Accessorizing Archives - Page 3 of 23

Looking for a Wardrobe Spark? Pantone New York Fashion Week Spring 2025 colors

September 23, 2024

Ah, one of my favorite projects! "New" colors are always fun...

I feel like the Pantone people had a meeting at which they decided that their work needed to be more "green," and that someone misunderstood the assignment. Lots of shades of green in this list!

But let's start with Orangeade, which I kind of interpreted in a more rust direction, for autumn:

I like this warm light brown, but I might have tried harder to give it a more appealing name than Bran...

I don't know why you'd take a nice shade of light camel and give it a slightly greenish cast.... OH WAIT, this is the green season...

I wish I could think of any legitimate reason for me to own this next scarf, but it would be fiction! If ... View the Post

Can I Wear Toast Brown With My Current Clothes?

August 19, 2024

Starting very early last Friday morning, I was asked repeatedly if the "toast brown" cashmere sweater in this post could be worn with neutrals other than black...

This is the post, just to make it easy for you to see it again!

So I thought that I would pull together a little "French 5-Piece Wardrobe" in that lovely brown/taupe. It's a great color - sort of warm, but not yellowish - at least on my computer screen!

Maybe you weren't convinced that this colors goes with black, so I will show it again...

Honestly, if I didn't already have both a brown cardigan and TWO brown crewneck sweaters, I'd buy this one... I love the way these colors look together!

I think it's logical, and maybe obvious, ... View the Post

A Small, Basic Travel Capsule Wardrobe? Start with Art – Portrait of Woman in Green Hat by Picasso

August 16, 2024

She remembered the post - right here on The Vivienne Files - and was thinking of something a little bit different with the same painting!

I think every reader of The Vivienne Files thinks up their own versions of these wardrobes; that's kind of the point! Put your own preferences in place of mine, or those of our heroine...

Her wardrobe is black and white. She's just now starting to add a bit of taupe/brown to things. But she could see the merit of a blue shirt, or a green sweater, along with a scarf or two...

So for a trip - a fairly long trip - she decides to pack VERY light, but to give herself the feeling of a "bigger than it really is" travel capsule wardrobe. Three accent colors might do ... View the Post

Love a Little Black Dress? Start With a Scarf – The Bryan Yambao scarf by Echo

August 9, 2024

One of our heroines fell instantly in love with a scarf, and had a business week travel vision...

She has a closet full of black dresses, but she's never dared to pack JUST black dresses for a business trip!

Why not? She's going to meet different groups each day she's away, and she doesn't care if she's known as the woman who wears lots of black...

Here's her color palette:

Her first dress is a mid-calf shirtdress... perfect with her suede belt, a red cardigan, and some other bits that pull everything together:

Her second dress is shorter, and has a small "moc" neckline. As much as she loves her golden yellow cardigan, she MUST have a brooch, so that she can conceal that annoying ... View the Post

Do You Love Larkspur? Are You Passionate About Periwinkle?

June 28, 2024

OMG, tomorrow is my birthday! I will be 64... although I feel like I'm somewhere at the crossroads of 21 and 90. My brain is young, my knees are past retirement age!

What do I want for my birthday? For you to recommend The Vivienne Files to anyone who might enjoy our community, and my ideas...

Speaking of community - many of you - MANY OF YOU - really love the color "Larkspur" offered by L.L.Bean. They currently have THIRTY-THREE items available, so it's pretty easy to find something you can wear frequently. That said, many of these things are marked down, and therefore might just rush into retail oblivion...

I assembled this French 5-Piece Wardrobe in Larkspur to help me focus on how this color might be ... View the Post

Some Wardrobe Update Ideas – Pantone London Autumn/Winter 2024/25 Fashion Week Colors

June 26, 2024

Some of us are diligently wearing our well-crafted wardrobes regularly, but still have... an itch? a yearning? for just a little bit of an update. Something fresh (for us). A bit of a wake-up call for our usual outfits...

And Pantone delivers, with ten colors that they isolated from what they observed at the London winter fashion week. Does this mean that these colors will be readily available or easy to find? Heck no! But they do give us ideas, and ideas are where all beautifully-dressed women start!

Oddly, there is NO shade of pink here.

Please note that I really don't think anybody will wear ALL five items in these images at one time. I'm not sure that you should buy all five, unless you've got a serious ... View the Post

Want to Shake Up Your Routine? Start with a Scarf – the Stephen Bliss silk scarf from Echo

May 10, 2024

She knew it was time for a change; for years, she was known for her subtle wardrobe of shades of ivory and beige... She loved it, but she knew that it was time to brighten things up a bit.

She's been dressing like this for ages:

And then this caught her eye. She even felt that - when much younger - she had looked like the woman in the scarf.

After thinking about it for a few days, she finally took the plunge and ordered!

She looked at her scarf - very closely - for quite a while. After sleeping on it for a night, she isolate this color palette as a starting point for her wardrobe evolution:

Some patience, and a little bit of shopping, got her to these slight but meaningful changes in her ... View the Post

How do Accent Colors Work? Trying 9 Colors with Charcoal Grey and with Olive

April 26, 2024

Now that we've taken a good hard look at the Pantone New York Fashion Week colors for Autumn/Winter 2024/25, we still have to decide if any of these colors actually look good with the majority of clothing in our wardrobes. No accent is useful if it looks icky with all of your best pants, sweater and jackets...

I wanted to look at some somewhat different neutrals than I usually use - no black, navy, beige or white this time! Instead, I'm thinking of Autumn and Winter, and I grabbed us two simples outfits, in charcoal grey and in olive green:

From here, it's pretty simple - I'm going to show again the colors from Wednesday, and then show our neutral outfits accessorized with each of the colors.

Some colors ... View the Post

Need a Fresh Accent Idea? Pantone New York Fashion Week 2024/25 colors

April 24, 2024

These are "new" colors for Autumn/Winter upcoming - maybe we can get a head start on having these in our wardrobes?

I'm very curious to know which of these you like and dislike... As always, I have a certain fondness for all of them - after spending hours looking for things in these colors, if I didn't love them, I would throw my computer from our very high windows!

Let's go!

First up - I would almost certainly wear this dress, and I would certainly have Skimmies under it!

This next dress looks MUCH better on a human being than it does like this - when the top part of the dress is "filled out" by a human torso, it balances the skirt much better!

yes, these earrings are very expensive, but ... View the Post

Four Neutrals x Three Accent Colors – Which Ones “Work”?

April 15, 2024

So once you've studied the Pantone Colors from London Fashion Week, (found here and here), you have to decide if you like the colors, if you would be flattered by wearing any of them, and how they might look with the neutral clothes you normally wear.

I can't answer the first two questions for you - obviously - but I can give you some visuals to help you picture how the accent colors might work with your existing wardrobe...

I've assembled four "core wardrobes" in white, black, beige and navy, in varying degrees of dressiness. The level of dressiness is going to be more important than I had realized - you'll see what I mean.

Here are the four Wardrobe Cores:

The black core is pretty casual:

The beige ... View the Post

Do You Love Blue? Adding Accessories to a Start with Art Wardrobe – Blue on White, White on Blue by Paolo Quaresima

January 24, 2024

You thought that I forgot! Yes, I can get pretty immersed in those Echo 100 scarves, but there's no way I was going to miss revisiting this painting:

This heroine is going to look at each of her "wardrobe clusters" one at a time, and make certain that she has the accessories that she wants for each cluster...

She's already got her shoes chosen - that's a lot of the thinking out of the way already!

First up, her warmest cluster. There are at least four outfits possible here, if she layers her navy shirt under her navy sweater... If you're summering in a place where evenings can turn cool, this could happen!

And for what it's worth, we have cool summer days in Chicago! The sellers of souvenir ... View the Post

In the Mood for Something Pretty? Japanese 24 Seasons: Tōji – Winter Solstice

December 22, 2023

The shortest day of the year certainly puts many of us in the mood for a little treat - just something to brighten up the long, dark night...

You in the Southern Hemisphere - enjoy your long day and warm weather!

So for this post, I just cruised through all of my usual favorites to see what caught my eye...

My favorite place to look for accessories is ALWAYS Wolf & Badger; they represent a ton of small designers, and always have things that won't be seen anywhere else...

It didn't take long for me to spot some lovely pieces:

Of course, it wouldn't be The Vivienne Files without a few things from J.Crew! I had to share this cropped hoodie, in one of everyone's favorite shades of blue... And the ... View the Post