Dressing for where you live
As told through my outfits of the week
When I was in Paris two weeks ago, I was overjoyed to be in a Fashion City™️ and eagerly drinking in metro inspo. A man wearing a green sweater, green pants, brown dress shoes and a navy Longchamp, a trio of women with perfectly done hair and makeup, sheer tights and black kitten heels. It was cold when we were there, and so BIG WOOL COAT and BIG SCARF were instantly stamped into my frontal lobe as necessary purchases. I rued (and continue to rue) the day that I turned down a perfectly fitting mahogany leather blazer at Goodwill because on principle I couldn’t stomach giving Goodwill $39.99 American dollars. The debate on whether or not to get black WeeJuns was settled immediately when a woman walked onto the M9 wearing sheer polka dot tights, black trouser socks, a black mini skirt, and black loafers. As I sat on the train, I started to mentally outline a Substack in which I described what I would be adding to my collection after my trip to Paris, rare as the opportunities for me to see street style are.
Sitting at my desk back in Flagstaff though, the street-style rush has ebbed… “this ain’t Hollywood, this is a small town!” If anything, it would be nice to have a nice wool coat for the holidays and work events, which I learned from last year’s company Christmas party when my feather-shedding North Face jacket from eBay pretty much ruined an otherwise cute outfit. And I currently don’t have a pair of black dress shoes, so the black WeeJuns are warranted. I did end up buying a pair of New Balance 530s in Paris because the foam treads of the thrifted 574s I brought started coming unglued on day 3 of walking around, but I had been thinking about those prior to the trip as well. In short, my lifestyle is not that of a Parisian commuting on the metro. That doesn’t mean I can’t have fun with my outfits, but it simply would look a little weird to replicate the sheer tights and kitten heels look out to bar trivia in a place where most people are wearing Kuhl pants and Altra running shoes. Begging for forgiveness at the reference, but around the holidays I saw a TikTok where a woman in North Carolina, where I’m from, was telling the “fashion girlies” of the US that if they come back to their small towns wearing a long denim skirt, a cardigan, ruffly socks, and Sambas, they are actually not projecting their desired effect of high style but that of homeschooling and blink-twice-if-you-need-help religious fundamentalism.
Leandra Medine Cohen recently made this helpful distinction between taste and style in her post Great outfit weather:
The task of getting an outfit right is about finding the overlap on the Venn diagram of your taste and style. The difference between one’s taste and style is that the former doesn’t concern the physical form that is you — it’s a pure expression of what you like.
Your style on the other hand takes into consideration the practical conditions and limitations of your person — what you like about your body, what you don’t like about it, where you live, what the weather is like there, what you spend most of your days doing and frankly, who you spend those days with.
I think this is a perfect distinction. As much as I enjoyed being in Paris and wearing cute outfits there, I don’t have an endless budget or the closet space to buy clothes that fit the lifestyle of me IF I lived in New York, me IF I lived in LA. There’s something to be said for incorporating elements of style you’ve seen in places you’ve visited or online, but fully adopting the style ethos of someone else who lives in a city where you don’t live, to me at least, comes across as inauthentic and just plain impractical. And the great thing is if I move, I am free to adjust and edit accordingly! Making this distinction between taste and style frees from both the disappointment of not feeling like you’re expressing yourself truly and also the discomfort of feeling overdressed or out of place.
A shorter post this week but thank you for reading! I want to try and get on some sort of bi-weekly (that might be ambitious) schedule where I do one shorter post and one longer post, but honestly this week got derailed by being sick. To wrap up, here are a few things I consumed this week:
Perfect working/reading playlist: search “Hinoki Wood Radio” on Spotify
This article in The New Yorker about the making of “The Sympathizer”
We finished HOTD and are very excited for the new season!!
I am almost done with The Secret History, and it is much better than The Goldfinch, which was an exhausting book.
Poog with Kate Berlant & Jacqueline Novak. That’s all!
Thank you for the thoughtful reply on something largely unrelated to the lovely content of your newsletter btw!! I just have terrible circulation and really loved these compression socks I got - and now want to redo my sock drawer to include more! 😂 PS I live & work in NYC and still have to pause and do the “are these shoes for the me living & commuting in reality or the dream-me in my head?” reality check when shopping!!
Wait do you like the wellows better than vim & vigr?? I got a pair for a 14 hr flight last year and have literally worn them so much since just for normie office days.