It's Spring Somewhere

Yesterday, my strategy to combat the fall blues involved embracing the worst aspects of the weather as an opportunity to wear something new, but that's not the only way to face the incipient coming of winter. There's also straight-up denial. Sometimes, when fall approaches and it seems like all is darkness and nothing will ever be happy again, I like to pretend it's still spring and wear the most seasonally inappropriate ensemble I can concoct.

Today, I chose to deck myself out exclusively in the springtime hues of pink and green.

The pink comes from a pair of cropped pants I got recently from Swap.com. I know from a convenient article I found about their brand (Real Clothing) that these pants were manufactured sometime between 1985 and 2005, and were probably not designed for the young or hip consumer. So no matter how you look at it, these pants are not, and probably never were, very trendy. I tried them on and found them to be quite baggy and stiff, not at all flattering.

I was going to have to modify them to make them fit me better, so while I had that opportunity, I figured I would make them as up-to-the-moment as possible. After consulting Lyst.com (my new yardstick for what real people are buying, since Polyvore turned into some cerebral editorial site), I determined that the most achievable cut currently in style would be slim through the thigh and straight through the calf. It took so many trips through my sewing machine before I had wrangled these granny pants into something that would pass for current, and after all my effort, I still feel like they're a little too 80's to be quite right. Sigh...I'll try tailoring them again later, but I'm giving up for now.

The pants qualify as my One New Thing for this outfit, but another, much more exciting if I may, New Thing is my sandals. These shoes literally just arrived in the mail last week, and I've been itching to wear them, in all their strappiness and ridiculously summery tropical print, before the weather makes that impossible. I usually avoid printed shoes because they clash with most of my printed clothing, but I made an exception for these because the color scheme (green and pink on black!) is fairly well represented in my wardrobe, and I was captivated by the oversized not-quite-wedge heel, which seems like it might be my new thing. Plus, I have a soft spot in my heart for plumeria blossoms, as they remind me of one of the places I've never been sad: Hawaii.

Fall might be coming to cast its miasma of melancholy over Maryland, but it's always spring in the islands.