be the first to know what I’m up to. Note: Google Friend Connect will be discontinued in early March, so please shift your subscriptions to RSS or Bloglovin’ before the end of February!
One last thought: I’d be so honored and thankful if you’d take a minute to vote for me in the Circle of Moms’ search for the Top 25 Fashion and Beauty bloggers! You can click here to vote (or the button in the sidebar), once per day until February 28, 2012. (No registration required).
- Black Jersey Dress: Ann Taylor, endlessly remixed
- Tweed Asymmetric Blazer: Ralph Lauren, mommed
- Black Tights: HUE
- Black Boots: Born, gift from husband D.
- Warm enough weather to go without a coat in January: ??
After having gone on at some length last week, I’ll keep this post, which is yet another chapter in great saga of “what do you wear when a suit would be overkill,” brief. I went to lunch last week (at the home of the holy grail of oatmeal-raisin cookies*) with the judge I’m clerking for next year (perhaps the one person whose name will never, ever appear on this blog), the current clerks and one of my future co-clerks. It was a mostly social gathering; we talked holidays with small children and revisions on my note and fiction reading that I’ve mostly done between the hours of 3 and 5 a.m. But, social gatherings with employers are still gatherings with employers, which merit dressing a bit more thoughtfully than I would have for an ordinary day at school.
Because it was a predominantly social gathering, and with people who knew I was coming from school, a suit would have been overkill — at least a little bit. Here, I’ve taken advantage of the opportunity to be slightly less formal to wear boots, which I wouldn’t do in an extremely conservative office but which take the outfit to a slightly more fun, original spot. This much-loved blazer has become a go-to for occasions like this during the colder months. In the right weather, it can be worn without an overcoat; its inventive shape adds instant visual interest and punch to an outfit that still sends a message that I understand the requisite level of formality. Worn with a dress, the slightly shorter length helps balance out my long torso, all while defining a waist without looking sexualized. But what I love most about it is much more subtle: the way it makes me feel like me. I’ve never quite been able to pin down why, but this blazer is one of those items that makes me feel like my most powerful, confident, inspired self. Maybe because it was one of the first things I owned for work that wasn’t the same black suit from Banana Republic or J.Crew that every girl on the Hill has, or maybe because the fit was so unexpectedly perfect, but it’s remained a signature business piece for many years as a result, and represents a kind of lodestar in my work wardrobe for my personal breed of power dressing. It’s another great example of how our clothes become imbued with our own lived-in history, the way they take on meanings far beyond the surface image they present to others.
Do you have a favorite item lurking in your closet somewhere, one you consistently compare new purchases and ideas to? What makes it so special to you? Its shape? Its color? Its history? Where’d you get it?
*Local residents get five points for identifying said location.
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- Patterned Shirtdress: (Accidental!) Target
- Teal Cardigan: Caslon via Nordstrom’s, gift from Mom
- Black Tights: HUE
- Brown Riding Bots: Franco Sarto via Zappos
- Belt: Forever21
- Earrings: Old Navy
Much as being a parent in law school (or in any setting where relatively few people have kids) has its “oooh! Look at the pandas!” moments, my particular experience suggests that pandas might not be so rare. In one three-month span this summer and early fall, five children were welcomed by students from my first-year section (of 120) alone.
This is not at all representative of law students as a whole, or even students at my law school, and I don’t know what was in the water last winter that explains the great Section One Baby Boom of Fall 2011. It’s worth noting that it’s not just our child-rearing habits that seem to be ahead of the curve; a decent number of my classmates were married before beginning law school, and that number has grown over the last 2.5 years. I’d like to think we’re exercising some kind of group defiance against the (bogus but oft-repeated) idea that law school has to entirely kill your personal life and your relationships with anyone outside law school, but that rebellion is probably more in my head than anything else.
We make a strange secret society, our motley crew of zombie parents (frequently indistinguishable from zombie law students of other stripes). Some of us were good friends before we all became parents at around the same time, and some of us have little in common other than that. But amid a whole lot of trying to appear normal, we share our secret Real Lives, passing down leftover newborn diapers and advice about class schedules and back-up child care. Membership comes with its own private rituals and obligations, a strange amalgam of commiseration about sleep schedules and an iron-clad promise to cover if you have to miss class.
Although I planned (or attempted to plan) many aspects of our process-of-becoming-parents (and boy, am I eager to tell you about them!), this was not one of them. Among my friends from college, D. and I were frontier settlers in the land of marriage, and if you’d asked me who I thought would be accompanying us on this journey to the outer space of parenthood, I certainly would not guessed that it would be my law school classmates. It’s turned out to be a wonderful surprise: while there are universal things about parenting that anyone whose done it can tell you, there is a kind of magic, healing bond that comes of experiencing very similar things at very similar times. And while much of the “parent wars” (I won’t say “mommy wars”) rhetoric out there is unhelpful nonsense, it is certainly not false that the way our lives are organized (economically, structurally, logistically) influences how we experience parenting, and that it can be incredibly helpful to have people around you implementing similar models and experiencing similar challenges. I don’t know if you’ve heard this rumor, but the early days of being a new parent can be incredibly lonely, even as they are magical in ways you never could have guessed; it helps to have some hands to guide your metaphoric leap into the great unknown.
I wore this outfit to a lunch with some of our partners in crime/law school parenting; my friend S(3). and I are both home with our kids on Fridays, and often get together for lunch with the babies and sometimes a spouse or another friend from school. His son l. is only six weeks older than baby m., and they aren’t really old enough to meaningfully interact, but they smile at each other sometimes, and we trade off holding babies and burp clothes so nobody has to eat the entire meal one-handed, and we go home relieved that we’ve made it out of the house, that we have Done A Thing Today, Darn It. It has done wonders for everyone’s sanity. This dress (yet another accidental Target find), in all its milk-friendly glory, was forced into early retirement after the fourteenth spit-up incident during the two hours we were out of the house. Thankfully, it seems to have survived the wash, and I look forward to rejoicing in its dot-matrix pattern, its swishy shape, and oh, yes, those fabulous buttons, in many remixes to come (particularly if this warm weather keeps up. Insane!).
There are aspects of our experience that we don’t share, of course, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t note that of these five families, I am the only female parenting student. There are days when this state of being not-just-a-parent-but-a-mother matters more and less, but for these last few weeks and months before we all splinter off to the wide blue yonder, I’m trying to be a lumper rather than a splitter.
All the same, I’ll reserve the right to refer to our Friday lunches as “mom dates.”
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- Scarf: Malo, mommed
- Dress: Mandy’s closet sale
- Tights: HUE
- Black Booties: Franco Sarto via Nordstrom’s
- Arm party of hair elastics I forgot to take off my wrist, again.
I’m a little behind these days (can’t imagine why), so these are actually from last Thursday . . . when I got all did up to steel myself for a “challenging” meeting, only to have it cancelled at the last second, leaving me relieved at not having to go, and amused at feeling like a walking style-blogger cliche, all dressed up and nowhere to go. We’ll pretend it made me more productive in the ensuing hours, after my schedule was all shot to hell. After all, don’t these shoes just scream scholarly to you?
. . . Right. Of course they do.
This dress is yet another attempt to incorporate more pre-loved items into my wardrobe, as I manage the “in transition” nature of my body, my budget and my closet at the moment. I snapped it up from Mandy’s closet sale a few weeks back (along with a fabulous pair of yellow shoes). While the fit isn’t perfect, it’s a great blank canvas for remixing, and I’m looking forward to taking advantage of its relative seasonlessness. It’s also a breastfeeding-friendly silhouette that works for both nursing and pumping (easier said than done), which is an added bonus. And come on, the vague shades of the late lamented crocodile hunter that I seem to be accidentally rocking are pretty hard to resist.
(Incidentally, my actual past adventures with crocodiles during the nearly two months I spent here were no joke. It’s a good story. Maybe I’ll tell you sometime.)
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- Blue Patterned Faux-Wrap Dress: Target
- Red Cardigan: Vintage Michael Kors, mommed
- Nursing Tank: Bravado Designs via Figure8Maternity.com
- Black Tights: HUE
- Black Boots: Born, gift from D.
- Belt: LOFT
- Necklace: gifted
- Arm party of hair elastics I forgot to take off
- Sniffly nose: gift from baby m.
The week, David Amsden style: baby m. is doing much better, but like all loving children, has used her newfound giggling abilities to transmit her cold to her devoted parents. My class schedule went through about 24952318 permutations during add-drop week. In honor of the momentous occasion of my last first day of school ever, I wore that red sweater that is (strangely) my power animal, even though it made my nose look even redder than it already was.
This dress is what Amy would call an “accidental Target” purchase: I went in looking for something else, saw it, and was struck by lightning/inspiration/my need for surplice necklines/the effect of too much Downton Abbey on my perception of ruffles and appear to have been overcome. And while I was initially sure I was going to return it (my approach with 95% of impulse purchases), it’s grown on me, to the point that it now feels destined to become a frequently remixed favorite. Or at least that it might become one, once I’ve gotten the baby spitup out of every. sweater. I. own…. In the meantime, I really like the pairing of bright red against the mottled blue, and the decidedly different effect of black boots over the brown riding boots I overwear tend to live in in the winter. While there are arguments for a black belt, the brown one has a slightly more casual vibe, and one that feels a little bit more me.
Did I mention it’s my last semester of law school, and almost definitely my last semester of school, ever? That I have thirteen weeks left? How did that even happen?
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Hi! I'm S. Welcome to Narrowly Tailored, a blog about life and style from a law student and new mom. In short: work and life gets dressed; balance mostly gets amused.Follow Along
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