The Art of having nothing to wear

staying home inthe afternoon of saturday. siblings off to fete. and i working for the TCB grand opening event as well as other events that i have yet in pending. debating which one to finish up to be sent this afternoon through Email, half of me was debating between starting the alchemist book (thanks anya!) or the other booki have long to read too (the art of imperfection)

I picked up the book. then i started to read...

"The art of having nothing to wear"

hmm.. interesting. flashes of shopping spree with my ever so scandalizing sister, now known as my MSG buddy, came into me. then i read further.

"Style is to clothes what carbon dating is to archelogogist and geologists: a sure way to tell when something was created. But while measuring the amount of radiocarbon in an organism reveals how old it is, style in agarment reveals how young it makes you feel.

The more style there is in clothes the more buoyant the feeling.

In fashion, the ultimate challenge is to stricke a balance between two extremes: timelessness and timeliness. More often than not though, clothes last a lot longer than the youthful spirit inwhich they were created. Think about it his way: Radiocarbon in gabric has a half-life of 5,730 years--give or take 40 years. The style of an outfit is subjectivve, elusive and volatile, with a half-life less than two months.

This discrepancy makes for a lot of slothes in mint condition languishing on racks in closets, storage spaces, thrift shops, costume rental sotres, attics, and museums. It also makes for a lot of us feeling guilty: Our closets are full yet we can never find the right thing to wear.

Some garments, arguablt, keep their appeal for months, even years. Yet one day, unexpectedly, their style expires in your arms as you put them on. Really good clothes can turn matronly within weeks. And quite a fw outfits look trite the minute you take them out of the tissue-paper cocoon and snip off their price tags.

In women's wear in particular, the demise of stlye is sudden and irreversible. If you insist on wearing a garment that has lost its je ne sais quoi, you run the risk of feeling as dated as a six-hundred-million-year-old-trilobite.

Remember your favorite, above the knee, blakc leather skirt? Inexplicably,m it became extinct in October 1991--in what now feels like the late Precambrian. The red sequined top you bought for New Year's Eve 1997 was history by Valentine's day. A wide-lepel-jacket you got on sale at the end of Mat 1998, at a 40 percent markdown, looked like an archaeological find a month later.

To be sure, clothes are best understood when viewed on a geographical time scale. They make most sense as artifacts designed to help us keep track of passiong seasons, years, and decades. You can measure a lifetime in silhouette adjustments, hemline revolutions, retro-fads--and how often the miniskirt craze came and went. Fashion is most useful as an intrument of measure, a way to monitor intervals between historical events.

the twentieth century will endure through coco chanel's little black dress, simone de Beauvior's turbans, jacquiline kennedy's sunglasses, Marilyn monroe's "happy birthday mr president" sequined sheath, Diane von Furstenburg's wrap chemises, Jane Fonda's striped leotards, Nancy Reagan's red power suits and Imelda marcos's shoes.

Look inside you closet: Each item in it is an entry in you sartorial diary--each chronicles a moment in your personal history. As self-defining as the clothes you bought last week are those you no longers care for. They tell where you came from, when you got here, and who you've become. They are part of the long autobiographical narrative that makes your life unique. Dianace Vreeland, the legendary editorre of Vogue magazine in the sixties, once said "where would fashion be without literature?"

Don't worry if you wear only a fraction of the clothes you own. Your invisible wardrose is teh underpinning of your present style. Though not on display, the frocks or suits you've discarded have left an indelible impreint on the way you dress today. Without them, you could never have picked the three or four outfits that, you now feel, best capture the essence of who you are.

STYLE IS KNOWING WHAT NOT TO WEAR

The larger your disposable income, the grater your need to know what not to wear. "Elegance is refusal" said the imperious Vreeland. On the list of raiment to leave on the racks are clothes that are little too tight, jackets with pockets int he wrong places, garments that ride up instead of down, and trousers you think fit you because you can zip them up.

Men show grat savvy inthis domain. Masculine tailoring is designed to smooth physical flaws. Women have no such luck: their garments are not as user-friendly. To look good, they depend on the dos and the don'ts of fashion.

For instance, femmes fetales blessed with curves learn the hard way to stay away from double-breasted jackets--overlapping lapels add too much buildup on thier chest. Eentually they dare to wear snug garments that are a lot more flattering to thier fuller figures thna loose tunics and pants.

Try as they might, though, women should not look forward to ever getting it right. In the long run, it wouldn't work to their advantage. A case in point is the Duchess of Windsor, who overcame her many physical flaws to become one of the most elegant women of her time. She never managed to look vulnerable, though. In fact, she was always so perfectly put together that intimate observers began to suspect that her punctiliousness was designed to hide the fact that shew as a man!

The lure of perfection is pernicious. it preys on the best of us. And it strikes its victims swiftly. One morning, you absentmindedly put on your trusted white blouse. your beugh suit. your perl necklace, your good italian loafers. That day, feeling overly confident, you walk past the most delicious peach acetating stratch satin shirt in a store, without evennoticing, your brain registers no sense of passibilities, no secret yearning, no desire for fetching frills.

A year later, it's too late. you've become dowdy. when your best friend's daughter say hello, her eyes glaze over.

when you give the delivery bot a tip, he no longer flashes a smile at you.

And when you catch your reflection in a store window, you hesitat before recogniting the chic woman as you.

But dont worry. it won't happen as long as you never stop feeling that you have absolutely nothing to wear."

Fashion is the best over-the-counter youth prescription.

by Veronique Vienne

these are indeed just simple ways to make peace with yourself.

hmmm what is there to wear for tom? father's day is comin!


and yes, you've guessed it right. i'll probably save paolo coehlo for another rainy day. hahaha


...::The world is full of passing faces. Our hearts are bruised in many places::..