Dressing for the (miserable miserable) weather

Oh man was today awful.  Yesterday had about 8 inches of snow fall and then today was 30 degrees with freezing rain all morning then 34 degrees and heavy rain so far this afternoon.  In general this winter has been the worst since I was in high school.  So I figured if I'm staying in all day I might as well do this about some serious wintery mixes for this serious wintery mix (note to self: come up with less lame joke for right before the jump)

 

So last night we were deciding on what to write about today (see! planning! focus!  It's like it's a whole new blog!) and we decided to work with this corduroy vest.  I wrote before on how much I like vests, but that was before and this is after, so let's think about it in a bit more depth.

I think vests are awesome because 3-piece suits are awesome.  Now, granted I barely ever wear suits (such is the life of an unemployed grad student in Maine) but the idea still stands.

If you break down the suit down to its 3 pieces you can put it back together how ever you want.  In this case I'm wearing jeans, a corduroy vest and a tweed tie (Irish Tweed, just to be contrarian) With my old peacoat on top and some serious sorels on the bottom.

While only the boots are waterproof, all the fabric was so heavy that no water really got through.  Thankfully Ashley lives close enough to me that I didn't get soaked to the bone (the boots handled the 3 inches of slush on the ground without a first thought).

Now, heading inside for coffee this base outfit (jeans & cord vest w/ boots) is nice because it takes to several iterations with vastly different styles.  Today was rainy and disgusting, so I stayed with the combo I had on.  Pretty simple pattern and color matching.  But it makes a good base to play around with other stuff.

If I had wanted a very tweedy academic-y type look I could throw on a tweed jacket over top. This simple black and white herringbone number is probably my favorite one.  I like how it's fairly unconventional with the slim lapels and nipped waist combining with the traditional 3/2 roll and soft shoulders.

And like I said before, now I'm wearing all the components of a 3 piece suit, they're just all in heavy wintery fabrics, instead of the same fabric.  This gives the outfit a familiar silhouette but makes the color and texture unexpected.

Or had I wanted to go the complete opposite way I could make this same base outfit (again, the jeans/vest combo) considerably more rock and roll by swapping out continuity of fabrics for continuity of colors and make the pieces less formally traditional.




Maybe move to a white shirt, and a loose blue cotton tie?  With a fur lined corduroy jacket?  Looks much less academic, but very little actually changes in terms of actual items.  Now most of the colors are the same, the patterns are largely eliminated and I'm holding a bottle of booze.  Get rid of the booze and the outfit still works.

And if you don't feel like partying anymore, lose the jacket and scarf and you're right back where you began, just in slightly different colors.

Conceptually breaking apart an outfit and reassembling it is the (very pretentious sounding) way that I get dressed pretty much every day.  It's more art than science.  And no outfit should be more than 2 steps away from being rock-ified, or it's just kind of blah.