JCrew New Arrivaval Pics: Slim Trench Topper, Collection Golden Paisley Blouse

Good morning! I don't have a lot of time today (hubby is FINALLY coming home from Europe today and the apartment is currently a mess after almost two weeks of me acting as a single mom) but I wanted to put up a few IRL pics of two items that rolled out yesterday and got some (positive or negative) attention in the JCA community.

First, the Slim trench topper aka the blackwatch plaid trench. I absolutely loved this trench, I usually have a hard time with trenches because they tend to overwhelm me or I find them too classic/boring. This is perfect for my petite figure, probably because of the single-breast style and the short length and the blackwatch pattern is unusual.
I tried my regular coat size 2 and it fits perfectly. Ths is how it looks unbottoned:

As I mentionned on the JCA it is unlined, which isn't a dealbreaker for me, in fact I don't expect a trench to be lined (the Icon is unlined as well and the short Burberry too). The construction of this trench is superb, the fabric is sort of a coated wool (I forgot to check the fabric content but it didn't strike me as something much different or heavier than the Icon. It is definitively a trench and not a coat even if it is wool), it has lapels at the sleeves and a lapel that you can button under the collar. The self-tie belt is the only thing that gave me pause because, as you can see below, it is VERY long. However, thanks God, they made enough holes in the fabric that I can fasten it tight enough to give me a good waist definition, so I only have to find something to do with the loose end, lol (probably put in the pocket):

A new trench was on my "need" list this Fall and I really see myself wearing this one so I put it on hold and I am thinking of taking advantage of the VPS promo that ends this Saturday. However, I bought the Icon when it was promo-priced with 30% off (which made it almost a third of the price of this one) and I have to decide between the two of them. I feel that the Icon is more versatile because a neutral that goes with everything but I am afraid I won't reach for it as much as this one because of the double-breast style. Thoughts?

The other new arrivals that has generated a lot of talks about the prices reaching impossible highs at JCrew this fall is the Collection golden paisley blouse. This one is striking IRL and I immediately grabbed one to take to the fitting room but I had a "Holy cow!" moment when I saw the price. This is one expensive blouse and to be honest for no particular reason: it is unlined and it seems fairly easy to make (unless making cuffs, which is the only detail that requires some sewing skill, has become very expensive) and the silk isn't as heavy as they say in the description, it is just your "regular" silk twill. Pricing it at $200 would be a stretch already but $300 which is more than some of the coats seems crazy. I don't need a blouse like this one (who does?) and I am happy with the silk jaquard keyhole one that I picked up at the sample sale for $49 as a nice evening blouse.
In any case this is, believe it or not, a size 8 (I thought it was a 0 fitting big and when I realized that it was a size 8 I already had sticker shocker so I wasn't motivated to ask for my size. I tried a 2 today and it was still a bit long in the arms, while it was a bit pulling at the hips so I am not even sure that I like the fit that much):

What do you think of these two new arrivals, are you interested in any of them? How much would you spend on a blouse? Please share, I will let you know how much I splurged in Europe on THE blouse in the next post!

OOTD: Colorblock Top

We are having "blazer weather" here in NYC and I am decided to take advantage of it to wear my lightweigth blazers before it is too late (I hate to wear a blazer under a coat).
I still haven't found a blazer that fits me better than this old shrunken Gap. The JCrew schoolboy, while more substantial in weigth, is less nipped at the waist so less flattering:

I just bought the colorblock top (97371) that I am wearing under the blazer but I always thought it was black/tan. I tried it yesterday night with a couple of black bottoms only to find out that the sides are definitively navy ("portobello mushroom" which is how the color is called online really doesn't convey any idea of navy in my mind). I thought about returning it but I really like it under a blazer and I got it for the store sale price ($79.99) less 20% off through my VPS so I am going to keep it even if it will have a different use than the intended one. After all navy is going to be my main color for Fall and it pairs well with these awesome Joe Fresh cords that I picked up last week for under $30 (here the top looks more black because the pants are a lighter navy):

I am wearing a size 00 that I preferred to the 0 because shorter and overall more flattering (the 0 was too big in the body but since I am a 34C the 00 just fits in the chest without being too snug so I think I will only be able to layer a thin tissue turtleneck under it, which is fine to me):

I have more new arrival pics to share but it is a bit cumbersome because I am using my phone to take the pics and I have to email them to myself or blog from my phone like in this case (can't do it for a long post). So they will probably be up tonight.

What do you think of the colorblock top? Did you know it is navy and not black?

JCrew New Arrivals: Jules Dress in Italian Paisley

I am going to post quickly the pics of the Jules dress in Italian paisley, that is one of the new arrivals that will probably be available online this Thursday.
This dress caught my attention a while ago when it was hidden under the stadium-cloth mod coat in this website pic:

It was clear to me already that it was a Jules silhouette but when I spied it yesterday on a manniquin of my local store it looked way too short:

I went in and I was swooned by the print, which is even more beautiful IRL. I tried my regular 0 and if fits perfectly, as far as Jules go. I must be much shorter than the manniquen because, while still on the short side, it isn't obscene on me. In fact I think the proportions are perfect:

It is one of those Jules with the front pockets, which I prefer to the side pockets.
The dress is 100% silk twill, partially lined in poly. I took a pic of the reverse to show you the construction:

It is pricey for a Jules ($228) but it is a must have for me. My new definition of must-have is "something that you won't mind seeing on the sale rack for a third of the price while you splurged on it", even if I think that this one will sell well. As I said the pattern is even more striking IRL as the aqua that runs through is more vivid than in these pics. I know that many of you have reached "Jules saturation" but as a matter of fact I don't own any Jules and I am glad that I waited. This print has a timeless vibe to it and I can't wait to wear it this Fall (it will look good dressup with Juliets or dressed down with boots and a sweater-coat).

What do you think of the new Jules in Italian paisley? I have more new arrivals pics coming up, stay tuned!

I am back ... to school

Good morning! It took me more than a week to fall back into my routine but I am finally ready to resume my regular blogging after my European vacation. It is always hard to come back but this year my little one started kindergarten so I had to deal with the jetlag and all the back to school craziness as a single mom, since my husband is still in Europe.

I have a lot of pics and European fashion finds/trends to share but since my camera's battery is dead and I found out that my husband has the charger (along with my credit cards) I am going to post pics of the few JCrew new arrivals that I could try on yesterday first.

In the meanwhile, some travel notes:

1) I saw nobody wearing stripes in Paris. Nobody but me.
2) I always forget this but if you go to Paris try to carry a pair of white shoes like sneakers to walk in the Jardin des Tuileries or Luxembourg. The pavement of the Parisian gardens is covered in a white dust that will turn your shoes completely white.
3) Try not to go on the top of the Tour Eiffel between 17.15 and 18.15. That's when the "Bar a champagne" is closed and after all that line you will need a glass of champagne.
4) If you are going on a beach vacation in Italy you should know that every woman aged 15 to 90 is wearing a teeny bikini (I was in a very family-oriented spot on the Italian riviera, not a wild place like Ibiza). You will feel like your gramma in your regular bikini already, let alone your one-piece. Do your suitcase a favor and leave at least your one piece at home. If you feel brave you can buy what is called a brazilian bikini in any store there.

Stay tuned for pics of the Jules dress in Italian paisley!

Packing for Paris

So I am leaving tomorrow and I have been preoccupied with packing all the week. I am travelling alone with my daughter and this year for the first time since she was born we will go to the beach with my parents for almost our whole stay in Italy (I am spending only few days in Milan, which is great because Milan in August is a desert inhabited only by mosquitoes). I am very excited about it, it is the place on the Italian Riviera where I used to go with my parents and grandparerents every year in the summer growing up and I have a lot of memories of those summers, so I hope that something will stick with my daughter too, especially since she doesn't have the chance to see her grandparents very often. Going to the beach means that I have to pack a lot more stuff for her and also myself but it is easy packing because what works here will work there, I just have to take my favorite summer clothes (just not ALL of them).

The second part of the trip is going to be Paris, where we are going to meet my husband at the end of August. This is the part that is giving me packing headaches because the weather in Paris at the end of August is totally umpredictable. It could be very hot if we are lucky but it could be cold and rainy and Fall could be in full swing. I don't have enough space in my suitcase to take a lot of "in case" clothes so everything must work perfectly together. I had to take a windbreaker for me and my daughter and that took up un entire layer in my suitcase. I have to admit I panicked a bit and run to the store to buy something that could make my Parisian wardrobe work (the "store" obviously is not the grocery store, it is how I call JCrew around the house). Besides my Altuzarra for JCrew Patricia dress (that I bought with Paris in my mind already) I didn't know what to pack and in particular I was struggling to find a top that I could wear with my pants and skirts.
The painter boatneck tee in stripe in the moroccan stripe black color is what I needed, the black and sand stripes work with both my Minnies, my cargos and my long black jersey skirt:

We are going to walk a lot so I am taking two pairs of flats, that are easy to pack and comfortable. One are the black studded Sam Edelman "Frankie" flats that you can see in the pics above (I had to replace my black Revas and I got these at Bloomingdales during one of their sales); the other ones are the JCrew Collection snakeskin Lula flats in strawberry red that I bought at the sample sale. They add a pop of color and look great with my Patricia dress:

I am only taking one extra summer dress, in case the weather is really nice (as it was the last time that we were there at the end of August). It is kind of funny but even if I lived in Paris for more than eight years, the image that now comes to my mind when I think of Paris is the one of Rachel McAdams rocking the shirtdress look in Midnight in Paris. Power of the great filmaking, that replaces reality with an imagined one, I guess. In any case I just found the perfect shirtdress to replicate the look, at the Gap and with 40% off to boot. It is the rolled-sleeve shirtdress in a XS:

I also tried the Perfect oxford shirtdress but I didn't like the style on me and it looked more like a sleepshirt (it is a very nice shirtdress though).
The white shirtdress look can be difficult to pull off but this dress is effortless and I am banking on the fact that I will be very tanned after 15 days at the beach, so I won't look like a nurse. If you like the style but can't do white (it is a bit sheer despite the double layer in the skirt), it also comes in chambray and in stripes or checks

The only thing I am still undecided about at this point is if I am going to take a pair of pumps only to wear them one night when my husband and I are going to celebrate our anniversary in a nice restaurant.
I am hoping that this Lilly dress that I am going to take with me to wear with flats in the evening at the beach can do double duty and be dressed up for our romantic dinner in Paris. I bought it in May and I was saving it for a special occasion like our anniversary (that was back in July but we didn't do anything special because we had the worst storm in NYC that day and that's when we decided that we were going to celebrate in Paris):

Dressed-up version with my splurge jacket and slingback Valentinas:

But I am not sure that I want to risk to take an extra jacket and an extra pair of pumps with me only for one evening, not to mention that it could be rainy and cold (sorry I lived in Paris long enough to know that the weather can be shitty in the summer).

Anyway, that's it. I have a post scheduled for you and if you want to leave a comment I will read them since I will be more or less connected until Wednesday in Milan, then I will probably take a long break from the Internet until I am back on Labor Day.
See you then!

Can This Top Save This Skirt?

A while ago I ordered the Jardin maxi in aqua morning. I am not proud of this but all of a sudden I got a little bit obsessed with this skirt for no particular reason, other than seeing it on Audreybella in this post. I had tried the other colorway in store the day it went on sale because my ps had put it aside for me but I didn't like the blue as much so I left it at the store and started stalking the aqua online. It was sold-out for a long time but, as everything, one day it popped back in a 0 while I was looking and I ordered it even if it was still FP on the website. Then I did the silliest thing: I took it to the store still in its plastic bag to get a price adjustment WITHOUT EVEN TRYING IT ON. The stores were running a 30% off which sealed the sale as final. That's how much I liked the idea of this skirt.
In the reality of things, I wore it a couple of times to run errands back in June but as the temperatures went up I couldn't bear the idea of carrying around all that fabric (even if it is very lightweight) and I stopped wearing it. Also, I didn't feel particularly elegant in it, quite the opposite in fact, due to the wrinkle factor and an intrinsec frumpiness of the skirt.
I went with the biggest of my two sizes, a 0 instead of a 00. It is a little bit loose in the waist but that was intended because I think that even if it is supposed to sit at the waist exactly, it is more flattering if there is a little bit of looseness around the waist when you tuck in. Not sure if it makes sense now that I write it, better in pictures:

This is the best outfit I could come up with BTW. I also wore it with my short-sleeve sweatshirt but it looked better IRL than in these pics (the short-sleeve sweatshirt tends to stretch out during the day so the outfit looks a bit frumpy here):

As summer went by and the skirt was left unworn I got a little bit mad at myself for loosing my sleep on it in the first place. What was I thinking? I KNEW that it was difficult to pull off for a petite like me and I should have know even better because I had bought and returned the midi Jardin last year on the account of frumpiness.
If I look back and try to analyze this purchase and what triggered it, I realize that I loved that particular outfit that Audreybella wore, not the skirt per se. I liked that skirt with that anchor top and the skirt couldn't make up for the entire outfit. I was never into that anchor top though and I resisted it even if it was very popular and when it went on sale my store still had it in my size for the longest time.
However, I always liked the Colorblock sequin tank that I tried a couple of times in store. At that time I didn't know that I needed this top to make the skirt work and I didn't want to add any more sequins to my closet, but when it went on sale recently and with 30% off on top of that (and no fs) I ordered it as a ride-along to try with the skirt. I ordered a XXS, which is the smallest of my top size. The XXS fits perfectly but it is definitively shorter than the XS that I tried in store (that was a looser fit and longer, without being too low-cut).
So, back to the title of this post, can this top save this skirt? What do you think?

I think this is a dreamy outfit and it is worth the additional $35 spent on the tank.
For some reasons it reminds me of the Great Gatsby: if Gatsby were to throw a party in modern-day East Egg (aka Sandy Points, NY, where I have recently been) I would definitively wear this. But since I have no party to go, I will just take it on vacation with me on the Riviera (the Italian one, not the French) and read "Tender is the night" to console myself.

I have a couple of posts for you and then I am off for three weeks (Milan, Riviera and Paris, the packing is going to be challanging), stay tuned!

Colorblock (Two Try-Ons)!

So are you into colorblocking? It seems like it is inescapable this Fall to play with colorblock. Of course it is the easiest thing to do with what you have in your closet and you don't need necessarily to buy already-colorblocked clothing.
And think of the wonderful possibilities that colorblocking opens up: no more frantic searches for matching socks in the morning, you are good (more than good, uber-cool in fact!) with one black and one navy. And if anybody who clearly isn't into fashion still points out that you have mismatching socks you only have to take a snobby face and say "I am colorblocking, you know?"
You can also throw on whatever clothes are available on hand, regardless from their color, you won't be regarderd as colorblind if you pair that pink sweater with your red skirt while you wait for your red/navy/ivory/black sweater to come back from the dry-cleaner. You get a colorbloking pass for pretty much any weird color combo.

But if you don't know where to start or are just lazy or just need to update your closet, retailers are helping us with ready-to-wear colorblocked options and I happened to try two offerings from the JCrew August rollout.
The first is the Perfect-fit colorblock tee. This one is labeled as Catalog-only but it is in the B&Ms. I am usually a S in perfect-fit tees so I tried a S in the black/natural colorway:

I liked the fit but I didn't like the superfine baby-rib cotton used for this tee, it looks like it is not going to hold up its shape and the sleeves, while not long, where bunching up due to looseness in the fabric. I went down a size to see, but while more fitted in the body, the sleeves had still this problem. I would consider this tee on sale in the S but not at full price.

The next one is a new version of the Jules that comes up on the website if you type "colorblock" or "Jules". This one is 100% silk and partially lined in poly (the sleeves are unlined). Unlike the Jules in snowcat, it has on-seam pockets (which I am not sure are a super-good idea in this style).
I tried my usual 0 first and it was too big/shapeless:

The fit of the 00 was much better if shorter. However, as you can see, in this size the side pockets make my hips look bigger (even if really, I cannot really say if it is the pockets or the general wrinkliness):

I really like the idea of this dress but I am not sure that it is superflattering on me. I am probably going to try it again with tights and heels/boots because it fits perfectly in my wardrobe inspiration for Fall which you will hear more about soon.
For comparison purposes, this is the Jules in snowcat in a 0, which fits perfectly and I think was much more flattering (although I don't need this one):

What do you think of these two items? Are you into colorblocking this season? Are you still worried about matching your socks?

Stay tuned for more try-ons.