My Favorite Silly Little Outfits

I ended up with about a 60% participation rate for “Me Made May But Make It Weird” but I had SUCH a good time when I did. Having a reason to really get dressed and having a theme to dress to was really inspiring–I pulled out different combos and old makes and remembered why I sew (because FASHUN is fun!).

Here are my favorite combos of outfit and prompts, featuring a new (!) tiger print dress for the last day.

 

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The “dress over pants” silhouette made another appearance:

 

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I don’t think I ever posted or even photographed this whole set because it felt a little loud–but it was perfect for the prompt and I kind of love it now?

 

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And finally, my favorite prompt by far:

 

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Silly Little Outfits

It’s May and that means Sewing Instagram is full of people posting outfits with the clothes they made and calling it “Me Made May.” The last time I tried to join in was in 2018, when I’d say only 30% of my wardrobe was handmade. Now it’s about 90% and it’s “Me Made Every Day,” so documenting it for May just seemed a little silly.

But this year I saw an account propose a new idea: “Me Made May But Make It Weird.” What? “Weirdly specific and unnecessarily dramatic”? SIGN ME UP.

I missed a couple days of prompts in Moab but I’m back at it this week, because just look at the outfit prompts:

If you want to see my silly little outfit videos, my feed is here or check out the hashtag.

Hand Made

It’s the twelfth anniversary of the Rana Plaza collapse today, the deadliest garment-factory disaster in history. It was also the 114th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire a few weeks ago, on March 25.

I’ve read a couple essays recently, one specifically about the legacy of the Triangle Shirtwaist disaster (All Our Clothing Is Haunted) and one more about the fact that most industrial sewing still can’t be automated (All Clothing Is “Handmade,” Even When You Can’t See It).

They’re both worth a read and they both bring up a fact I don’t think many people realize: Robots aren’t making clothes; humans are. As Haley Houseman says in “All Clothing Is ‘Handmade,'”

No matter what you are wearing, it was made by a skilled team of workers. Somebody gently joined the toe seam of your socks on a machine where a human hand must stretch each individual knit loop in a row across a series of long teeth as fine as a comb. Every single seam of your shirt and pants was pushed through a sharp sewing machine needle by a person. Fabric was carefully laid out in broad stacked sheets, and then someone bravely cut individual sizes of a garment’s pattern pieces like slices of a layer cake. The zippers, buttons, and other crucial fastenings that keep your clothes on your body were attached—and only made possible—by the supple dexterity of fingers, even this late into the industrialization of clothing production. Every single label was carefully sewn in. Finished garments were ironed, folded, and packaged by someone flexing sore wrists at the end of a long week.

Khaki Mystery Solved

I was wondering where my current prep style fixation came from and then I remembered being a teenager in the 90s: Banana Republic selling blazers, J. Peterman selling literal jodhpurs, the GAP KHAKIS ADS:

(All images from a fantastic single-interest blog collecting Gap playlists and print images.)

 

Daughter Judy released a new pants pattern with perfect timing for all my nostalgia, so guess what I’m making next:

More Green


Here’s an article about the nouveau vert of the 1860s, or a new synthetic green dye: On that deadly emerald green: How emerald green became fashionable, despite its poisonous past. 

Before 1859, green pigments came from arsenic mixed with copper, which, uh, killed you:

The “green tarlatan so much of late in vogue for ball dresses” contained as much as half the gown’s weight in arsenic – as one article explained. [Alison] Matthews David concurs with this assessment, adding that “a ball gown fashioned from up to 20 meters of this fabric would have 900 grains of arsenic. It was possible that no less than 60 grains could fall from the dancing gown in the course of a single evening. For an average adult, four to five grains were already considered lethal.”

(Arsenic wasn’t used in just fabric, either. William Morris, Mr. Arts and Crafts, owned a copper mine and used copper arsenite pigments in his wallpapers. He also dismissed claims of that green being poisonous up through the 1880s.)

Newsletters About Clothes

Both Virginia Sole-Smith and Anne Helen Petersen sent out newsletters ruminating about loving clothes on your own terms, how fatphobic most fashion “rules” are, and how to keep (or get back to) the joy we all felt as kids when we out on an outfit we loved. (Plus, they both include descriptions of those kid outfits that are perfection: “My middle school aesthetic fell somewhere between Punky Brewster and Rayanne Graff, if they were also very into rainforest vibes.”)

Sole-Smith’s newsletter hits on how dressing for joy almost inevitably becomes dressing to blend in (and the thin privilege thereof), plus the intersection of navigating all of this as female:

Every creative kid goes through some process of deciding how much they want to stick out and how much they need to blend in, in order to survive their tween and teenage years. What once felt special, personal, and unique suddenly becomes “attention seeking,” which, we learn early, is one of the worst qualities a girl can have.

Petersen’s newsletter links back to Sole-Smith’s and talks about unpacking the years of blending in:

What does it look like to dress with the same joy as you did before you became conscious of your body? Is it possible to choose an outfit with the underlying supposition that the body is beautiful in it, is lovable, is sexy, simply because you have decided it is? What would it look like to talk about clothes without talking about bodies — which is to say, without talking about “flattering”?

They’re good bookends to each other. At the very least they’ll get you remembering your favorite outfits as a kid.

On Trend: Checkerboard

I’ve been seeing checks everywhere in RTW lately. It’s not a brand-new trend (the buyer for Stonemountain Fabric called it at the end of 2018) but we all know 2020 didn’t count–and it’s finally worked its way into fabric.

Want to copy these pants from Wray but want to make them even more comfortable (and not $225)?

Get some cotton knit from Girl Charlee and make some Emerson Pants:

Like the look of this fancy Arq bra but know you’re not young enough to wear it out as a shirt with your high-waisted jeans?

Make an Axis Tank (lengthened) with this knit from Fabric Mart:

And finally, this is a gingham, not a true checkerboard, but lime green is also everywhere in fashion lately:

It’s from Fabric Mart again and it’s a beautiful quality linen–much nicer than the gauze used here

Make any of the dress patterns at McCalls right now, add some ruffles, and wear not just one but TWO trends. (Just call me Home Ec Anna Wintour.)

Lizard-Brain Fashion

I’ve been thinking about what a post-vaccine world will look like for me–and by that, I mean I’m thinking about what to wear. I have no desire to be back in the office 5 days a week, but 3 days a week? Just think of the outfits!

But WHAT outfits? This tweet kind of summed it up:

Even before the pandemic, I would look at an outfit and think, “It’s a little much for my team/Target/a Tuesday” but once I’m back out in the world, no more of that! I recently found Frisky Gatos on Instagram and Reddit and her concept of “listen to ur lizard” is the best way to find your “personal style” going:

Stop trying to research and analyze oneself into style and instead just listen to YOURSELF – your most primitive brain – WHAT DOES IT WANT?

I’ve always liked what I’ve sewn and feel cool wearing it, but once I’m back out in the world, I’m not gonna tone it down anymore and put a sober blazer on top of one wild print. My lizard brain wants to wear ALL the prints and ALL the colors together and I’m just going to remind my more advanced brain parts of this:

I was embarrassed what people would think of me if I wore [what I really loved]. I’ve come to realize how flawed this thought process is because it assumes that anyone cares about me and what I am wearing. Let’s be honest: no one thinks about me as much as I think about myself and everyone else is thinking about themselves all the time anyway, so who cares?

Give it a read, click to the links for examples, and listen to ur lizard!

(image from Frisky Gatos’ reddit post linked above)

Thinking About Fashion

I’ve been saying, “I miss wearing outfits” for about a year now but I wasn’t able to articulate why very well, or explain why putting on an outfit I used to wear to the office to work from home just isn’t the same. So this Vox article was really enlightening for me: “To all the clothes I’ve loved before: Reconciling the sweatpants-wearing me with the fashion-loving woman I was just a year ago is an existential crisis like no other.”

…dressing up at all feels futile when there’s nowhere to go and no one to see. Style, after all, doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Clothes are a form of self-expression, but they are also central to our identity because they shape how others see us, says Carolyn Mair, a behavioral psychologist and author of The Psychology of Fashion. […] “We have a sense of identity ourselves by what we’re trying to project, and our identity is also reinforced through the feedback of others,” Mair says.

This may help explain why, while fashion may not rank high on everyone’s list of what’s been lost during the pandemic, for some it has felt like a significant blow.

As pandemic losses go, the loss of outfit appreciation is a minor one. But as my therapist tells me, two things can be true at once: it can be a minor loss in the bigger picture and it can be something I really miss and mourn.

Do I Need To Sew A YELLOW Coat Now?

A literal bright spot in yesterday’s emotional roller coaster was poet Amanda Gorman reading in her yellow coat. I mean, she could have worn anything and done that reading and the entire world would still have fallen in love with her, but just look at this fashion (it’s Prada):

If you didn’t hear it–or even if you did–listen to her read “The Hill We Climb” again and marvel at this 22 year old and her perfection. The kids are all right.