Blue Jean

Let’s take a deep breath. We’re overworked, overtired, undernourished and underslept. It’s easy to get caught up in a tornado of public activity and production and not realize that you’ve been neglecting basic maintenance in your home and private life until you wake up one day in your clothes after another bewilderingly unsatisfying four hours of sleep and, staring out over the cacophony of receipt paper, single shoes and scattered clothing that has become your apartment and in the mirror at the single tear following the course of the imprint of the floorboard that creases your cheek, you murmur, “Help.”

You look fabulous when you go all out, but sometimes you need to pull back in to catch your breath. When your life is nonstop GO GO GO, reach for easy, basic, comfortable pieces that you don’t have to think about and that will get you through the day by being your soft, accommodating, effortlessly flattering friends. Make your wardrobe one less thing to worry about and spend the extra time you just made doing things like sitting down to eat and running a brush through your hair once in a while. Don’t worry, the clothes on your back– they’ve got your back.

May we present to you a two-piece outfit that serves as an exceptionally flexible base for all your ventures and adventures.

To begin:

The tunic.

Dora Tunic

To end:

The jacket.

Petrelli Jacket

You can add:

A scarf.

Handknit Cowl by Jill Lauren

A necklace.

With Care Necklace

A sweater.

Beckett Sweater

The tunic is long enough to be a dress on its own, but we want to be toasty warm and cozy. So add pants. Any kind of pants. It looks good with black leggings, jeans, chinos, skinny legs, bellbottoms and trousers alike. For shoes, go with a durable, goes-with-everything classic:

Campus Boot

Don’t think. Don’t worry. Just put it on and go.

High on a Mountaintop

As anyone else who spent some time in the 1990′s can tell you, it was a dark time for fashion. Small pools existed such as the Gap and the Limited which clung rebelliously to the dregs of 1980′s mania by coating their shapeless, oversized silhouettes with denial in the form of colorblocking in subdued shades of teal and purple in precisely the wrong hues and covering insipid baby T’s in tired, sallow floral patterns that were just large enough to be perceived but not large enough to make a statement. The rest was plunged into relentless darkness. Popular media would have you believe that 90′s fashion was all edgy fishnets, badass trenchcoats, pretty dresses with combat boots, short schoolgirl skirts with bared, toned bellies and ankh earrings.

Yeah, right.

In the real world, in the backwoods sprawl of rural Pennsylvania, the 1990′s meant Champion sweatshirts. Seas of dingy flannel. Grunge. Dirt. As much brown, maroon, and taupe as you could choke down. The standard wardrobe was a rotating combination of gigantic band t-shirt, incredibly ill-fitting pants (jeans were in the awkward growing-out phase between the high waist of the 80′s and the obscenely low rise of the early aughts) and whatever atrocity your part-time waitress position at the diner could afford you from Hot Topic and the army surplus store. Imagine my horror when Teen Vogue recently announced Grunge was coming back.

No.

The whole “retro” thing is a reliable recurrence in the fashion industry. The 80′s re-did the 50′s, the 90′s made a halfhearted attempt at bringing back the 70′s, 2000-2005… let’s never speak of those years again, shall we not? To my perception, fashion has spent the past few years in a rehabilitative state, looking over its shoulder in embarrassment and chagrin, apologizing to those it has offended, taking deep breaths, lifting itself up, reaching towards the heavens, finding balance and integrity, and quietly trying to be better and do the right thing. And what it has done is amazing.

Nala Jacket

We’re seeing “retro” in a way it’s never manifested before, as a unified composite of only the best elements from each era. It’s like a pizza made entirely out of first bites. We now have, at one time, access to the gorgeous, full-skirted hourglass sundresses from the 50′s.

Tracy Dress

The bright, bold colors of the 80′s, tamed with some of the earthiness of the 90′s.

Cruz Dress

Colorblocking has resurfaced in a big way, but it’s the way Andy Warhol would have done it.

Covet Dress

Basha Shirt, A'Marie Shorts

Denim is appearing in washes you haven’t seen since mama took your Kodachrome away and the necklaces come in long, sweeping strands that graze across your abdomen as you swish down the street in your ankle-length bohemian skirt.

Hawk Jacket

Pleated Maxi Skirt, Fringe Top

You can accessorize with vintage gold tennis bracelets or with chunky beaded cuffs in the colors of a desert sunset.

Pants? You can have, with the exception of the 2000-2005 muffin-top horror we dare not speak of, anything you want. High waist? Yes. Mid rise? Yes. Tapered? Yes. Straight leg? Yes. Skinny? Sure, why not. Bellbottoms. Tailored. Slouchy. Denim. Black, blue, tan, and every other color of the rainbow. Yes. Anything you want, you got it. Yes.

Conrad Jeans

You can mix and match eras or go full-on Studio 54, and every look and combination is so nostalgic yet so charmingly authentic and fresh you look like you just walked out of a Polaroid.

Crochet Trim Dress

I may be running into the realm of exaggeration here because my view is admittedly limited; I very rarely shop anywhere but my workplace so my opinion is formed almost solely by Teen Vogue, National Geographic, and what I see in Queen of Hearts and Modern Love every day. And what I see is a wardrobe beyond belief, a glorious costume closet from which women can outfit themselves in shades of the past that have been thoroughly and sagely informed by the wisdom of experience. Our current selection for Spring seems almost indescribable, but “impeccably curated” springs to mind. It’s a rare and wonderful thing to find yourself in the midst of a renaissance and it’s even more precious when you’re aware of it. Ladies, it’s time to exhale. This is Camelot.

Mark Shorts

Georgette Jumpsuit

Oldie but Goodie. That pretty much sums it up.

Sunshine, Lollipops and Rainbows

Even the best, most attentive, most respectful elementary school students are subject to bouts of terminal boredom.  Those last few weeks of school in May are torture, remember? You sit on your hard plastic chair, the seat of which sticks uncomfortably to the backs of your thighs with sweat while the rattling air conditioning breathes softly and insidiously from the vent near the ceiling, serving no function other than to embalm the backs of your upper arms in an unpleasant, corpselike coldness.  The short, wide windows have been opened outwards using the gummy plastic cranks that stop turning when the space created is just shy of permitting a ten-year-old’s body to escape through it, in a blessedly merciful attempt to counteract the unpleasantness issued from the vents.  While your beloved teacher stands in front of the chalkboard and drones about fractions in a herculean effort to stay on task, on schedule, and above the rising tide of apathy, your gaze is drawn to the hazy, lazy beautiful day happening outside. You have to stay in your seat in this horrible room on this beautiful day because despite the fact that your body is at its physical peak, that your veins pulse with the wild, bloody, irrepressible urge to dance and run and fly, that no matter what anyone tells you, you know that you won’t really need to use fractions every day (or ever, if you don’t want to) as a grown up, that you are mortal and the precious seconds of your life are maddeningly slipping away in a fluorescent-lit cinderblock tomb while late Spring sings a symphony under a cerulean blue sky with a chorus of voices from which your own is absent, you won’t own your life for another eight years. Despite your physical imprisonment, however, there is absolutely nothing you nor anyone can do to keep your soul from flying out the window like a kite unreeling on a windy day at the beach, hurtling out across clover-kissed grass and up to your rightful place in the dizzy, sunny atmosphere.

It’s at about this point of the year when we start to feel similarly about our winter wardrobes.  The black leggings, the wool, the thermals, the turtlenecks, the browns and grays and navy blues, the cozy, suffocating layers of practicality.

It’s time to set your soul free.

Salsa Skirt

Royally Blue

Twirl in this.

These skirts, apart from the functionality of covering your body, are not practical.  They are gauzy, like laughter made material. They shriek with delightful asymmetry.  They billow and twirl when you walk, and when you dance? Forget about it. Spread those wings and float away on a cloud of chiffon.

This Time Tomorrow

There is one single thing you get to keep with you from the time you are born until the time that you die: your own body.  Every other thing, person, feeling or concept you encounter may leave, get thrown away, or be forgotten, lost, or replaced.  Of course you might make it through your whole life with something or someone else besides your own self, but it’s never a guarantee and you’d be a fool to count on it.  We are leaves on the wind, brushing against and floating away from one another in anonymous and unremarkable flurries, dancing in transient clouds across the careless surface of a shifting world.

So it goes– especially in fashion.

The cozy sweaters, badass boots, cute little moccasins, sparkly dresses, luxurious coats, gorgeous jewelry, cool accessories, and trim little sneakers that we drooled over and coveted when they were new are now being shown the door.  Get out. Git.

Tomorrow we begin our massive post-holiday sale, brutally slashing prices on perfectly good, gorgeous apparel so we can have space to fill the shops with a new wave of stunning dresses and shoes.  Out with the old and in with the new.  Once more and with feeling.

So why not take advantage of this opportunity to clothe your body in beauty and with style?  After all, you get to keep your body with you for your whole life.  Deck it out, keep it warm, and treat it well.

…And I’m Feeling Good

I’d say that 2011 went by quickly, but everyone always says that about every year, and I think it might not be true.  One thing that is true of 2011 is that the courses it followed and the events it contained have incited some very strong and varied opinions of its character among its many blessed and unfortunate denizens.  Whether this year punished you, rewarded you, slapped you with one hand while it caressed you with the other, or left you apathetically nonplussed, I think we can all take a seat on the same train to get to that bright, shining future that undoubtedly awaits us with warm and open arms on the station platform in 2012.  Whatever yesterday brought, tomorrow can only get better.  It’s a new dawn. It’s a new day.  It’s a new life, for we.

And we’re feeling good.

Tomorrow is New Year’s Eve.  What do we do on New Year’s Eve?  We celebrate.  We party.  We dance.  We raise our hopeful hands to the sky and trample the dust of days past under our feet.  We throw our clear, loud voices into tomorrow and let the echos of yesterday fall faintly behind us.  We let our torn and worn, tear-stained and travel-splattered garments drift away from our skin like threadbare leaves on the wind, and we clothe our fresh and naked bodies with fabrics woven from righteous threads of golden anticipation.  We take up the hands of our friends and enemies alike and, united in strength and beauty, barrel fearlessly into the unknown that lies ahead.  Because thus clad, you divine children of earth, swathed in love and light and courage,  standing shoulder to shoulder with your eyes calm and sharp and open, there is no strangeness in the world, and every step you take, wherever you take it, finds you at home.

Right?

Right.

Step in.

Dorothy's Dream. One is silver.

And step out.

Dorothy's Dream. The other is gold.

Happy New Year, with love.

Bad Reputation

You know what to buy for your always considerate office mate.

Queen of Hearts and Modern Love Gift Certificate

You know what to get for your sensitive, caring, reliable sister.

Classic Frye Campus boots and leather care products

You know what you should buy for your new nephew.

Baby Moccasins from Laurentian Chief-- Back in stock!

You know what to get your mother

Hobo "Lauren" Wallet

and your father.

Wool Brixton Hat

But what do you buy for the friend who you sometimes don’t want to answer the phone for because every time you take her call you wind up too drunk, laughing too hard, way too late at night?  The one who you almost forgot to add to your shopping list because she never seems like she actually needs anything from anybody?  The girl who has a look that can melt a man into puddle of butter, and another that can freeze that grease spot to the floor for someone else to scrape off before she walks away without looking back?  The woman that you won’t hear from for weeks and then will show up on your doorstep, unannounced, with a bottle of wine and a jaw-breaking grin?

What’s a good gift for a bad girl?

You’d take her to a movie or ballet if she could sit still long enough or stay quiet– but she won’t.  You’d take her to a nice dinner, but she scarfs her food so fast it seems pointless to waste the chef’s talent.  You’d buy her something practical if you hadn’t just seen the Target gift card you got her last year poking out from underneath the fridge, forlornly glued to the floor with a paste of coffee grounds.  She’s strong and brash, stony silent or wicked loud.  Without saying a word, she makes a statement.  So why don’t you get her something to match?

Range and Sky Earrings

The Jan Michaels collection arrived this morning, clambered into the jewelry case, and proceeded to intimidate and awe the staff and customers.  It’s tough. It’s beautiful.  It’s brass.  It behaves like no other jewelry in the store, and never apologizes.  Semi-precious stones are used; precious never.  Stars galore, with no trace of a heart.

Masmary Star Ring

The earrings cascade in effusive fountains of joyfully chaotic, jangling chains of daggers, angles and points

Stars and Rays Earrings

sometimes running on for a length much past what you expected.

Comet Earrings

The rings are, we’ll not dance around it, big.  They’re a size you have to take seriously, and in designs that drip gorgeousness and never acquiesce to Cute.  She won’t be able to break one by accidentally smashing it into a wall during a series of wild gesticulations, and it will be slightly harder to lose on a shelf cluttered with black eyeliner and unpaid utility bills.

Deco Ring

Symbolism Ring

Cutout Ring

The single bracelet we received is glamorized chain mail.

Good Knight Bracelet

The necklace– oh, the necklace.  It begins with a pair of buttonlike exoskeletons that perch like tiny epaulets on her collarbone, the mouths of which expel eighteen strands of variegated fused brass chain and tiny hammered brass plates from one end to the other in an eternal swoosh of hard-edged, twisting elegance.  It would be at home paired with a male friend’s forgotten undershirt, with a silk toga on a slow-moving raft on the Nile, with, let’s face it, a burlap sack.

Gold Fountain Necklace

Do this woman a favor and come to the shop for a peek at the wares.  Because while she may be naughty, she’s also very nice.

P.S.  We would be remiss if we didn’t also include some of the TokyoMilk fragrances in this post, available at Homestyle, which is conveniently located across the street from Queen of Hearts.  Offering scents that smell like actual things that exist in the world (like wood, grass, and cocoa) in place of the cloying  representations of conceptual lust that give you a migraine in the mall, TokyoMilk is perfume for the woman that hates perfume.  It comes in sexy black square bottles with names like “Arsenic”, “Crushed”, “Bittersweet”, and my personal favorite, “Bulletproof”.  They even have one that smells like salt.  Salt.

Baby Love

“Because it’s a parasite and parasites are the creepiest kind of animal in the whole world.  It lives inside your body and sucks all the nutrients out of your blood and eats the calcium out of your bones so they get all brittle and you’re more likely to develop osteoporosis when you get old.  It literally sucks the life out of you, and what do you get?  You get fat, your hair falls out, your boobs get weird, and then you’re stuck with this tiny thing you have to take care of, that keeps you awake at night, and does the father help?  No, he’s busy moaning about how he wishes you never had the thing because now he’s so tied down and his life is just ruined and it’s all because of you, you and this monster that already ate all this stuff from your body and that’s going to keep eating you for the rest of your life, chipping away at you in little bits and it’s just going to hate you in the end anyway because it ruined your life and everything sucks for you so much you’re going to take everything out on it because you have poor coping skills because your parents did the same thing to you.  Why on earth would anyone want that?”

That was me in 1998, in emphatic response to my health teacher asking me why I was so sure I would never have kids and why I thought I wouldn’t change my mind when I got older.  I still believe that reproducing, for me, would be foolish.

Pros: I’d get to play with a baby sometimes, I think my genes would be a good addition to the human pool, and my chances of a guarantee of being buried in a marked grave after I die would go up a little.

Cons: Every single other thing I can think of.  I can barely afford to feed myself and my cat.  I don’t want to own a car.  I already know a bunch of babies I can play with.  I’m bad at bills and paperwork.  I like to stay out late.  I hate cleaning the house.  I lock myself out of the house and forget things all the time.  Like, important things.  These are all excellent reasons for me to not to produce a child.  None of these reasons, though, are because of how gross the little parasite is and how fundamentally disgusting pregnancy and the process of gestation is.  Because while logic stands firmly on the anti-reproduction side of the fence, I WANT A GODDAMN BABY WITH EVERY CELL IN MY BODY.

I’m not scared of that scene from Alien anymore, now I’m scared of how much I feel like Sil from Species.  My brain chants, “babies suck, babies suck, throw the babies in the garbage truck,” while my blood seethes and every beat of my heart screams, “BREED.  BREED.  BREED.  BREED.”

These.  Don’t.  Help.

Are.  You.  Serious.

This Canadian company is owned by a mother and son team, and all their BABY MOCCASINS(!) are handcrafted in Canada.  They are soft.  They are tiny.  I hold one in the palm of my hand and it melts my heart of stone.  A tiny itsy bitsy little shoe for a tiny itsy bitsy burbly little human.  A little tiny human with soft downy hair on his tiny head, a head that smells like heaven.  Tiny little moccasins for ten tiny little toes, little toes you can pinch.  Please get a wallet or a sock for my ovaries to bite down on, because the sight of these sends my reproductive system into seizure.

And when your little baby starts to grow, he can grow into these:

If you need one more little push to get these for a baby or toddler you know, check out the packaging design:

This box will be the box that the child keeps colored pencils in.  And broken yo-yo’s.  And robin’s egg shells and perfect skipping stones and the torn page from a dirty magazine that he found in the woods and candy wrappers with jokes on them and bottle caps and a pocketknife.  Love.  Love.  Love.  Love.  Love.