ward, i need to wear your blazer, my sweaters are being dry-cleaned.

An uneasy feeling has been tugging at me for a while now. I have fallen into a style rut. I am dressing so conservatively. As my sister put it, "Emma is becoming a Christian. For real this time."

This is what may have caused it. It is called The Pink Phenomenon.

When I was very young, I despised pink, mainly because, as a girl, I felt that it was being forced upon me. I insulted it at every turn, and I certainly refused to wear it. Then, all of a sudden, I went to high school and became obsessed with it. I wanted it. I thought about it all the time.

Similarly, I went through a brief period when my hair was an inch long and I wore men's pants all the time. I actually really hated it, but I refused to fall into the trap of The Pretty Abercrombie People.

So THEN, in tenth grade or something, I crashed and started wearing dresses constantly. Then came my black/grey pencil skirt + tucked-in blouse phase. I am starting to feel as though wearing neon blue tights and chunky bracelets is not enough to counteract The Grey Pencil Skirt That I Wear Every Day.

Anyway, that's the sitch.

I have recently become very re-interested in pushing the boundary between masculine and feminine dress. I say re-interested because I used to wear my dad's boy scout shirt with pearls, which caused my English teacher to call on me by saying, "Yes, oh wise one in the extremely ironic boy scouts of America shirt."

I want to go through characters I love and see what would happen if I combined them...for example, a few weeks ago I wore this hand-made vintage dress that I bought in a thrift shop in Arizona, along with a tweed blazer. The story that I made up to go along with it is embodied in the post title. I will post pictures soon.

Tomorrow I am considering doing a Blanche/Stanley mix-up. Already stole my sister's beater, so GET READY.

Also very interesting to me is Brett Ashley. I just started reading The Sun Also Rises and am so inspired (even though I still maybe like F. Scott Fitz more...we'll see. And before I write this quote down, can I just say that I opened right to the page I was looking for on the first try?)

"Brett was damned good-looking. She wore a slipover jersey sweater and a tweed skirt, and her hair was brushed back like a boy's. She started all that."

 

This is them in real life! I am thinking she is the mysterious one next to Ernie.

christian have i loved

Last night at the dinner table, we decided that beige is the absolute worst color ever. It does not look good on anyone, even people who can work decidedly nasty colors like yellow and orange. So today when I decided to check out Christian Siriano's spring collection, I was at first a little nonplussed by the beige festival. However. The Gowns.

 

  

  

The sheer volume of these is so fantastic. Each individual texture works in perfect understanding with the color of its material; red naturally has a frazzled, feathery quality...blue moves in more direct, generous lines, and beige, if worked correctly, can have the quality of cream.

  

And THIS. The skirt has such a darling sway, so unlike anything I've seen before.