Drew and Kim are two of the most stylish people I know and today they are getting married! Cate and I are super excited for them and will soon be having fun playing stylist to the wedding party.  Their wedding is going to be amazing! I can’t wait until 4pm today when it all happens!

Here are some pictures of the happy couple that could provide style inspiration for anyone who wants to look timeless and classic.  Enjoy some pictures of my beautiful friends!

Above is an engagement photo by Sloan Photographers.

This is the day they got engaged!

Kim and Drew, we are so happy for you and can’t wait to celebrate!

The best way to describe how I feel about this project right now is: UGGGGGHHHHH.

I mean, seriously. TWENTY pieces is not enough pieces. It’s like having no clothes. And they all rip and get dirty and look stupid and I hate them. All of them. Every stupid piece of stupid clothes I stupidly own.

You know what’s awesome? Shopping. Shopping is the best! Why would I ever give it up? You get new things, you feel all sweet and good looking. A new dress wrapped in tissue paper and lovingly laid into a beautiful new shopping bag has to be one of the nicest things about life.

So to sum up: I hate all my clothes, shopping’s the greatest, this project is hard. And stupid.

The end.

““Style is a simple way of saying complicated things.””

- Jean Cocteau 

Last week, Cate and I had lunch at In-N-Out. Many of you may not know of this place if you are not from California or have never been here.  It is like fast food, but better. It is made of actual food and it tastes delicious. It is the Helvetica of cheeseburgers.

Cate and I ate our burgers and then began talking about one of our common acquaintances, anxiety.  The conversation started out serious.  We talked about our experiences of sleeplessness, the pressure we have in our chests, the irrational fear we can sometimes experience in anything from looking at the night sky to looking at the ocean.  God help us should we happen to look at the ocean at night!

Then the conversation got silly.  Because neither of us were actually feeling the anxiety at the moment, we started to giggle about it.  We have a mutual friend on Facebook who acknowledged his occasional desire to eat the sun.  We laughed and said, oh hell no.  There is no way we would go near that fire ball in the sky. Which by the way, is one day going to suck our whole solar system into itself when it goes super nova. We think about this stuff.  We think about it way more than most people.

Cate can lay awake in bed scared of infinity and I can lay awake in bed afraid of Tsunami’s (I don’t exactly live on beach front property).  As a child, Cate continually insisted there was a witch in the tree outside her window.   I thought there was a witch that would come in the night to eat any of my appendages that was not covered by blanket.  Cate’s dad told her to look outside at the tree to see that there was no witch.  My mom had to prove to me my room was not balanced on a stalagmite by walking into my room in the morning when I would wake up and yell, “mom, I’m awake!” I knew only her step into the room could prove my room was not going to fall off of its perch at my slightest move.

We laughed so hard at In-N-Out, we may have caused a scene. I laughed so hard I cried.  It felt so good to laugh at all this.  As much grief at is has caused us both, it is thankfully finally pretty funny. Last night, when I asked Cate if she thought I should write a blog about our lunch experience, she replied with with a yes and a, “don’t let the witches eat your ears tonight.”  I replied, “Don’t worry. I keep them covered with a blanket.  Witches hate blankets.”

Cate and I went to the mall last weekend to make replacements.  She replaced a T-Shirt that had worn out. I replaced the little black dress that I complained about a few posts ago.  This was a good and hard experience for me. 

As my clothes are wearing and shrinking, etc.  I am forced to face how much I am not experiencing this the way I thought I would.  I thought I would have my Twenty Pieces for the year and that they would all last that long.  I thought I made great choices.  I thought I chose best.  Now I have to admit that I have not, that they are not lasting, and that I had to make a replacement purchase. 

I felt bad.  I felt like I had somehow done wrong.  And because I had done wrong I should have to tough out the consequences by not having a dress to wear to the three summer weddings I have on the calendar, the other option being the more subtle, I should have to choose a replacement item I didn’t really like, something almost equivalent to the black dress I had that was too short. Should I really be allowed to go from poor to great with a swipe of the debit card?

This theme is certainly one for my life.  I am the kind of person who feels guilty about a lot of things.  I can see in hindsight that a part of the appeal of the Twenty Pieces Project, for me, was the thought that I would get to spend a whole year with entirely no guilt based on my clothing purchases.  Now here I am buying, within the rules and values of this project, and still feeling guilty. 

We knew the project would be exposing of our attachments to clothes, but now I see how attached I am to doing things according to my own warped ideals. 

Here is a picture of my new dress, yes it is a dress, though today I am wearing it as a skirt with a shirt over it and a belt around it.  In the 3 days I have had it, it has gotten more wear than my black dress did!

As mentioned before, Cate and I are both looking a bit shabby.  We are both down to about 15 fully reliable, well fitting, unstained, items of clothing and I am at the place where I am beginning to think about replacing an item. I went to a few stores yesterday and was very aware of just how picky I have become.  There was not a single thing that was even remotely tempting to me. I left empty handed.

As I looked around the department store, I was reminded of mine and Cate’s conversation with dress designer, Judy Lee, a local designer in the LA area who specializes in occasion dresses, namely wedding dresses. Cate and I sat down to lunch with her several weeks ago and learned so much about the fashion industry.  There is much more to say about this, but you can look forward to an article on that coming soon.

Judy helped us understand a bit more of how the ready-to-wear fashion industry works.  The highest priority, at this level of design, is consumption.  This means that designers must design clothes that continually look different from previous seasons in order to keep you buying.  This makes for a big problem when it comes to the quality of design we see at any given store.

This seems especially true this season.  As I walked through stores, I was struck by how much I had NO DESIRE to purchase these garments.  They were…ugly. They were poorly designed.  Their colors were garish and exhausting to look at.  The prints were excessive.  The fabrics were cheap looking and had an almost obnoxious sheen.  It was easy to say no thank you.

I am looking for something to replace my black dress, but it will certainly not be any of these items.