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Tuesday, November 30, 2010

Get the look: Joan from Mad Men

If you enjoyed the inclusion of Joan's Christmas dress in the post about holiday dresses and past posts about Mad Men style, then you might be interested in seeing this set I made on Polyvore. (I even found a vintage-inspired pen necklace.) She's such an inspiration!

Sunday, November 28, 2010

Black Swan set

I made this set, inspired by the film Black Swan, on Polyvore today.

Black And White Feather Lashes [1516] -
lookingglassfancydress.co.uk

Baroque Swan
wickedsunshine.com

[Серые фоны]
justbackgounds.beon.ru

Christmas Dresses



When I was a girl, I loved American Girl books, and I remember being especially thrilled by Molly's green velvet Christmas dress. For all I knew, as an 8-year-old girl, Christmas dresses were always red, so Molly's green dress seamed like a fantastically rule-breaking stroke of fashion genius. I soon convinced my mom to make me one (which wasn't so hard to do -- the skill and enthusiasm with which she made me clothes is one of the many things I cherish about her), and she enlisted our friend Imogene (an older woman whom I had adopted as my grandmother) to help with the project. The design came from my own head--it had these crazy sleeves that were puffed and the top and then fitted and long (I'd seen them on a costume in a Shakespeare play)--and I was consulted for every detail (I distinctly remember Imogene asking how may scallops I wanted at the neckline). It was my first experience with the limitless joy that clothes could bring, and because of that, I still have a soft spot for holiday dresses.

If you've got a holiday party coming up, and you're already considering what to wear, you might want to check out modcloth.com, as they truly have the best collection of affordable(ish) holiday-party dresses I've seen. Plus, many of them a Mad Men quality to them that I love. I mean, don't these two dresses evoke that lovely dress Joan wore to the Office Christmas party?


Here are some more of my favorite Mad-Men-evoking holiday dresses from Modcloth:

1. Combine Joan's color with Betty's silhouette for a brand-new look.
2. Black can look festive with laced with shimmer.
3. This super sweet look captures my vintage-loving heart.

And here are some modern ones:

1. Silver and gold are an underrated pairing that look spectacular for holiday parties.
2. An opportunity to try out the new visible-bra trend
3. This one was featured in Marie Claire.

Modcloth even has a great collection of festive shoes (including green velvet ones)!


From a green-velvet dress to green-velvet shoes, my taste in fashion has changed a lot over the years, but I still love, love, love Christmas dresses!

New obsession: crinoline petticoats

Watching videos on Stylelikeu.com, I saw crinoline petticoats on Jane Aldridge and Ali Lovell and have become gradually obsessed with them. I love how '50s-and-'60s they look, how ladylike. I want to get a couple (they're cheap on eBay) and wear them with to-the-knee circle skirts and A-lines. That's also my next big sewing project: making a bunch of to-the-knee skirts from fun fabrics.







Real-life Carrie Bradshaw

I feel like this chick is the real-life Carrie Bradshaw in everything from her style to her gestures and way of talking. The only difference: Carrie wouldn't be caught dead in the $9 peeptoes Ali claims to love.

Check out her wardrobe and her bubbly personality in this video, courtesy of Stylelikeu.com

Ali Lovell from Stylelikeu.com from Stylelikeu on Vimeo.

Friday, November 26, 2010

What jeans suit your body type (women)

Jeans are one of those great items that look good on everyone. The trick to finding the pair that look best on you is to know your body type and find what flatters it. I offer up the following as a general guide.

Flat butt
Forget padded underwear. All you need to do to give yourself the illusion of junk in the trunk is to buy jeans with pocket details such as flaps. These add dimension to your back side and help give you some shape and not look so flat.

Bubble butt
"Apple-bottom jeans" is not just a silly song lyric; it's a description of jeans made to accommodate an ample rear end. An easy trick for finding out if jeans have extra room in the back is to compare the height of the waistband in the back to the height of the waistband in the front. If it's not higher in back, there's no room for your badonkadonk. Another tip: ultra-low-rise rarely leave room for even the most humble curves; better to go with mid-rise or higher.

Short legs
To have longer looking legs, avoid anything cropped. I know there's a temptation to buy cropped pants because regular ones so often don't come in your inseam, but try to avoid this temptation because cropped pants just make your legs look shorter. Luckily, jeans usually come in a variety of lengths, so you can find ones that fit more easily than you can in some other styles of pants. But do remember that longer jeans, especially ones with a bit of a flare, look great with heels. If you're one of the shorter girls who has embraced heels and all they can do for you, then God love you; you're making the most of your body type already. Buy a pair of boot-cut or flare jeans that are about two inches too long, pair them with some killer heels, and you'll look as long and lean as a super model.

Long legs
Again, jeans, more than other pants, tend to come in a variety of inseams, but if you're still having trouble finding a pair you love, keep cropped and rolled hems in mine. Hardly anything looks more chic than a cheeky bit of ankle peering out and you've got the mile-long gams to pull it off. Just make sure that the jeans you roll are skinny or straight leg at the widest. Cropped flares never looked good on anyone.

Wide thighs
If your thighs are the bane of your existence, as mine are of mine, then you've probably already noticed that skinny jeans are hard to pull off. Since they emphasize the thinness of your ankles, the thickness of your thighs looks huge by comparison. I find that I only really look good in skinny jeans if I wear them with boots or heels, both of which are slimming enough to compensate. Skinny jeans with flats make me look dumpy and frumpy. So what cut is best? Flare and boot-cut jeans both do a lot to balance out the width of thigh. In a pair of these babies, your legs will look thin in the middle and flare out on both ends, creating a sexy curve.

Skinny thighs
My grandmother always complains that she has been bow-legged all her life. I look at her size-4 frame and wonder what's so bad about that? The fact is that, since wide thighs are my personal body-image demon, it's hard for me to see how the opposite (skinny legs) could even be seen as a bad thing. But the truth is that any deviation from the mean can make a person feel insecure about their body. I recognize that some women are insecure about their skinny legs, even though all I see when I look at them are inches and inches of glorious space between their thighs. Anyway, here's my prescription: boyfriend jeans. The bagginess of the cut will disguise how thin your legs actually are, and, since you are blessed with a thin frame, that extra bulk won't make you look fat, like it can on curvy women. To keep the look feminine (and never dumpy), take a cue from celebrities with your same body type and wear the jeans cuffed with a pair of heels.