Today was
Friday Funday, and that means I was duty-bound to come up with a work
outfit that's a little more casual and a lot more playful than what I
wear the rest of the week. Of all Fridays, today it was especially
important to not fail in this endeavor, because my boyfriend and I were
going to happy hour directly after work, and I wanted to impress his
friends with my totally laid-back-but-uniquely-chic fashion sense! No
big deal, right?
I
lie! It's a very big deal! So big that I took a few hours off this
morning so I could come up with the perfect work-to-drinks outfit (well,
also so I could catch up on sleep, buy myself a little me-time in the
midst of a very hectic few days, and pick up some furniture I was unable
to pick up last night because of the aforementioned hectic-ness). Those
few hours of relative relaxation produced not only a splendid
monochromatic ensemble, but also a fine trip down Memory Lane, and a couple of tips & tricks to boot!
Our first stop on Memory Lane takes us back to 2012, courtesy of the skirt, which is a classic specimen of the high-low trend
that really hit full steam that year. You might recall, my initial
opinion of this type of skirt was unfavorable, but a lot can change in 6
years! For one thing, I decided there was no point in calling them
"hi-lo" skirts when there were two perfectly good English words to serve
the same purpose. But, more importantly, once I got over my weird idea
that high-low skirts make your knees look ugly, I grew to accept and
embrace the trend pretty quickly. Good for me, because now that the
fashion cycle has run its course, it is possible to buy high-low skirts
for next to nothing (I got this one for 1.80$)! That's not to say that
they are completely out-of-date yet; you can still find new ones in
stores, but they much more often tend to be wrapped, ruffled,
asymmetric, or generally more complex than this humble mullet skirt.
Let's
now consider the color scheme of today's outfit, which takes us a
little further down Memory Lane to February 2015, when I wore basically
the same colors for "My Future Valentine,"
again with a burgundy skirt on the bottom and pastel pink on the top.
What has changed? The season of course, but also the length of the
skirt. That day in 2015 was, I think, the very last time I wore a skirt
that skimpy to the office. I remember feeling very uncomfortable and
deciding, once and for all, that I would set a minimum length for all my
future skirts.
I feel like I should be able to bend over as far as I want
without accidentally showing my undies, so that became my new, and
still current, rule for skirt lengths. This is where high-low skirts
come in very handy—they enable one to wear a (partial) short skirt
(generally more flattering and less dowdy) while simultaneously being
able to bend over to my heart's content without revealing anything! This
burgundy one is the first high-low skirt I've acquired (though not the first high-low dress), but I foresee
them playing a much bigger role in my life as they saturate the
secondhand market!
So we've
visited 2012, we've stopped off in 2015, what's next? How about 2016,
where the legacy of my shoes began? You see, in 2016, I acquired a pair
of pink glitter jelly sandals that simply set my heart on fire! I wore
them once or twice
that year, but the following summer, I took them out of storage to find
they had developed a terrible stink. I washed them in every kind of
chemical imaginable, but I couldn't get the odor out. Eventually, I
washed them in ammonia, which not only failed to get out the odor, but
also turned the plastic cloudy and ugly, so finally I gave up. I
replaced them with these: slightly inferior, but still pink and
glittery, flat jelly sandals.
Since we're traveling forward in time, I might mention that the first time I wore the shirt in this outfit was last summer,
but it's not that important. What is important is how I styled the
shirt.
To get it to look good with the skirt, I had to give it the old
quarter-tuck.
"The old what?" you say. That's right, I've never
mentioned it in my blog before, but it's an indispensable technique for
making a single shirt do double-duty. As it has become one of my most
tried-and-true styling techniques (and, as this has already become an
irredeemably verbose blog post!) I might as well finally get around to
explaining how to use it.
The half- and quarter-tuck
The
half-tuck is a simple way to wear your shirt so it's tucked in in the
front and loose in the back. There are so many reasons why you might
want to try half-tucking your shirt!
- It raises your shirt's hemline, thus showing more of your pants, thus adding apparent length to your legs.
- It simultaneously allows you to keep a sleek waistline by avoiding the side-pooch that comes with tucking your shirt in at the sides.
- It helps prevent your pants from being seen through your shirt, as would be the case if you wear a too-thin shirt on the outside of your pants (that's why I tucked the shirt in this outfit)
- It can help define your waist, which might be hidden when leaving a baggy shirt completely untucked
- It keeps the bulk of your shirt outside of your pants, thus avoiding any interior bunching, lumps, and bumps, that would come from having a shirt completely tucked.
The half-tuck's edgier sibling is the quarter-tuck, which is basically tucking in only one side
of the front of your shirt, usually resulting in an asymmetrical angle
to the hemline. I find the quarter-tuck works well on shirts (such as
this pink one) that already have some asymmetrical details.
Fashionistas have been wearing their shirts this way for ages—I first tried the half-tuck myself in 2015— but now, as I understand, it has been thrown into the mainstream by being dubbed the "French tuck" on a popular Netflix show. I just call it the half-tuck because I have never watched Queer Eye and don't intend to adopt a new terminology just because someone on that show allegedly uses it.
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