The other night, we hosted our friend Polina (aka Truly Cool Parent), who was in town for New York Fashion Week. She came to dinner with her wardrobe stylist-slash-art director Nikki. We dined on coconut chicken curry and the finest durn cupcakes in New York City (my apologies for rocking the worlds of Magnolia and Billy’s advocates).
Polina and Nikki are the queens of fashion photography in Indianapolis, so Cool Mum and I quizzed them on their line of work because the only thing we are more clueless about than parenting is fashion. We loved hearing stories as micro as working out details for a shoot and as grand as effecting cultural change in Indianapolis.
Since we moved up here, fashion has occupied more space in my consciousness. Not that it ever occupied much. (What do you mean Hypercolor shirts went out of style? You press the shirts, AND THEY CHANGE COLOR! These are shirts of the future, if anything.)
I even went on an online clothes shopping binge towards the end of last year. Winter was coming, and I didn’t want to alternate the same two sweaters that I did during our first winter here. Thanks to Slickdeals, I picked up better-fitting jeans, Merino wool sweaters, two corduroy blazers, a wool pea coat, and a crate of slightly irregular purple Z. Cavariccis (no i didn’t).
Despite my shopping spree, I still feel fashionably inadequate; my clothes just aren’t cool enough. It doesn’t help that a lot of friends here work in fashion and design and always look swank. And it especially doesn’t help that after dinner with Polina and Nikki, Cool Mum asked me if I think that my hairstyle is outdated. Apparently, she does because this is not a typical after-dinner cleanup question.
Even when I have decent clothes, my fashion sense is bankrupt. I could be the all-time champion of Project Run-away. One day I went to work sporting a nicer shirt (that happened to be striped) and my cool new pinstripe dress pants. CM pointed out (after work, of course) that I shouldn’t wear striped tops and bottoms together. I checked online, and one commenter on a forum called the combination “horrific.” That makes me long for the days when CM called my clothes choices “not bad.”
How’s your fashion sense: Fetching or retching?
