hot hot heat

It is a gloriously sunny eighty-six degrees out right now, I have steak marinating in the fridge for afternoon grilling, and I have stocked my freezer with a fresh batch of Otter Pops. Memorial Weekend is in full swing.

Waterfall tank, Development by Erica Davies; tube bra, American Apparel;
pencil skirt, American Apparel; heels, Urban Outfitters.

"What to wear under this tank?" has vexed me for some time, so today I'm testing out the tube bra option at a friend's barbecue. Also, I realize, as I am biking to that barbecue across town, I will be testing out this bra's ability to not slide down my torso while I am on my bike. I apologize to Belmont Avenue in advance for the awkward shifting-around I may have to do.

we can get down

This December, when buying the leopard-print lace Rodarte for Target dress, I had a brief moment of practicality. "Where on earth will I wear a leopard-print minidress, really?"
Silly question. You wear such a dress to a festival of Charles Busch plays (Vampire Lesbians of Sodom, anyone?) and dancing at a gay bar, obviously.

Dress, Rodarte for Target; scarf, Target; trench, H&M; bag, Nine West; tights, dunno;
boots, Colin Stuart. Eyeliner smearage courtesty sweaty frantic dancing.

Yes, this dress is short, and somehow the camera picked up on that and created a little blotchy halo as a Modesty Blob on its lens.

paint it black

These leggings, bought in 2007 at the height of my I need leather leggings but the American Apparel knockoffs shall have to suffice frenzy, have slowly become less pleathery and more, um, worn-in. Meaning just this side of sheer. I think they'll have to be moved from the shelf of pants in my armoire and into the drawer of tights so I have the reminder to not wear them solo.
(I can feel C smirking at me right now. Hi, C. You can shame me lightly for this if you so choose.)

I'm inching ever closer toward the Tights Are Not Pants line here, aren't I? No matter: today is a day off, which means a day of errands where my lack of proper pants was covered by my trenchcoat in most situations, and now I can lounge around in my leggings at home and enjoy the snow falling in the courtyard.

Long cardigan/swobe thingy, bought in undergrad, origin forgotten;
v-neck, American Apparel; faux-leather leggings, American Apparel;
flats, Steve Madden; watch, Marc Jacobs but it's falling apart oh no;
nail polish, Sally Hansen Insta-Dri in Uptempo Plum that looks not at all
plum when you put it on, but really just black.
Whatever, it's been chip-free for three days, so I don't care.

i'm telling y'all, it's a sabotage

New and unusual ways in which my clothing has made me look foolish over the past three days:

Saturday-
I am wearing this dress to work. As it was sixty degrees, I didn't bother to wear it with tights. I realize, as I squat directly in front of a large window, that this particular dress is far too short to wear to work, when work may included unplanned-for squatting situations when things like lamps and rugs must be moved around.
Especially when one's underthings happened to be brightly colored and probably visible from the parking lot.

Sunday-
After several frustrating hours of looking for a very particular shirt I wished to wear out to dinner, I am forced to write off the disappearance of my striped cowlneck as inexplicable and inevitable, as I really like that shirt, and have only worn it twice. So of course it's now lost and gone forever. Ah, no matter: I decide on a very lovely cashmere sweater that has never failed me.
Five and a half hours later, I realize that this sweater has a hole the size of a nickel which had been front and centered over my torso for the entire evening.

Monday-
Admittedly, I overslept by about 45 minutes, so I wasn't doing a full once-over before leaving the house this morning. But my drapey DvF dress has been a failsafe piece for quite some time, so I feel confident in its ability not to make me look like an ass.
Dammit.
Turns out the lower half of this dress has become see-through without my noticing. The florescent lights of the bathroom at work have helpfully pointed this out to me, so now I get to shuffle through a mildly important networking thingy this evening with the knowledge that, lit from the right angle, I might as well not be wearing much more than a leotard.


At this rate, I'm assuming that tomorrow will involve tearing a giant hole in the seat of my pants, or I'll have a heel snap off as I'm walking down a staircase, or that a scarf will become sentient and strangle me of its own volition.

dress for success

A brief manifesto on office dress codes:

I understand, in certain industries, the necessity of enforcing a formal dress code for the office. White-shoe law firms, banks, psychiatrists, and so forth: the tip-top in professional dress seems appropriate and even necessary (to say nothing of industry-mandated dress codes for those in the medical field or whatnot). And although it's never been spelled out explicitly, I've worked in several offices where an implied "business" dress code was certainly the norm.

Recently, I received an email re: office dress code. This particular office happens to define itself as "business casual", which is no surprise at all. However, the email ended with the line: "no jeans". And mostly, I get that. Really. But there's this great disconnect happening here in the huge grey area between "business casual" and "no jeans".

For example, I'm 100% convinced (and oh, how I would bring you photographic evidence of this!- if only I were able to photograph people without being noticed!) that the example ensemble of dragging-hem, wrinkled, and faded black "dress pants" (ha) with a shapeless t-shirt layered over another dingy t-shirt is in no way at all to be considered "business casual" or office-appropriate. On the other hand, something like this (from my Lazy Sunday a few months ago) includes jeans, but I'd wager that it looks worlds more professional than the more-than-casual abomination criticized above. Or, horrors, the black gym pants I saw today, paired with a black t-shirt and drapey wrap cardigan. Now, is that outfit perfectly appropriate and perhaps even flattering for a run to the grocery after your yoga class? Absolutely. And I've likely worn it myself on several occasions, but none of those occasions have been to work.

The "no jeans" clause bugs. In my mind, it should be enough to say "please dress in accordance with our Business Casual standards." If that means that well-fitting jeans devoid of rips and the like may be worn, so much the better. But people, as Beckett reminds us, are bloody ignorant apes; they will find a way to attire themselves in sloppy-but-technically-standard-following ensembles.

Oh, my delicate aesthetic sensibilities are aching.

waterworld

Dress, Shipley & Halmos for Uniqlo (I am fairly sure that
when Uniqlo makes clothes, they ask themselves “what would
D want to wear?” and design accordingly); shoes, Seychelles.

Winona of Daddy Likey would tsk-tsk-tsk at me for this, I’m certain. “Have you learned nothing from Don’t Show-cha Your Chocha?”, she’d ask. But I am known to wear things that tiptoe along that border between “rather short” and “ridiculously short”, and I tend to do so without caring one whit.

She’d further disapprove of my decision to bike to dinner in this dress, and she might have a point there. I was going to layer shorts under it for the bike trip and remove them when I got to the restaurant, honest: but then I realized that I’d have nowhere to store those shorts upon arrival, so shorts were out. In a nod to practicality, I did change into flats for biking, rather than wear these 4 ½” heels for my night out.

I desperately wish that I’d had my camera at 11 pm, when this outfit went from “nice dinner out with friends” into “I biked several miles through a rainstorm and arrived at the bar soaked to the skin and dumping water out of my shoes”. I have never appreciated the quick-drying properties of polyester quite so much as I did last night.

required reading

Earlier this week, Amazon put up a truly insipid list of “Ten Books to Read Before You Die” that incited ire in several of my friends who were unfortunate to happen upon it. (It’s since been replaced by the ten best-sellers, sparing your brains from reading such suggestions for “essential reading” as The Bible and everything Dan Brown ever wrote. J.R.R. Tolkien is on there too, as is Harper Lee, but I won’t quibble with the former, and will defend the latter’s inclusion to anyone silly enough to question it.)

It would be super-easy for me to sputter about the lack of Joan Didion (Slouching Towards Bethlehem, seriously) and Salman Rushdie, and Dashiell Hammett, and Hamlet, and Kerouac, and The Odyssey, and Evelyn Waugh, and oh hell, Tom Wolfe–(oh look I just did!)- but there are probably four hundred Great Works of Literature that I’ve never read. Such as:

Emma

Wuthering Heights

Ulysses (well, I read about 1/3 of it, and then my brain broke. I fully intend to go back to it, though.)

Infinite Jest

Little Women

A People’s History of the United States (yes, I have a liberal arts degree, and yet I’ve never read this.)

A Room of One’s Own

Finnegan’s Rainbow

The House of Mirth

…dear lord, I could go on and on and on. There is so much out there that I haven’t ever read through. I had guilt about thinking myself to be vaguely cultured in light of all this, then I realized that unless you was a lit major, you probably have a half-dozen Important Books that you haven’t read, either, and you just fake your way around those in conversation and assume that no one will hold them so dear as to get deeply into specific plot points. (Or you rent the movie and talk about the “atmosphere” of the book, assuming that will suffice.)

Admit it to make my not-so-well-read brain feel a little less alone: what Essential Reading did you not find essential enough to actually read?

see, I was not exaggerating about the shortness of that dress

Last night, for sushi and drinks with friends:

Navy blue supershort cotton dress with ruffles, Target; necklace, Etsy; shoes, Urban Outfitters.

I have no idea why my lower legs are glowing here. Good moisturizer?

GO! to Target!

This dress from the new GO collection arrived in the mail today from Target, and it is fabulous. (Why the model is missing half her head, I'm not sure. Moving on.)

The reviewers were not kidding when they mention that it is quite short. Perhaps because I'm 5'9", the dress went from "rather short" to "I will have to sew weights in the hem to make sure it doesn't waft up in a breeze and expose my underwear to the world", but daaaaaamn. Regardless of its length (or lack thereof), it's quite lovely. And from an avowed ruffle-fighter*, that's high praise.



*(Jessica, on my decision to purchase this dress: "But D, you hate ruffles!" Me: "I'm just thinking of them as three-dimensional pleats.")