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.

Piperlime Find: The Marc Jacobs Jagz Velvet Skirt

Today I want to share a recent find from the recent 20% off promotion at Piperlime.com. Usually I don't take advantage of this kind of promo because I am usually overwhelmed at the vastity of the offerings on the website. I don't spend much time browsing on Piperlime unless I am looking for something specific so when a promo kicks in I don't even know where to start. I don't like the feeling of buying just because I have to take advantage of a promo or making decisions in a split-second out of fear that something will sell out (that's why I never buy on the sample sale sites a la Gilt, I just can't wrap my mind around stuff that wasn't even on my horizon until a minute before. The thought that I didn't even know that something existed and all of a sudden I need it so badly that I have to buy it immediately usually makes me feel like a total chimp and keeps me from buying). In this case though I had had the
Marc Jacobs Jagz Velvet skirt in my cart for a little while (not sure how I found it but I was probably looking at MJ bags, since I have been on the lookout for a white bag this summer, and stumbled upon the skirt) and I was waiting for a price drop or a promo like this one to pull the trigger. The price itself was already a very good deal compared to the original price but I needed a little help to overcome the fact that it was marked as final sale. With the promo the price came down to $95, which is the price of a basic sweater at JCrew these days, and I was also going to save an additional $10 in sale tax (which always gives me a special thrill) so I decided that it was the time to buy it.

The skirt arrived today. I was impressed by the packaging, it was very carefully packaged in bubble plastic to protect the fabric (it came in a box):

I haven't bought Marc by Marc Jacobs in a while but I tried a few things during the sale at Saks and find that it is still pretty much my style. For a $400 Marc Jacobs skirt I had pretty high expectations but this skirt exceeded my expectations, it is simply gorgeous. I ordered a 2 based on the reviews that said to size up and that was good advice but I could probably have sized up to a 4 since the waist is teeeeny, I could barely breath when I first put it on. Definitively not for a gourmet-dining evening! On the other side, a reviewer said that the skirt is pretty full, which I don't find to be true, unless she meant that the black satin waistband can create a bit of volume under it but personally I think it looks good and pretty much streamlined (the Jardin skirt for example does that on me).
I plan to wear it mostly in the evening with black. Being silk velours it has a lustrous shine to it that makes it more appropriate for the evening but it can certainly be played down for the day too, especially if you have brown or red tops to pair with it. Again, I don't have my full winter wardrobe on hand but I think that this is pretty much how I am going to wear it.

So here it is. I have a lot of black top choices and I tried it first with a black silk cami which is, I think, what's better suited for it:

Detail of the waisband (strangely the top of the skirt is sewn over the waistband, I think so as to avoid bulkyness at the seam but it could be just a designer preference):

At first I thought that I wouldn't be able to tuck in anything heavier than silk, but my cashmere short-sleeve tee is not bad at all:

Tucking in is the best choice with this kind of skirts IMO but I think that this H&M top works because of its boxy shape (I LOVE this too as much as if it were a Marc Jacobs):

As for jackets, the shortest, the better. My BR tuxedo velvet jacket is the perfect length:

The only "daywear" option that I have found so far is this old Cacharel blouse which is the same exact color than the skirt:

But I think that there is a new color in the cashmere sweaters that is the exact same brown than in the skirt. I was already considering it because I miss browns so I will try it and let you know.

This skirt makes is a stunning addition to my Fall wardrobe and I am thrilled that I could get it for such a good price. Most of the sizes are still available and I would recommend it with the caveat that your waist must be on the thin side for this skirt (or size up two or even three sizes especially if you are tall enough). Final sale sucks but this one was worth the risk.

What do you think of the MJ Jazg skirt? Any suggestion as what other colors I could try with it?

OOTD: Orange and Blue (First Anthro Purchase!)

This will come as a little bit of a shock to some of my longtime readers but I made my first clothing purchase at Anthropologie this summer, followed by a few more. I am shocked as well, in ten years of living in the city I must have stepped into an Anthro store no more of fives times. My only purchases have been a candle that I bought years ago around Xmas and a towel set that I bought as a wedding gift. It used to be that as soon as I stepped into an Anthro I was overwhelmed and wanted to leave and the Anthro-related posts of other bloggers never translated into a need to go and look for something in a store or online, I always thought that their style was not for me. So what happened? Two things: first, a new Anthro opened in the neighborhood (we didn't have one in the Upper East Side) and even if I generally don't choose the stores I shop at by their architecture, I really like the exterior of this one, it definitively has a West Coast vibe that the other stores in the city don't have and I find it particularly inviting. Second, one day I was caught in the rain when I was walking by the store so I took shelter inside and decided to peruse the racks. Mistake! To my surprise there were a few things that caught my eye> It was a Tuesday and I knew by reading blogs that Tuesday is markdown day at Anthro so I looked for the sale section. I didn't buy anything that day but I tried on two things that I really liked but were both sold-out in my size, a raffia top and a pencil skirt. I ended up ordering the top online and I was lucky enough to find one lonely pencil skirt during the additional 25% off sale in my size.

I apologize if I don't know the names of these items, I am an Anthro neophyte. The pencil skirt was pretty popular I think (I remember seeing it on somebody's blog) so many of you Anthro fans will recognize it. What I really liked of this pencil is the fabric, very stretchy and different from the pencil skirts at JCrew. When I first tried it on my store only has a size 0 and a few larger sizes. I could barely squeeze in a 0 and because of the very stretchy material it was very va-va-voom. Even in a 2, the size that I ended up buying, it is still a bit va-va-voom but I could see myself wearing it on vacation if not in NYC. To me vacation doesn't rhyme with pencil skirt, but this one reminds me so much of Spain and Italy that I had to have it (I am a bit obsessed with Spain right now, I haven't been in many years but I would love to go back).
I did wear it yesterday to host a playdate at home. It is very comfortable and lightweight and it stretches out with wear. The colors are to die for and it was my excuse to finally get the round-eyelet top in blue grotto that I had wishlisted since it came out. The blue in the skirt is the exact same blue and the eyelet in the top picks up the medallion detail in the skirt (in fact I think that this skirt was called Medallion something):

I have other things to wear with this skirt but I wanted an easy top option to leave untucked for when I don't feel like showing my curves. Tucking in a top shows off the pretty detail button at the waist but the effect is definitively more ve-va-voom:

The other item that really caught my eye was a crochet top made in raffia. The store only had a size S that was definitively too big and the tag showed a sale price of $89 that I wasn't ready to spend that day. Once home I looked for it online and to my surprise it was not only available in all the sizes but also marked down to $49, so I decided to order it (I did pay the shipping but I paid with my PayPal account and I had funds on it so it didn't hurt too much).
This top got terrible reviews on the website and I think that people didn't get it at all but it really spoke to my Italian soul. Raffia is a material that is more commonly used for clothing and accessories in Italy and not only Prada and Dolce e Gabbana make a heavy usage of raffia in their summer collections but it really reminds me of Italy. And guess what? I have an old Zara raffia pencil skirt somewhere in the storage (that I still have to dig out).
I tried it with my white Loft pencil with the eyelet hem but it really works better with black because you can see the color of the garment underneath:

I tried it with my black bell skirt from last year to show you how it looks with black. I belted it because the shape of the skirt creates bulk under the top:

Two weeks later I stumbled upon this top in the sale section again and it was marked down to $19.99. Again, no XS but I took my ticket to the register to see if they would give me a price adjustment. Given my JCrew background I was half expecting the SA to give me a hard time but she was actually HAPPY to make the price adjustment so I was thrilled to get this top for that price. Now I understand why people who shop regularly at Anthro love the customer service there. I am hooked and the fact that there is a store at walking distance from my place and my daughter's new school makes me think that I am going to shop there more often!

Do you have this pencil skirt or the raffia top? Do you shop at Anthro?