Me-Made March 3
Not much to report here today, but to save me from just throwing up my MMM pics, I have a little bit of rumination. About self-stitched clothing, their wearing, and pushing the bounds of fashion.
All of which is to say, my outfit today felt a little… odd. Not quite outlandish (though maybe close). But just a little… too… different. Now, either element, the 70s Dress and the Kimono Lady Grey, I’ve worn on their own without issue. But the dress is a bit over-the-top for the work day, not too mention too low cut for this weather, so I felt like a sweater over top would be the perfect thing to dress it down. The best look overall would be the 50s shrug, as I’ve shown before, but a) this is still pretty fancy, and b) it still leaves a pretty large chunk of cleavage getting COLD. The cardi-wrap would probably work stylistically as well, but despite stubbornly photographing as black the 70s dress is actually a distinct, if muted, purple in real life. Which I don’t think goes very well with the red wrap. Especially when I’m trying to look less odd.
Which left the Kimono-styled sweater. And, on a certain arbitrary level, I
MMM, day 3, rear view
actually really like the look—elegant, full, lots of fabric swishing around… but it’s a bit, hmm, not exactly over the top, but maybe off to the side. Beyond the bounds of “everyday” fashion. I feel like there’s an equation going on here, where rather balancing the oddity of either sweater or dress with ordinary jeans or a cardigan, I added two slightly odd pieces together and got something just a little too far past normal.
Ah, well. It’s not like anyone commented, other than my one prof who knows I sew (and hence always asks if I made my more unusual pieces). And she asked while knitting while we waited for the CT scanner to warm up… yes, Academia is a very strange place some days…
So why did I pick this outfit? It’s not like I don’t have plenty of self-stitched jeans that go just fine with the sweater. But I really wanted to wear the dress, I guess. Part of the point of the me-made months is to try wearing the things that feel just a little bit odd. Just to see, I guess, how odd odd really is. I don’t have as much trouble with this as a lot of self-stitched sewists, I think because so much of what I’ve made has been very tightly contemporary (as opposed to flights-of-fancy dresses and vintage concoctions). But I really do want to do some wearing of my flights of fancy, as well as my regular threads. So this was a stab at that.
Ah, well. If nothing else I’ve demonstrated that slightly odd isn’t equivalent to people-on-the-street-pointing-and-laughing…
Tanit-Isis Sews 