But it will if you aren’t careful

Welcome to the Sunday newsletter.

An every seven days curation of touch sight taste and sound in relation to fashion and beyond. An accountability marker to maintain the never-ending curation of style, and to stay in contact with the senses through fabulous things.

This week’s menu is all about practicality and how I subscribe to it without letting it dictate my life. I believe a healthy mix of anything is a 50/50 balance between being grounded and having your head in the clouds, and this is especially true for my wardrobe. So, welcome to this week’s light bites. I hope you enjoy.

Light Bites of the week

Rain gear

As you may know, I moved to Copenhagen at the beginning of this year. One of the biggest jolts since relocating has been the shift toward practicality that my wardrobe is being forced to adapt to.

Getting dressed in New York was easy. Life essentially consisted of putting on clothes, walking five minutes to the subway, sitting there, walking five minutes to your destination, sitting there — and then doing it all again in reverse. Even after moving to Brooklyn, when I started walking more often and my step count averaged a cool 15,000 per day, my wardrobe didn’t suffer.

Here, the biking and the weather have led to the demise of my style. Where all my clothes used to be required to perform for, at most, a thirty-minute walk, I now have to choose an outfit that can operate while straddling a bicycle, stay dry in torrential rain, not fly up in gale-force winds, and still represent my personal style?

Forget it — I was fucked.

However bitter I might sound, this has actually been a very welcome shift in my lifestyle. My tolerance for uncomfortable clothing was already dwindling, leaving me with a largely unusable portion of my wardrobe that I had no real reason to replace.

And as a stylist, I always felt a weak point of mine was when clients requested outfits for extremely specific practical needs — like going to trapeze class straight from their corporate job with no time to change. In my mind, practicality was the lethal injection to any wardrobe, and the two just couldn’t coexist without a fight.

So, as the weather shifts to rain nearly every day here in the Nordics, some weather-appropriate purchases are in order and will be joining my wardrobe soon. Until then, these are a few outfit formulas I’m working with — using the one raincoat I do have.

Please note the rolling of the pant leg to a 1990's english jockey style was not on purpose and

was a welcome byproduct of trying to avoid my pants getting caught in the dirty bike gears.

Powder blue and chartreuse

There’s a lot to unpack within this specific color combination and why it’s been bringing me so much joy. It started as a pairing of baby blue and chocolate brown — a reaction to decorating our new apartment. There are lots of exposed wooden beams, and baby blue happens to be one of my favorite colors to paint a room. See my bachelorette pad before Nina moved in here:

Chartreuse is a color that recently entered my orbit when we started looking at engagement rings. After some basic research, I know I’ll be choosing a lab diamond, but the color and shape are still very much up for consideration. I’m drawn to a warm yellow diamond, thinking about the practicality of it being worn with every outfit.

My wardrobe leans mostly warm-toned, with lots of splashes of blue and navy. This only deepens my infatuation with the unexpected blue-and-yellow combination. Another example of how every emotion, relationship, memory, and living habit quietly builds the foundation of your personal style.

The seven categories of inspiration

Where to find outfit inspiration has been a hot topic ever since I announced the “Rebranding My Entire Wardrobe” series. I often talk about the importance of not looking to other people’s already-made outfits for inspiration and this because of a few key reasons.

First, because there’s always a body attached. And nothing skews our opinion of an outfit more than the body wearing it. Bodies that look like ours, bodies that look nothing like ours, and every body in between. People often find it nearly impossible to separate the art from the artist, so to speak — to analyze an outfit without the way it lays on the body interfering with our interpretation of the style itself.

Second, it keeps you from developing the skill of breaking down outfits into their individual components. An outfit is never just an outfit. It’s a blend of colors, layers, silhouettes, textures, and more. There are hats to pull inspiration from, color combinations to dissect, even makeup choices to observe. It's an endless pool of creative input — yet we often water it down to a simple “yes, I like that” or “no, I don’t.”

To keep the skill of component identification sharp, I start with it at the very beginning: inspiration. These are the seven categories I often turn to when I’m collecting inspiration for a project, and why.

Textures

Texture is one of the first things I look to for inspiration, because it’s often the component that produces the strongest emotional response. Texture is touch — and the way things feel in our hands holds massive power over our emotions.

When I identify the appearance of the fabrics I want to wear on my skin, I’m deciding how I want other people to feel about me.

Objects

Possibly one of my favorite categories of the seven — because really, anythinggoes. Abstract style inspiration is a tool I reference often and one I always introduce in my first session with personal styling clients. It’s the idea of building outfits inspired by intangible things: music, movies, book series.

This category is a continuation of that — the unexplainable feeling of resonating with an object that seemingly has nothing to do with what you’re doing, yet somehow becomes everything you were looking for.

Feelings

Not to be confused with texture, of course, the difference here is about recognition. When I’m looking for images that evoke emotion, the distinction between this and texture lies in perception.

Texture is what people see on the outside; feeling is what I know on the inside. I’m searching for physical imagery that reflects how I feel — not how I look. It’s about finding visual representations of an internal state.

Styles

Styles is another name for silhouettes or styling choices. The shapes that are created when more than one thing, preferably things that appear to oppose each other, are paired.

On The Hunt

Now this is a favorite category — because it’s a whole space dedicated to the delicious selfishness of simply wanting something. This is the wishlist category. All of the purchases I believe, in my heart of hearts, will change me into the woman I’m meant to be and fulfill me completely.

That said, though I love to shop, I hate to buy. And so, for my weekly dose of masochism, I continue to add to my list and watch — day after day — as the stock of these pieces withers away, until I see that little grey message under the product image: “sold out.”

I will then promptly curse myself and swear to never do this again... until tomorrow.

Colors

Self-explanatory I suppose but it’s never a waste to pinpoint a few colors your exceptionally inspired by. Bonus points if you can make a few whacky combinations.

Brands

If I must look at other people’s outfits, it simply has to be on a runway. The just-whimsical-enough unattainability of the looks makes personal tweaks necessary so a direct copy isn’t possible, and personal style must be activated.

I like to check in with archive runway photos and see which brands are calling to me, season to season. It also serves as a general stamp of approval: anything secondhand I find online from these labels becomes an immediate purchase.

Squash blossoms & coffee walnut cake

The farmers’ market has been getting increasingly bountiful here in the North — much to my surprise. When I went to the very first one in spring, I was so disappointed by the lack of produce this rocky, cold terrain had to offer. But as the months have inched closer to fall, more and more stands have appeared with produce in every color of the rainbow.

Late summer and early fall is really when the produce here shines. Turns out I just needed a little patience. I took my pick of beets, squash blossoms, a zucchini the size of my head, and rainbow chard.

It’s starting to become that cozy time of year when the kitchen feels characteristically warm. Not hot, like in summer, but warm. The oven is on a little more often, casting an invisible blanket between the kitchen and living room doorframes. And the flavors are shifting from punchy and bright to toasty and soft.

When I saw the recipe for this coffee walnut cake here on Substack, I was enamored. The zingy cream topping on the toasted walnut base felt like the perfect combination of what was and what’s to come in the kitchen.

The cake was shared between me, Nina, Dolores and then sent home to Dolores’s three other roommates.

Outfits of the week you may have missed

Style exercise of the week

We can’t talk about practicality without discussing its antonym: impracticality.

Often, when we’re trying to get dressed, we end up in an outfit that isn’t our style at all simply for the sake of getting out the door. But just as it’s important to learn how to build an outfit, it’s equally important to learn how to fix one.

Build an outfit using your most impractical and difficult-to-style pieces. There must be at least six different items in the outfit. This can include socks, bags, pants, jackets, anything, as long as there are six distinct pieces.

Now, instead of hating the outfit and tearing it all off, we’re going to work backwards. Remove one piece at a time, and replace it with its opposite, whether that’s in shape, fit, texture, color, or style.

Wearing a giant denim jacket? Swap it for a fitted blazer. In a tight midi skirt? Try pants, or a skirt of a different length or silhouette. Go piece by piece, and practice seeing the outfit as a sum of its individual compon

ents. Troubleshoot each one, and sharpen your skills in fixing a look, not just building it.

That’s all for this week, folks!
Make sure to check out my recent post “The Cheap Secret to Revolutionizing Your Fall Wardrobe” and I’ll be back next Sunday!

Practicality doesn't have to ruin your style