Heels

After focusing on flats, I need to give a little attention to the lovely heels and wedges that showed up to New York Fashion Week.  So, here are the feet that may have suffered a little for fashion -

Flats are gaining ground

In my opinion, one of the biggest benefits of the street style blogs has been to democratize fashion.  The blogs have given a strong voice to the person who doesn't want to follow the crowd or the mainstream fashion community.  For years, women have been saying they want to wear comfortable shoes, but designers continued to focus on heels.  The savvy subjects of the street style blogs have shown that flats can be cool, and the fashion community and designers are finally paying attention.  Flats were well represented at Fashion Week, and several designers are starting to use them in their shows.  Fashion is starting to reflect reality.

Woman changing into flats after a fashion show

Milly for Sperry Top-Sider

 

Men's fashion

Great prints at New York Fashion Week

I never used to wear prints.  Maybe I was stuck in 90's minimalism or maybe I just didn't know how to wear them.  Over the years, seeing the mish-mash of various prints assembled by bloggers and street style subjects has assured me that they aren't so scary.  So, now I love prints and think they might even be easier to wear than solids, because they speak for themselves.

 
Errrrk... (that was the sound of a car screaching to a halt).  Let's just stop here for a minute.  This flowery dress is so NOT me, but I really like the look.  Here is a great example of how styling an outfit matters.  The dress is very "Little House on the Prairie", and while I love the show, I don't want to look like I belong on it.  In order to move away from that reference point, she paired it with accessories that have very strong geometric lines.  So, the necklace really becomes the statement and the dress is just a supporting piece.  Ok, we can move on now.

 

Love these pants.  So much.  Wish I had them.

This is a great jacket, too.  I am very drawn to the fabrics with the water color and splatter-paint prints.  I am going to start working on my own splatter-paint print dress tomorrow (as well as splatter-paint t-shirts for my daughters and a friend).  I really want to try to make my own water color fabric.  I'm not really sure how that's done.  I have a lot of work to do...

In the process

I always love looking at the clothes during New York Fashion Week, but my favorite part is meeting the people.  Everyone in the crowd has some passion that will spill out of them if you just ask.  There are many people who are in the process of building a new clothing line, an on-line business, or a documentary.  I have great respect for people who are in the middle of the "process", because I have spent most of my life avoiding the "process".  I am a task-oriented achiever, and I want to be finished yesterday.  I want a list of items to check off and at the end of the day to be done.  I think this is why I worked in accounting for 9 years.  So, here are some of those creative and hard-working people who inspired me to have some thoughts on staying in the process (see my thoughts at the end) -     

Kika Vargas (wearing her own collection) is hoping to show next year at New York Fashion Week - 

Nina Zadeh created a website called Zaden Row to sell clothes from various New York boutiques and to enable people to "shop like a local" -

 

Katie Bartels took the plunge by leaving a New York law firm to design jewelry full-time - 

Catie Cacci and her friends are filming a documentary on fashion bloggers.  It seems to me that making a documentary would be so difficult, since the whole story has to be told through the mouths of other people.  As they were interviewing me, I was wishing I had some well-formed revolutionary thoughts on the blogging industry.  I don't know if I gave them any usable footage, but I can't wait to see what story emerges in the film -

I am very self-motivated to start a lot of projects, but my natural reaction when something isn't working out is to move onto something else.  People who spend years building something substantial encourage me to settle into the tension of the process.  My primary job right now is to raise two children.  If that is not a process, I don't know what is.  And emerging out from under that job is the creation of art in the form of sewing, painting, writing, and now kitchen designing (just for myself - and yes, we are still in the design stage of my kitchen).  Ahhh...the creative process.  Few activities are as all-encompassing and soul expanding and SLOW as the creative process.  The fascinating thing about the creative process is that you have to work hard to facilitate the end product, but ultimately you have no control over the spark that makes it special.  You can't push the process.  There may be some artists that are very deliberate in their productions, but for the most part, I believe when the end result is good (really good), the artist feels that it came from somewhere outside of themself.  Thus the terms "inspiration", "muse", "revelation", "flow".

I think we experience it as such, because God loooooves the process.  Sometimes I feel like he's laughing at me (in a nice way) when I am growing so uncomfortable with the process.  If it were up to me, I would have taken everything he's done in the course of the history of the world and accomplished it in a week and then wrapped it up in a neat little "to do" list.  But he dragged it out over thousands of years and then (instead of a list) gave us a person.  And thus began another process.

I think he gave us the process as a gift.  A gift in which we experience a little bit of the divine.  It's in the spark of an idea that we see the creative mind of God.  It's in the steady flow of hard work that we see the patience of God.  It's in a new understanding that we see the size of God.  It's in the perfect ordering of seemingly random events that we see the love of God.  At the end, when everything is finished, we can look back and appreciate what happened.  But it's in the midst of the process that we feel the impact.


*The views expressed in this post are strictly the views of the author and do not reflect the opinions of the people pictured above.  I did not interview them about their creative process, and they did not sanction any of my God-talk. 

**Don't worry.  I'm not finished showing you the clothes.  I just needed to balance all of the frill with some substance.