Category: fashion

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the spring cape

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A cape is a nice option for this schizophrenic spring weather. A loose, effortless layer. I’ve always liked a cape.

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How I enjoy navy with mustard.

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Brows can be much darker than this, of course, but this is dark for me, and about as dark as I can go without things getting suspicious. Without, as it were, giving the game away. This is a bit of pencil brushed through with some of Benefit’s gimme brow tinted gel over that. Quite like this gel, which I use in the lighter shade and find entirely natural on its own. My brows are not conspicuous and this is a quick way to bring them forward.

Brows and lips have, for me anyway, for my eye, the largest capacity for impact, and doing something to groom and present one or the other of those elements is all that is needed to convey the impression that you’ve done a lot more. I’m not really demonstrating this theory here, as I’ve done other stuff, but I’m convinced.

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Express leggings, American Apparel cape (thrifted), Jeffrey Campbell France boots (similar), Mulberry bag (thrifted), J Crew turtleneck, mustard leather gloves (thrifted). On the lips: MAC lipstick in Kinda Sexy.

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Wearing a bit of Tarte’s Amazonian clay blush in Exposed, a lovely neutral mauve shade so muted that I understand it can be a contour shade for paler skin tones. Its’ matte and subtle, as is this lipstick, a bit of a departure for me but one I’m liking.

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the leather driving gloves

Have been browsing for a pair of leather driving gloves for a good 5 years or so, always finding it difficult to find them in a brick and mortar to try on, especially women’s gloves with their sleeker fit and more delicate fingers. The most promising options were in British menswear shops with understandable-yet-still-galling postage fees, and I delayed. A few years ago a glove shop opened on Newbury St, Sermoneta gloves, selling Italian-made gloves, and I finally gave it a proper browse last week.

I found the salesperson pleasantly tolerant of my endless trying on (I have large hands, and glove sizing is been pretty inconsistent in my experience, making it quite a risk to buy a pair without trying them on first,* not to mention feeling the quality of the leather first).

*As there is variation in each pair, this means not only trying on multiple sizes, but trying on multiple pairs within the nearest size.

I pronounce the visit a success.

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I do not always feel that my shopping is a success, reader. I return a fair amount (though, too, there is some amount of returning built into my shopping methods re: sizing and comparison, etc.), and have to sometimes resell or eat the cost of something I changed my mind about. My whims are fallible, my tastes are sometimes—only really in retrospect, inconveniently—questionable. Often I return something because I recognize that I have made a compromise (of fit, construction, quality, adherence to some vision) I did not want to make, and should not make. It’s a steady stream of stuff coming in and stuff going out again over here.

It’s all the more satisfying, then, when there are no doubts and no reservations. White 1/2 finger driving gloves?  Don’t mind if I do. I was looking for basic turquoise gloves but…that’s how it goes. These were the ones that sang.

There is something about a pair of sublimely fitted gloves that is as sensually tempting as it gets.

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It’s satisfying when you get home from a bout of acquisition and can say, I got this.*

*Like, in the sense of ‘I’m all over this’…not like ‘I acquired this’…though you do technically now have it…oh never mind.