Fashion and Personal Style

It’s funny: I don’t think anyone who knows me would say, “MourningDove has such great fashion sense.” And yet I’ve spent a fair amount of time in my life thinking about fashion, noting which designers I like and don’t, recognizing trends, paying attention to what other women are wearing…. And absolutely none of it has ever paid off for me personally. I’m too timid to try anything actually fashionable and have a terrible sense for what looks good on me (Ooh, look at these white crop pants with the large-scale florid magenta print!). So, while Gwen Stefani is my style icon, I have accepted at this point that her fashion sense is something I can admire but never duplicate, like a Vermeer painting in a museum.

It’s not like I’ve never gotten any help. My mom, who was a chemist by profession and whose sartorial exertions ended at curling her eyelashes and swiping on Clinique’s Golden Brandy lipstick if she were going out, nonetheless “had my colors done” when I turned 13 (dude, it was the 80s). I’m apparently a summer, and I hate like 80% of those colors. Plus, I’m too lazy to put on makeup. Notwithstanding, I received further good counsel from my friend Erin, who used to be a Talbots stylist. There are also some great petite stylists on YouTube like Dearly Bethany; I’ll share a list on some future Friday. But I’ve largely squandered all this good advice, having in my middle years settled on what might best be called a modified capsule wardrobe built around two colorways. Each colorway has a dark basic, an accent color, a neutral, a metallic, a leather, and then some lighter shades of the basic. So one colorway is black/plum/white/silver/python/charcoal and the other is navy/red/beige/gold/brown leather/denim. They do mix and match pretty well across colorways…because they’re so boring.

But! It wasn’t always such a depressing picture, dear reader. Behold: I went back through some old sketch books and found oodles of fashion sketches I made in my teens and early twenties. I don’t know why I was doing it: I couldn’t sew at that point (and am still basically a utility sewer) and never managed to talk my mom (an amazing seamstress) into making any of these designs for me. But here we have it.

Get ready to revisit the 80s and 90s with a soupçon of You Read Too Many Fantasy Novels….

**Ooh, wait, I have to tell you about Bethy Clark and Susie Reese. I went to high school with these girls, and while they had about as opposite personal styles as one could imagine, I revered them both because they wore what they wanted and knew they looked good in and didn’t care what the girls around them thought about it. They were both really nice, too. Susie had clearly Had Her Colors Done (spring). She had long, curly strawberry-red hair and was partial to pastel linen suits, silk scarves, short-sleeved cashmere sweaters, and saddle shoes. Bethy Clark looked like an extra from a Warrant video in the best possible way: think poet blouses and leopard-print tights with tasseled booties and cropped leather jackets. Her eyeliner was a walking tutorial. Her blond hair had its own zip code. How, I wondered, did you figure out style when you were only 17? It was as incomprehensible to me as those kids who play violin at 3 and go to Harvard at 15.

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