Style Spy DIY -- Shimmy, Shimmy

Last month, in a post about fun, fabulous necklaces, I showed you this:

Which I really, really, reeeeeeeally loved, but which was selling for a cool 600 samoleons. That? Is excessive. It's on sale now, for 30% off and ya know what? Still excessive. That is just too damn much money for some fringe.

I'm having a fringe moment. I've been having a fringe moment since I saw Raf Simon's Fall 09 show for Jil Sander last spring, which featured, among many, many breathtaking garments, items like this:

and this:

I'm not alone here -- there's a LOT of fringe happening in accessories and clothing this fall, and I predict we're going to be seeing it for a while to come. I love fringe like this because I love movement. I'm not talking short, stubby little fringes like at the bottom of some little girl's tap dance recital outfit. But these long, silky, shiny fringes? Make me nuts. I've always loved, as I've mentioned here before, a good shimmy dress. So, that necklace was really speaking to me. Crying out to me, even. Although, honestly, the $600 cry of the Fringe Siren was not all that hard to resist. Even I can't justify that kind of madness.

So? I made it myself.

(Omigod, do you see what I meant the other day about needing a haircut?? GAH!!!)

And I am pretty darned pleased with the results. This is one layer of fringe, attached to a neckband that I tied in the back. It is so much fun, I can hardly stand it. (Although be careful eating soup!) And even more versatile than I thought it was going to be. I wore it out Saturday night and the lovely Miss A pointed out that I cold do other things with it -- like knot it into a giant tassel:

(Tassels are also going to be big this fall, I think.)

And that got me to thinking -- I could play around with some jewelry, too! Here it is with a rhinestone hair clip:

and a sweet little vintage rhinestone pin in the shape of a bow.

Black is handy, but Style Spy likes her some color. And since I am still having my purple moment...

Voila! This one is two layers of fringe, with the top layer trimmed to be a little shorter. It's a denser look

but in some ways maybe not so versatile, because I won't be able to tie it and fix jewelry to it as easily without the shorter layer working loose. If you'll notice, the Kiki deMontparnasse necklace at the top of the page has a silver choker that the fringe is attached to. I thought about trying to come up with something like this, but for the prototype I just decided to attach it to grosgrain ribbon. And boy am I glad that I did, because a glass of wine or so later I came up with this idea:

Woo-hoo! I tied it around the waist of my bandage skirt to create an instant, removable fringe overlay. (Well, part of an overlay -- it doesn't go all the way around, of course.) The black on black is hard to see (you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them), so here it is with the purple:



Here I channel my Inner Joan Holloway and do the twist. I'm really kind of excited about this. I think I might make one to go all the way around my waist, creating an instant convertible shimmy skirt to put over any number of things. But I also like the black one only on one side -- it's funky in that way I like.

Like I said, I'm extremely pleased with this one all around. I wore the black one out for drinks this Saturday, here's how it looked:

Teamed with black capris, Marni sandals, a vintage Lanvin bangle (insanely lucky vintage store find) and, approriately, a Jil Sander top. Which is ever so marvelous.

Simons works mostly in neutrals, but he usually throws in a few good pops of color for every collection. This top is from Spring 08, which had a little more color than usual and showed a lot of this delicious sherbet orange and hot pink. See the little hot pink bit on the back? The front of the sweater is orange, the back is pink, and the capelet is attached at the sides & neck so that the pink flashes when you move. It's pretty fabulous. It's finally cooling off a bit and so I can wear this -- it's silk & cashmere and was not appropriate for 103º, even though sleeveless.

How come when the other fashion bloggers do cool model-y poses they look great, but when I do it I just look silly? So unfair. Also, again with the haircut-needing. I look like a poodle the AKC refuses to register...

I'm going to make some more of these fringe-y items, and I might even open myself a little Etsy store. If you think you'd like some fringe of your own, send me an e-mail and we'll talk turkey. (Note: I'm not going to charge you $600. I'm probably going to charge you about $25. So you could buy several colors and still come out ahead.)

Now if you'll excuse me, I've got some shimmyin' to do...


Images: Style Spy

Style Spy DIY -- Get Thee Gone, Wench!

A problem child from Style Spy's closet:

(Yes, the face was that bad. No makeup, crazy post-run, pre-shower hair. It's hard enough for me to show you any photos of me, let alone the ones where I look like a designer-clad escapee from a prison camp. So please indulge me.)

I've written about this McQ dress before, about how it's a little challenging but I still love it. And those things are both true, but I was rifling around in my closet this weekend (I am purging relentlessly -- look out for more Shop the Closet opportunities) and I saw it hanging there and realized I've worn this dress once, maybe twice. Which is a crying shame because one of the best things about it is the fabric -- a cool, breezy, supersoft cotton voile that is absolutely perfect for the Dante-esque weather we continue to have here in Austin this summer.

So I took it out & put it on, trying to decide if I wanted to keep it or if there was anything that could be done to make it a bit more wearable. I looked in the mirror and asked, "What is it about this dress that makes it user-unfriendly?"

The answer, of course, was the neckline. I love the asymmetrical pick-ups of the skirt, and I don't mind the Big! Blue! Stripes! because we all know how I feel about color. But the big ol' ruffle with the off-the-shoulder action and the foofy, poofy sleeves combine to make it, let's be honest, decidedly wench-y.

Style Spy does not do Wench.

Safe to say, any character AT ALL you might find at Ye Olde Renaissance Faire is not a look I want to be emulating at any time, ever. EVER. (And neither should you, unless you are actually employed by an actual Renn Fest.)

So in order to save this dress I decided I need to get rid of the ruffle and tone down the sleeves, and also fix the sliding off my shoulder problem. And so I did:


The ruffle wasn't actually that hard to take care of -- I turned it under like a facing, stitched it down, then trimmed off the fabric. I added ribbon ties to the back in order to keep the neckline together -- the bonus of that was I actually really like the kind of drapey cowl effect it creates in the back. The sleeves were a much bigger PITA, it turns out. Somehow, the geometry of this dress is really wonky and my usual tricks for dealing with sleeves (like folding the dress in half to measure) didn't really pan out. There was a lot of eyeballing that went on. Happily, the dress is pretty loosey-goosey, because I still don't think they're exactly even.

(I'm talking to Shine, not imaginary friends.)

Here I stuck a sweet little vintage half-slip under it, so that the adorable crystal-pleated flounce on the bottom peeked out. Just for giggles. And here's how the dress looked when it went out for Sunday evening moules et vin -- with a hat & various pieces of jewelry:

(Canvas & raffia platform wedges from Banana Republic that I bought for a song last summer and am going to wear to shreds, I should have bought two pairs; hat from April Cornell children's wear --yep, seriously -- and sweetest little antique porcelain flower pin ever found at Antique Mall a few years ago for something like 5 bucks. Bangles from various places -- I just scoop 'em up whenever I find some in colors I like.)

So there ya go. I'm pretty tickled about this little project. I was very hesitant to embark upon it because... well, who am I to second-guess Alexander McQueen? On the other hand, I wasn't wearing it, and if someone like me, who is fairly fashion-adventurous, wasn't wearing it, it didn't seem likely that someone was going to see its inherent magic on the small screen if I listed it on eBay and take it off my hands. I really had nothing to lose.

I know this is the sort of dress that, for some people, no amount of alterations is going to make tolerable. But I don't dress for those people. I dress for me, and for the imaginary coterie of street style photographers and fashion editors that live in my head. (Yeah, it's crowded in there.) Some will probably quibble with the volume of the dress, saying it looks bulky. In response to that criticism I have to say that still pictures don't do it justice -- a lot of this dress is about the movement. Besides: in shoes like the platforms I'm wearing in these photos I'm almost six feet tall -- I can wear the bulk without being swallowed. If I were a smaller person, yes, this dress would probably be too much for me.

So what do you think? An improvement? Or do you think it's a lost cause? Should I have left it alone? Burned it? What? Tell me what you think!



Images: Style Spy

Style Spy DIY -- Dior Edition

So. after ooh-ing and ahh-ing (and quite frankly drooling all over my keyboard -- what a mess!) at the Dior Haute Couture, I decided I needed to get a little vintage lingerie into my life. There's all kinds of sheerness and lace and lingerie-inspired stuff going on in fashion right now and I wanted to get in on it.

I decided not to take this route:

Because, while it certainly is wonderful, I don't think even I want that much attention. Also -- sitting down. Yikes.

What I did come across was this:


Once again, Connie Day, at the Antique Mall here in Austin, comes through for me. Gorgeous, gorgeous thing.

Let me just explain that the DIY part of this endeavor was not limited to browsing around in the air-conditioned comfort of the Antique Mall looking at beautiful things. This vintage long-line bra is in amazing condition. Except. The foam rubber padding that lined the cups had hardened and then disintegrated. It was like two bags of coal dust, or crumbled charcoal. An hellacious mess, is what it was, that left me gritty all over my hands and black under my fingernails and around my cuticles whenever I handled the thing. I had to split open the seams on the back side of the cups and scoop all that stuff out with a stiff brush and my increasingly-filthy fingers. It took forever, and it was a gigantic pain in the ass, frankly, not to mention a hideous mess. And then the alterations had to begin. Because this little item is a 36C, the cups were way too big for me, even over clothing. (Because it is a vintage 36C, the bodice, on the other hand, fits me like a glove. Numbers, apparently, were smaller in the 50's. Mysterious.) I had to basically remove the top half of the cups, take in a couple of darts along the sides next to the underwire, and then re-apply the trim that I removed from the original edge. That was much less a pain in the ass, but it took a while. Worth it, however, because it's just fantastic-looking.

First, inspired by this,

I went for a day look. Well, maybe not a day look, per se. Can it really be called "daywear" if there's a visible lingerie component? Probably not. At any rate, I came up with this:

(Happier than I look, I promise.)

This is all stuff that was already in my closet -- Theory blouse, super-basic high-waisted Kay Unger pencil skirt, Cole Haan calf-hair pumps.

But what I was really hankering for, of course, was something like this:

Because if you're gonna go Dior-inspired, my friends, go big or go home, right?

First I tried a full-on Dior homage:


The shoes are my Michael Kors Bad Girl shoes, the blouse is random but great white cotton number, and the skirt & hat are both vintage. We all know I'm a freak for tulle, and when I saw this skirt in a vintage store several years ago, well, I like to lost my mind, as we say around here. Because not only does it look wonderful, but you can do this:

Wheeeeeeeee!!!

After establishing that I like the bustier over a blouse I wanted to play with the transparency idea a little more, so I tried this:

This is the DIY project I posted about not long ago -- the lace top whose sleeves I cut off. I like this a lot, too, I like the play of the two different kinds of lace together.

Being the kind of person I am, I happen to have more than one tulle skirt in my closet. (Yeah, I know, I'm a freak.)

(This called for different shoes, of course. Pinkish-gold glitter Pedro Garcia pumps. Love these shoes.)

So I gave it a whirl. I'm less crazy about this for some reason, but I wanted to shoot for some of the transparency in the skirt, like in this look

So I put a black half-slip under the skirt:


This is a little less successful, I think. The dark slip read better in the mirror than it does in the photos, but it still looks more like a mistake than a choice, I think.

There was one more thing I wanted to try:

This is a vintage crinoline that I've had for quite a while. I don't have a black garter belt, and the shorter layer underneath is a shortened slip, not tap pants, but I think this is pretty close. Honestly, I really love this. I was this close to wearing it to the Austin Fashion Week Awards Sunday night (about which more later, but here's my capsule review: "Oh, dear.") but it was, as it has been for seemingly years this summer, incredibly hot and I really didn't want to deal with that bustier in 105º heat.

So there you have it. What do you think? Any looks that particularly speak to you?



Images: Style Spy, Style.com

Style Spy Does the D.I.Y.

Sometimes your friend Style Spy isn't very bright. And sometimes she gets lucky & figures stuff out. To wit:

I bought this Alice + Olivia blouse... oh, a while ago. Months. Longer.



and I've never worn it. I bought it because it was down to nothing at the NM outlet and I liked the way it fit and I liked the lace and thought it would be a great layering piece. But I never wore it because of those sleeeeeeeeeves.



That is a lot of sleeve. It's pretty and all, but really not my thing. I'm way too grown up for that whole Stevie Nicks/Renn Faire thing (Hear ye, hear ye! If ye can legally rent ye olde automobile, ye are too old for princess clothes!!); not to mention you can only wear this if you know you're not going to be eating anything, and who wants to limit herself like that?

(Style Spy gets her Stevie Nicks on)

(Remember how I told you the Wacaol nude was perfect for me? Check that out. I forgot to put on a camisole before I took these pictures, but you can barely see that bra!)

So the top has been languishing in the closet all this time. I've put it on a few times & tried to make it work, but it just never did.

In the meantime, I've fallen for this lovely, from Balmain.

I don't like to jump on the All-Worship-Balmain bandwagon, but I do really love that lace t-shirt.

So. Inspired by some excellent D.I.Y. I've been seeing on some of my favorite blogs, like Garance Dore's, I had lightning bolt and realized how to solve both of these dilemmas in one stroke:

(Two strokes, actually. One for each sleeve.)

And the result:

(Remembered the camisole for this one.)

Muuuuuch better, wouldn't you agree? Pretty, stylish, and useful! I do feel a wee twinge about the loss of all that pretty lace, but I'll hang onto it. It'll make for a lovely pocket square or something. I also think I'm going to go back & shorten the sleeves just a bit more -- this length is just not... quite.

It was the right thing to do. I've already worn it. I wore the night I did it, as a matter of fact, out for a glass (who are we kidding, a bottle) of wine with a friend.

(Gap shorts, Golde sequined vest, Marni platforms, various vintage necklaces)

I really liked the way this outfit worked, except the sequins snagged a bit on the lace, so I may not wear it with this particular vest again. It's still the look I was after -- I need to continue t keep my eye peeled for a vest with this silhouette, sans sequins.

So. I'm officially crafty. Whaddya think?

Images: Style Spy, Polyvore.com, Style.com, Vogue