I have to admit, larkspurs are hard to find! And that's a pity, because they're so lovely... There are very bluish ones, and all different shades of purple... sigh...

The birth flower of the month bracelet is available, but other than that I came up EMPTY on larkspurs. If you know of anything, chime in on the comments and share, please!

But this at least gives us another look at purple! It's supposed to be the color for 2018, according to Pantene, but it's still terribly difficult to find many nice garments in a color even close to purple! When you type purple into a search, it's likely you will get everything from pink through burgundy... sigh...

But let's give a dash of purple a try, eh?

I think purple looks rather nice with ... View the Post

As soon as I published the first wardrobe based on this great painting, I heard from readers who really loved it except... they don't like, or look good in, beige.

This isn't really a problem; this painting includes a few shades of grey! They're admittedly not as prominent as the beige, but that's okay. Let's see how this might play out, with the same 4 accent garments and a different scarf...

All I did for the color palette was change the beige to grey, and change the borders of each of the colors from brown to grey.

So this means that we need to start with A Common Wardrobe (i.e. classic garments that many of us might own) in grey:

As is always true with A Common Wardrobe, there are lots of possible outfits with just ... View the Post

Our heroine is pretty loyal to her favorite store... Every time she goes in, she just feels happy; she loves the outdoor equipment, and the feeling of love and pleasure in nature that the company really encourages. And it seems that most times she stops in, she walks out with something!

So her warm-weather closet looks like this:

She doesn't really struggle to get dressed, but she feels vaguely... uneasy... when she looks at her closet. She would like more focus, and maybe a clearer sense of personal style than she currently has.

Where to begin? The fastest, easiest starting place is to sort everything by color and see if she can learn something:

Oh. Dear. An equal number of navy and black garments doesn't give her a ... View the Post

Wednesday's very colorful wardrobe could certainly use some accessories! I'm going to take this opportunity to experiment with something that I've been thinking about for a while...

Imagine this scenario: you are at work, some distance from your home. You find that for some reason you MUST travel, and you must travel tonight. You're leaving directly from work, and you're relying on someone else to pack your luggage...

Do you have enough awareness of what's in your closet to be able to tell someone else what to pack?

(my ability to do this is heavily reliant on Belovedest's overall facility with clothing and fashion terminology...)

You've got your color scheme:

This plan is the same items that I've been including the last ... View the Post

Do you NEED color to be happy? A wide variety of colors? Lots of choices?

If this is you, then you can still travel with a capsule travel wardrobe - you just need to include a range of accents that all work with a neutral core. The neutrals give you all sorts of easy outfit possibilities into which you can insert a punch of color when you're in the mood. And when you want to be more subdued, you'll have that option too!

Let's start with an artist of whom I knew nothing until just a few days ago (I get the BEST mail from you all...):

While this painting clearly displays a strong affinity to great summer neutrals like khaki and ivory, it also includes some amazing accent colors. For this color palette, I skipped both the pink and ... View the Post

Let's look back at another recent travel wardrobe, and choose some accessories to be packed along with the clothes...

This wardrobe was all about colors of sky and sea; here's the original clothing color palette:

It's never necessary to have a plan for anything you do, but I think when you're packing, having some structure and some limits in mind can help a lot. If I don't set some clear guidelines when I'm packing, I'm likely to just toss in everything that I like (which is just about all of my wardrobe!) and then get somewhere and struggle to make sense of things...

Silver would be the obvious metallic choice for navy and shades of blue... but since we're talking about warmth and sun and summer, I thought that I'd go with ... View the Post

Wednesday I shared one approach to pulling together a travel wardrobe when your original plan starts to fall apart. Today, I'm going to look at what accessories need to be packed in order to make sure that you can get dressed without problems and panic...

First, let's look at our wardrobe color scheme:

For accessories, you want to make sure that you're including a color that will be suitable for jewelry - something metallic - and a color that can be used for your leather goods. This is pretty straightforward for this color scheme; the brown is perfect for leather, and gold just feels right...

Next, you want to think about what you expect to want to pack. This might not turn out to be exactly what you take, but you shouldn't ... View the Post

It all starts out so well. You've got your art inspiration in front of you, and quite a few of your garments are clear in your mind...

The brown was hard to find, but you're really happy with the results:

This is a great start...

The turquoise wasn't too tough to find; the maxi skirt is going to be SO nice to have on vacation...

This is where the wardrobe is supposed to get fun - finding tops that work with both core colors, and that pull them together. But you find that the things you were thinking about packing are too big. Too small. Too worn out. Too much in need of laundering. But you really don't have time to do ANYTHING except rethink things...

This isn't a bad wardrobe, so far, but given the ... View the Post

Someone wanted another visit to this painting, someone wanted some navy and sky blue together, and someone wanted to see another French 5-Piece wardrobe. Here, I present ALL of that, and more. First, let's enjoy this painting, and the idea of the shore...

Warmth, salty breezes messing up your hair, reapplying sunscreen... The stuff of a million dreams!

And although this painting seems pretty monochromatic at first glance, when you look carefully at it for a while you find a whole BUNCH of different shades of blue and green, as well as dark brown, and warm orangish-tan. (I'm ignoring the red signature, except for lips and nails!)

I start a LOT of my blog posts with a core wardrobe of classic, neutral, timeless clothes. I still ... View the Post

Let's start with some inspiration, shall we?

One of the first things that I noticed when I got back to Chicago is the absolutely boring way people dress here. Yesterday Belovedest and I walked about 5 miles - from near Wrigley Field to our home in the downtown. The majority of women we saw - of all ages and body types - were wearing workout tights of some embarrassing level of revealing, with a tee shirt and a sweatshirt. I don't for a New York minute believe that all of these women had been working out, or were headed that direction. In a world in which we collectively own more clothing than at any time literally in history, why are we all dressed so much alike, and so unflatteringly? Hmm...

So while I saw some clear patterns of ... View the Post