Friday, November 25, 2011

Fashion Family




It shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone that I have a younger, thinner, hotter sister who has more style than I do. That's how families work. One of you gets to be good looking while the other gets to be clever (okay, that's not really true. My sister Danielle is ALSO really smart).

She's smart enough to know that when I told her to bring clothes home over thanksgiving so I could put her on my blog, she packed not one, but five outfits. We're two peas in a pod. What's funny is we weren't always that way when it came to fashion. When we were little I would frequently dress in monochromatic outfits, with matching accessories and hair bows, and Danielle would wear floral night gowns with jeans, rain boots and sunglasses that she stole from our stuffed animals.



Somewhere along the way, I learned to loosen up a little and she learned that doll clothes are for dolls. What's funny though is although her sense of style is still very different than mine, I absolutely adore it.

Take the shoes she's wearing, for example. I would never in a million years buy these shoes. But somehow she manages to pull them off fabulously (due partly in fact to how she paired them with those black tights. I often remind myself that tights are a privilege and not a right, and are rarely an appropriate substitute for pants, but I digress.).



Nevertheless, this girl has got a keen eye for details. Her eclectic taste in fashion fits perfectly well with her trendy San Francisco surroundings, and I envy her ability to make layering look so chic.

Being more of an LA girl, I'm always that girl who thinks its totally fine to wear a cute, short dress in winter as long as you have a coat on, but I'm also the idiot who's legs are turning a lovely shade of blue if it dips below 60 degrees outside.

I'd like to take credit for contributing to Danielle's great sense of style, and being the fashionable big sister who taught her everything she knows, but let's face it, she's a force all on her own. Check her out here: somethinglikehunger.blogspot.com










Danielle Royston

C+S: What do you do? 
Danielle: I'm a student at San Francisco State. I'm majoring in Japanese and getting a certificate in Music and Recording Industries. 

C+S: If you could go shopping in anyone's closet, who would it be and why? 
Danielle: Definitely Audrey Hepburn. She inspire my hairstyle, by the way. I'd also like to shop in any SF State dance student's closet. They always look so cool. 

Vivienne Westwood is my favorite accessory designer.

Also, Ai Yazawa. She's a writer and artist, but she puts together outfits that I love and I have always dreamed of having.

C+S: Tell me about where you got those great shoes? 
Danielle:  I was in Japan this summer, visiting Harajuku, and I found them in this teeny, eclectic boutique. They were only like $10! I had been looking for a pair like them everywhere, and they were all like $40 or $50. At first, when I tried them on, I thought they were marked down because they were two left feet, but they turned out fine. 

C+S: Tell me more about the outfit you're wearing:
Danielle: I wear this outfit a lot, usually to my ballet class, but not with those shoes. It's easy to move in and light weight. I feel dainty in it, and I really like the empire waist that the skirt creates. It's a little poofy and it looks great up high. It's a combination of old pieces and new ones that I really like. 

C+S: Tell me about style in San Francisco, has it influenced the way you dress? 
Danielle: It absolutely has. In San Francisco, you can pretty much wear anything you want, so that has let me experiment more with the way I dress. It's also kind of a hipster-ish city, and I've always been a closet hipster, so I don't feel self conscious about wearing whatever I want. 

Friday, November 11, 2011

Guilty Pleasure

You are either going to love me or hate me for this post. I'm deviating from the usual C+S format for two reasons:
1. Because you need to know about this amazing website I found.
2. Because I haven't gotten around to styling new models yet. Sorry.
You know how around this time last year everyone was so twitterpated with Pinterest.com? Yeah, well I never got on that train. I was too busy thinking Iwas too cool to waste hours pretending I had money to burn and "pinning" all sorts of gorgeous, useless things. Well, that was before I discovered Polyvore... Oh my.

Let me explain.
When I was little I had paper dolls. If you are like me and you grew up in the 90's and had an ever increasing need for more Barbies, your mom probably got fed up and bought you some paper dolls, which came with  about 10 perforated outfits that you punched out and dressed her in. Polyvore is just like that, except a gazillion times better.


Basically, you can choose from billions of articles of clothing on the internet and arrange them into these really fun fashion magazine like spreads, called sets.


If that weren't cool enough, there are also enough design options, text, backgrounds, pictures, and accessories to choose from that you will probably pee yourself with excitement.


And if that still wasn't cool enough, it then itemizes all of the pieces that you used in your set, and lists where you can buy them (and how much they cost, which is kind of a buzzkill, but I digress. The set I made below costs approximately three months rent for me).

Fall is Golden


Shift dress
$178 - warehouse.co.uk

Giuseppe Zanotti peep toe bootie
$1,095 - giuseppezanottidesign.com

Leather cross body handbag
$100 - topshop.com

Breagha bow jewelry
£11 - hannahzakari.co.uk

Privileged locket necklace
$95 - maxandchloe.com

Emilio Pucci printed silk scarve
£93 - theoutnet.com







 In all seriousness, Polyvore does have some practical applications: Planning a wedding? You can use this as a style-board/ color palette. Shopping for a specific outfit for an occasion or a trip? You can literally search all of the pieces you're looking for and then see what they look like together before you buy them.

The set above is a very rudimentary example of what you can do with Polyvore, but you get the gist. Now for the fashion moral in my set: I was inspired to put together a vibrant look for Fall/Winter, probably because I am deprived of winter weather in Southern California, and because I am tired of people talking about how they can only wear yellow in the summer/spring. Not true! Is this outfit winter-y? Yes. Is it sophisticated? Definitely. Is it the color of rotting leaves or pumpkins? Nooooooooo. Remember, Fall does not equal boring. Spice it up!

Now, I'm off to waste three more hours on Polyvore. 

P.S. I nearly forgot, here's the link to my Polyvore account: http://janaenicole.polyvore.com/