Spring Formal

Feeling extra puny on this fine Friday spring morning today—humour is my best defense against stress. Spring is REALLY here and the way the rays of the sun streamed into my room woke me up with a smile. What can I say, I love the sun. Yesterday, I led a group of the most adorable second graders through the school’s art museum, hence the formality of the outfit.

My pair of chinos is going to be a huge staple of my wardrobe come spring and summer. The twill fabric is made from cotton, so it's breathable for the hot humid weather ahead. I also don’t like to wear jeans too much in general—I find it can be something of style crutch to rely on jeans too often. I have nothing against denim per se, but wearing pants made of other materials (ex. chinos in the spring/summer, corduroy in the fall/winter) allows the individual to experiment more with colours and textures. Jeans are so ubiquitous that the simple act of wearing any other material makes you stand out, and makes a basic outfit (such as the one presented here) more visually interesting than it would be otherwise.

This pair of chinos is a relatively new addition to my wardrobe—it’s not the same pair as the one seen in my ‘Cashmere and Pearls’ post from before. The last pair was bought hastily over the internet, and while it fit relatively okay considering the circumstance, it was not 100% satisfactory. If it’s a piece of clothing that you will wear often, I think it’s fine that you should seek better alternatives if you're not happy with it, seeing as its imperfections will annoying you. Every. Single. Time. It's okay to indulge yourself in finding “the perfect _______ ” this way : it's not worth torturing yourself daily (or however frequent you wear this particular piece) over the little things. I have since donated my old pair. I can’t wait to show just how seamlessly this pair of chinos works with other pieces of my wardrobe, to many degrees even better than my current small collection of jeans.

If there is something that bothers me about personal style blogs, it’s not the fact that they are so commercialized per se (though that is still a factor in itself), it’s that the bloggers themselves fail to provide a bigger context and insight as to how they paired the different pieces together. Neither do they provide any sort of examination of their stylistic vision, whether their particular outfit of the day is in line with that thinking or not etc. For a person who can barely cook to save her life, I read a ton of food blogs. I find the very best food blogs (Orangette, Poor Man's Feast, Local Milk, Not Without Salt, Manger, to name a few on the top of my head) not only provides the most beautiful photos or the tastiest recipes, but they all craft such wonderful stories to give you personal insight into their process during which the food is prepared. Of course, they all paint a highly romanticized relationship with food that’s not realistic, but it demonstrates how food can be personal and meaningful.

I don’t see why personal style bloggers cannot adapt the same approach for their blogs, in trying to tell better stories through their clothes. There is so much tradition and meaning behind clothing. If there was none to be found, I highly doubt there would be such institutions such as the Costume Institute at the Met devoted entirely to the exhibition, preservation and research of such stories. Perhaps it is all the more difficult when you are a slave to fashion and to the different mandates of seasonal trends—you’ve never given yourself the opportunity to understand yourself and what YOU really want from clothing. The aforementioned food bloggers and their audiences skews older than your average fashion blogger but the stories and ideas are not bound to age. It’s sad to see so little self-examination in your average personal style blog. Are there stories to be found in H&M and Forever 21? (Edit: I know I sound entirely facetious in this last line but I'm actually quite serious.)