Duran Duran

Here's another one of our outdoor locations; this is outside our back door, in front of the awesome wall of bamboo that towers over the property line. This is on the second floor of the building and you can see that the bamboo extends well above where I'm standing. When it's windy it makes the most beautiful rustling sound.

And yes, I tucked my tie into my shirt. It wasn't quite the way Duran Duran used to do it (owing to the fact that the shirt has a zipper up the front instead of buttons), but hey, it worked for me.

As an aside, Mark and I saw Duran Duran live at the Fillmore a few weeks back, and they were awesome. They looked great, they sounded great, and it was a blast to see them at such an intimate venue. Back in the day I saw them at the Oakland Coliseum, which involved considerably more shoving and being squashed than I could ever deal with these days. The recent show was far more civilized; you can tell an audience is mostly 40+ when the cocktail waitress can walk right through the crowd and deliver drinks all the way up at the front.
















Blazer: Helmut Lang
Shirt: J. Peterman
Tie: thrifted
Harem pants: Vera Wang
Sandals: Kors Michael Kors

Relaxed Suit

Sal wrote recently about this season's thriftable trends, and mentioned velvet as one of them. And what did I find during my most recent thrifting experience? This cropped velvet waistcoat by J. Crew (coincidentally, the shirt is also a thrifted J. Crew find). To me this is a great way to wear velvet -- I'm not so keen on a whole dress made out of the stuff (not since the 80's, anyway), but a waistcoat or blazer adds that soft texture and sheen without dominating the outfit. I totally forgot to photograph the adorable back of the waistcoat, but I'll show it to you the next time.

The waistcoat is a deep chocolate brown, which is more apparent in the detail shot. The back is a striped yellow, black and brown silk, the sort of pattern you might find on a man's tie or lining a suit jacket. The mixture of the menswear shape and back of the vest with the feminine texture of the velvet gave me the idea to pair it with trousers and the casual waffle-weave shirt in order to give the outfit the appearance of a relaxed suit. Instead of an actual tie, I added the scarf and let it hang straight down the center just as a tie would do. If it were a little less bulky I'd have tucked it under the waistcoat, but I didn't want to look like I have a beer gut.

By the way, I tied the scarf using the first technique I demonstrated in my video tutorial.

Shirt, waistcoat: thrifted
Scarf: Banana Republic
Pants: Anthropologie
Boots: Bronx

Suffer for Fashion

The original kernel of inspiration for this outfit was, "shorts with an oversized blazer," which ended up being a great starting point for building this look. I'm sure I got the idea from somebody's blog but at the moment my head is too wrapped up in other things to remember which one, so if it was yours, please stop in and take credit.

I love the fact that you could pretty much swap this whole outfit (maybe minus the tights) onto a boy and it would look equally good. And while we're on the subject, why can't boys wear tights, anyway? If they want to wear shorts on cooler days they just have to freeze, and that hardly seems fair. Oftentimes for the men photographed by the Sartorialist, even socks seem to be out of the question. Those poor guys, with their frozen legs and blistered, sweaty feet. And people say that women suffer for fashion.

Jacket: Nanette Lepore, thrifted

Shirt: J. Crew, thrifted

Waistcoat: Last Kiss

Shorts: Mango

Tights: Falke

Boots: Doc Martens

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Over and Under

Clearly with all the layers and tights I've got going on in this outfit, this was worn before our little heat wave began (which, by the way, is already pretty much over). This is the first time I've worn this yellow tie; I think I bought it more than a year ago but somehow I just hadn't yet found the right outfit for it until now.

This is another of the new vests I bought recently from Forever 21. My original idea for this vest was to wear it with the off-white dress I posted yesterday, but it's so narrow at the top that it really needs to be paired with something that has sleeves. I liked the effect of the black layers mingled with the gray; because there are black layers over as well as under the dress, it has sort of an optical illusion effect, as if you can't tell which pieces are separate and which are one. If you look carefully at the hem, you'll see that I also had my black and white polka dot skirt on under the dress.

The "belt" is just a wide piece of grosgrain ribbon, which I added in order to emphasize my waist. 

Dress: Red Dress Shoppe

Tie, skirt: thrifted

Vest: F21

Shirt: H&M

Tights: MP (via Sock Dreams)

Shoes: Tsubo

Redundant

Here's the third wearing of these shorts (see the first two here and here), and the next on my list of ideas for ways to wear them. I've still got one more idea I'm wanting to try, and that's pairing them with suspenders and oxfords (which I still have yet to get stretched to the correct width). You'll see that one soon enough, I'm sure. I don't know what the hell I'm going to do once I've run through all these ideas. Actually that's not entirely true; I still have other ideas for these shorts, but the other items involved in those outfits are too wintry even for this very chilly SF summer.

The goal with this outfit was to wear my polka dot tie. When I put this together I fretted that I've already worn this shirt and tie together several times before, but upon perusing the archives I realized that the tie has most often appeared paired with my Max Studio black V-neck top, and has in fact only been worn with this striped shirt one other time. Whew! I thought my outfits were starting to get redundant.

Shirt: Promod
Tie: thrifted
Shorts: White House Black Market
Boots: Modern Vintage

Uniform

This outfit was inspired by Rad_in_Broolyn's recent Angus Young look. I'm not a huge fan of AC/DC, but I must admit I've long been drawn to Angus's English schoolboy uniforms. This outfit wasn't a literal translation because it was too warm that day for a blazer, but I think it captures the vibe pretty well.

These cropped pants were actually in the bin to go to the Goodwill because I hadn't worn them in quite some time, but after getting inspired to do an Angus outfit I pulled them out again. I used to have a matching blazer as well, but I never could bring myself to wear the two together because it looked too, well, uniform-ish. It would have been perfect for this outfit, although I'm sure I would've balked at the last minute. There are limits to just how much of a costume I'm willing to wear, and anyway the jacket just wasn't a very flattering cut.

Shirt: Promod
Vest: A. Byer
Tie: thrifted
Pants: H&M
Socks: Sock Dreams
Shoes: John Fluevog

Here are a couple more Georgie outtakes from the day's photos:

Georgie channels many different animals. Here you can see her "seal" look on the left,

and her "fruit bat" look on the right.

Frankenstein

For quite awhile I had my eye on these Jeffrey Campbell shoes:

But then I saw these...

aaaand finally these....

Hey, it's not like you didn't already know I was a shoe fiend.

Now, early on I ruled out the Potion sandals (the top pair), for a few reasons. For one thing, open-toed shoes are tough for me, and I figured that with all those straps there'd be plenty of opportunities for pain. And then, I'm not super comfortable with a solid wedge that's that high -- I think they look great on other people but I have a thing about my feet looking like Frankenstein's, which I fear they might in those. And finally, everybody seemed to own that pair, and I didn't want to be like everybody.

When I saw the Clinic wedges (the second pair), I was really in love. They solved the problem of Frankenstein feet because the metal siding makes it look like the wedge isn't such a massive hunk o' shoe, and they obviously solved the problem of the open toes. But by then they were sold out everywhere, and there was just no tracking down a pair in my size. So I used Solestruck's nifty feature of an automatic email notification if/when my size became available again, and kept looking.

At last I found the X-Ray boots, the third pair, the one that wasn't too hot or too cold but juuuust right. Bless you, Jeffrey Campbell, for making so many variations on this style (there's also a tall boot version, a clog, and a mary jane!). With these there are no Frankenstein block-feet and no skin-scraping open toes. As an added bonus, you can tuck jeans into them. Though they were also sold out at the online shoe retailers, I found a brand new pair in my size on eBay without any trouble, and a happy ending was made.

I wore my towering wedges to work last week and achieved a full 6'1" height, causing multiple coworkers to do double-takes and one of my employees to cower in fear when I stood up from my desk (I'm pretty sure he was only half joking). Because these shoes have the potential to look a bit over-the-top, I wore them with jeans (tucked in, of course!) and a relaxed menswear blazer/tie combo.

These shoes are, believe it or not, remarkably comfortable. Though the angle looks steep, they don't really feel any taller than a regular heel. There was one interesting drawback though, and that was driving my car. Though my legs grew by 5 inches, my arms certainly didn't, so while I could slide the seat back to a comfortable position for the pedals, I had to stretch my arms to their fullest extent to reach the steering wheel. Next time I'm definitely driving in flats and changing when I get there.

In the end I loved these shoes so very much that when I eventually got a notification from Solestruck letting me know that the Clinics were back in stock, I snapped them up too. The Clinics are going to be a little more challenging to wear because they're a bit more daring than the X-Rays, but nevertheless I'm pretty excited about the possibilities for bad-assing up my bare-legged summer outfits.

Blazer: Nanette Lepore (thrifted)
Tie: thrifted
Shirt: Max Studio
Jeans: Acne
Boots: Jeffrey Campbell