Friday, July 22, 2016

Gingham Again + Blushing

"Skim Milk and Cream"--Friday, 7/22/16

It's highly unusual for me to find personal style inspiration on Memorandum, a fashion blog that features pricey, ultra-professional clothing (and the occasional very trendy casual wear).  But this simple outfit struck a chord with me.

From memorandum.com

I'm not going to wear rolled jeans (the few times I've attempted it, I looked like a fashion parody) or really high heels, but I can do denim + purple button up shirt + floral shoes.


*Light purple gingham button up shirt (thrifted, Kohls), $3.00/wear
Denim skirt (thrifted, Great Northwest Indigo), $0.42/wear
Cream floral flats (Payless), $1.30/wear
White open weave cardigan vest (Kohls), $3.68/wear
Purple gumdrop necklace (Target), $2.40/wear

Outfit total: $10.80/wear

Those pieces could have stood on their own (well, not literally--I don't starch the hell out of my clothing), but how can I resist the opportunity to layer on a cardigan vest?  It's an open weave so it shouldn't kill me in the office today with an expected high temp of 95 F.  Wearing that lightweight cotton gingham shirt yesterday was really perfect--with my fan blowing on me, I could feel the breeze through the shirt to my skin.  I hoped that this shirt + vest would have a similar effect, and it did.  There was a warm period for about 15 minutes around 3:00 but it passed and all was well.


The oddness of the pure white vest and cream shoes is getting to me a little bit, I admit.  I'd like the shoes better if they were white (both in general and in the context of this outfit) but I can handle it.

And it's a sign of how much kidney stones still loom large over my life that thinking of milk and cream, I'm like, Those are good high calcium options to bind oxalate in the intestines!

In other news...Seeing a blog post of a woman wearing a "blush" pink top reminded me that last weekend at Target, going through the women's section looking for a beige t-shirt, we came across a clearance rack completely filled with blush pink t-shirts.  So even though "rose quartz" was a Pantone color of the year, Target customers weren't buying it...at least not this version of it.

The specific pink of those Target Ts was...I don't know.  Like in the eerie valley of white person skin tones (especially those of us whose heritage puts the north in northern European).  Robert was like, is this the color of a very white person's skin with a mild sunburn?  It was odd.  I think a lot of these "blush" colors don't have enough pink in them to work on pale skin.  But as you can see in the post I linked to, the ultra-pale color looks great on darker skin.

I did add two "rose quartz" pieces to my wardrobe this spring/summer from Goodwill--a light pink blazer (definitely pink) and a light pink short-sleeved cardigan (which is close to having not enough pink, actually, but is just this side of eerie).  But these close-to-my-skin-tone shirts are a no-go for me.

3 comments:

Jen M. said...

Skim milk and cream---- that reminds me. Apparently Land O Lakes sells an atrocity which is Fat-free Half-and-half. It has skim milk and corn syrup. I wish I knew someone who worked there who could tell them they cannot in good conscience sell this product because well-intentioned fathers everywhere might accidentally buy it not realizing such a thing even existed...

Sally said...

Heh, that does sound pretty appalling.

rvman said...

Think of it as a halfway house for non-dairy creamer addicts trying to transition to the real thing.