5 posts tagged “clothes”
Oh right, I like to use Vox to talk about all my consumerist foolishness! I'd forgotten.
I'm feeling pleased at the moment with a shirt I just bought at Target. I was reading this post for the archives of A History of Architecture, where she pointed to several examples of chic people incorporating clothes from Target into their fashionable wardrobes. (Art History and History of Architecture certainly are at the apogee of academic stylishness, aren't they? Linguistics, I may tell you, certainly is not.) Since we were going to Target anyway to pick up such romantic items as sponges and kitty litter, I thought I would take a look at the clothes while I was there. That post was about a skirt that all these well-dressed types had identified as especially good, which I looked for particularly, but it was long gone, I think.
This shirt that I bought instead is very pleasing, however. It's from the Converse One Star line and doesn't appear to be available online. It has a surprising number of interesting and weird details. At first glance it is an ordinary cotton duck buttoned shirt. But then you see that it has inset panels of ribbed cotton jersey running up each side and down each sleeve. (This, incidentally, makes the fit extra nice.) The sleeves also have a button halfway down the upper arm that you can use, maybe, to pinion your rolled up cuffs into place, though I haven't figured out quite how. The One Star logo appears on a funny little piece of off-white, shinier fabric that's folded around the hem and sewn down so that it looks like a mysterious patch. White grosgrain ribbon runs up the button side edge of the shirt, underneath the buttons. The third button down is sewn on with black thread while the others are sewn on with white thread. There's a strip of ticking ribbon sewn inside the lower edge of the collar, so that it shows as the collar falls back (because you haven't buttoned up all the way to the very top Erkel button). In conclusion, it is packed full of odd little textural touches, and I think it also cost me $16. It is good on top of a black poplin dress with long gray socks and clumpy black shoes, not that you can really tell from this grainy and underlit photo:
I woke up in the morning, I looked behind the wall
I like to ask Snark, "What country am I from today?" meaning: so, given what I'm wearing, where might you think I was a tourist from? The answer today was Canada.
"Your outfit is practical, and your shirt is dark green," he explained. I don't know, man.
The skeeters and the bedbugs were having a game of ball
I have a super cute umbrella that I bought in Italy, though I think it was actually made in France. It's a kid's umbrella, green (and kid-sized small), with a green wooden handle ending in a green wooden frog's head. It's a great umbrella. However, I am starting to think that I need a second umbrella, of the collapsible variety. (Great story! Tell us more!) Further, I feel that this second umbrella should be fuchsia. Maybe this one. I hear it's "translucent for easy carrying." Opacity is awkward to tote around all day.
The score was six to nothing, the skeeters were ahead
You know that space under your desk? The one that can be so terribly inviting when you contemplate how easy it would be just to slide off your chair and curl up under there, and sleep and sleep and sleep and sleep? Mm. Stop coming on to me, space under my desk. You know it wouldn't work out between us. Plus, how long has it been since the maintenance guy vacuumed you? Too long, too long.
The bedbugs hit a home run and knocked me out of bed.
Our friend Rose and her law school friends introduced us to a very entertaining party game called "Celebrities" (I think). Here's how it works. Everyone gets five or six slips of paper and writes the name of a famous person, or fictional character, on each slip. The slips go into a bowl. The group is divided into two teams. Then the game itself is played in three rounds. Each round is made of one-minute turns, in which a player picks slips out of the bowl and tries to get her team to guess as many as possible in a minute. You go back and forth between the teams, rotating through so each player takes a turn being the clue-er, until you've used up all the slips.
Here's the fun part: In the first round, you can say and act out whatever you like, other than the actual name, to get your teammates to guess the name. In the second round, you get only one word (though you can say it as many times, and in many ways as you like) plus charades, and in the third round you have to be completely silent. So as you go, you often wind up doing as much to remind other players of how a name was clued in earlier rounds as actually coming up with your own clue. I really liked it -- it was a lot more fun, even, than I'd expected. Recommended!
I now own three variations of a single dress, made by Velvet (not of velvet; they're actually of lovely, comfortable, fine cotton jersey). This is a bit ridiculous of me, but I am very happy with them. I intend to more or less live in them all summer (except to work, because on me they are a bit too low cut for that). I like to imagine that the differences in color and neckline make their essential sameness a bit less obvious, though I also recognize that this is wishful thinking. But they are so nice-looking and also comfortable, I could not resist. I have a feeling they are also quite popular--probably when I am in New York I will discover that everyone owns one--since they keep selling out immediately at all the little online shops. Here they are, as usual not modeled by me, but just scooped up from various websites:
I have purchased some comfortable and not unattractive trousers. Hallelujah. That's not me modeling them, by the way.
Office-work has been exploding ungracefully in my face this week, leaving me feeling rather as if a moderately large felled tree has rolled me over. Dissertation, can you hear me? I promise we can get together this weekend. We'll have a lovely time! Dinner and a show and lots of cuddling. Just you and me! It will be dreamy. But right now my brain is made of goo. Mentally impotent, I'm afraid, that's me.
In between working and groaning like the giant pussybaby that I am, I think about pants, and how there do not seem to be very many nice ones. I want pants that fit me and curve to accomodate my thighs without being all saggy in the ass, pants that do not have stupid front pockets that look okay when there are no legs inside them but go kerbloinging out to make you look stupid when there are. I want them to have a 30- or 31-inch inseam, not some ankle-bone-showing 28-inch inadequacy or the fucking THIRTY FOUR INCHES that seems to be standard in certain circles, certain circles that hate me and my dwarfish ilk. I'd like them to be machine-washable as well. If I found some pants like this, I would like them to come in more than one color that was neither pale nor navy.
Ha ha.
It seems, too, that there are no good plain, smooth, non-cashmere pullover women's sweaters available for sale anywhere on earth, in part because retail believes it to be spring, but also because someone decided that cheap cashmere was the only thing any of us could possibly want in a sweater.
Oh well, I won't need pants and sweaters when I'm reincarnated as the beloved and cosseted pet of gentle space aliens who delight in plying me with lattes and good novels. I'll be covered in sleek black fur, and it will look divine.
