Return of the Taupe Booties

Left: I think Franco Sarto booties. Right: Torrid booties

I loved those booties on the left. I wore them a bunch as they were just cute, good under bootcuts, good over skinnies, cute with dresses and tights… they were just great. Then… they broke.

I took them to a repair place. After going back, they handed them back to me. “Basically to fix these we’d have to weld the metal structure back in place. So we’d have to dissemble the whole shoe, do that, then reassemble it back. That’s not worth the money. This saddened me. Even to the point I couldn’t get myself to throw them away. So they stayed with me even though I couldn’t really wear them without fearing the heel just totally breaking off one day.

Then… in a Torrid ad… those booties on the right. They looked almost exactly like the originals. In fact, I couldn’t tell the difference at first. I scouted them out on the website, and kind of fell in love with the shoe again. And bought them. It was only comparing the two side-by-side that I realized they were actually different and how. (I’ll admit, I still like the left ones a bit better, but the right ones are still great.)

Since getting these, I’ve been slowly wearing them (and other heels) more and more. So was it worth it? Probably.

Any shoes you’ve absolutely fallen in love with?

~ Sarah

A Year Later: An Update

So the last time I wrote in here was about September 2018, then before that April 2017. Obviously this blog has been a bit neglected. But that’s ok, I never really expected a ton of traffic or expected this to be one of the main things I work on. It was always more of an experiment in journaling than an expectation of being “A Fashion Blog”.

It’s been a bit weird since September 2018, and the fashionable side of me went away:

• I gained a bunch of weight since relocating, then lost about all of it (and trying to lose some more). This, of course, means that a lot of clothes I had that fit didn’t fit anymore.
• And of course heels didn’t make my feet as happy as normal, and a LOT of flats had been worn for a while. In fact, the giant rack of heels I have didn’t get put up for a while when I moved because there was almost no point.
• Eventually work killed off our project, and I had been looking for a job for a while. That can take its toll, and caused the mindset of wanting to stay at home a lot and there’s no point to dressing nicer at home.

Then at some point around September or so this year… I don’t know. I guess I hit that breaking point where you just want something and think about it so much and it eats at you so much that you kind of want to scream. And then I started trying to dress nicer.

I’ve actually started trying to do better about the fashions. It’s funny because my friends always say I look put together but I often never felt it. One friend mentioned in the past that I probably raised my own minimum bar on what it meant to be casual/dressed up. Which is probably true. And I guess I finally got to a point where I felt like, despite kind of working for myself now (doing freelancing) and not really getting out of the house much that I needed to change it. So I’ve been trying to spend most days at a coworking space. While I still don’t interact much with people, it does kind of force me to do all the getting ready stuff that I’d do if I did work at an office.

Another thing that helps is fall showed up. I always felt like I dressed better for fall and spring than winter or summer and I’m not quite sure why that is. Perhaps it’s just layering is a thing I tend to do a lot and you do that a lot less in the summer and winter is just thicker everything. But pulling out the fall fashions just felt nicer. And with it getting colder, layers are getting easier. Also I love boots.

Something that’s been nice as well is finding a few people to talk to on some of the tech communities I’ve been on about fashion things. I think secretly there’s a lot of women that want to be more fashionable but feel they can’t because of the male-dominated industry. So it’s nice to find people like “K”, a woman that decided to just start wearing heels and pumps to work every day (been doing it for about 2 years now). A few of these people have been nice to share outfit selfies with again and slowly get back to a routine.

For the first time in a year, I’ve started to feel a bit cute and pretty again. Will it last? Who knows, but at least I’m trying to enjoy it a bit while I’m doing it.

If you deal with any waves of looking nice and then getting into a funk, I’d be curious to hear how you get out of it. Feel free to drop some comments about it.

~ Sarah

So… It’s Been a While, and a Lot Has Changed

I still think about this blog. Fairly regularly, actually. I think about what I hoped to do with it, I think about what I hoped to realize about myself from it, and I think about the style I hoped to feel confident about having because of it. And it started off alright, but then became a chore. Then life got hard and emotional. And it got abandoned.

Some of the major life changes include:

• Realizing I was stuck in many aspects of life, and deciding a new job would be a major factor to fixing that, so I searched for 8 months and found one.
• Realizing I also felt stuck in my city, I looked for that job in an entirely different city. I got interviews across the country, and ended up moving east!
• Realizing I felt stuck in a variety of other places in life, I started trying to work through those too.

And this leads me back to this blog. Style and fashion is something I’ve always been fascinated with. Something I’ve always looked at others and envied. Something I daydreamed I’d have at some point in my life. And through a former job teaching college classes and a former job at a more conservative bank, I did up my style for a bit. (I think some of the pictures here were from those days). I then ended up at a super casual tech job, and felt me sort of rolling back some on my style. I guess if there was a bar I was aiming to hit, I wasn’t hitting it anymore. I think some of it was it got raised from those jobs, and some of it was just being at a casual place doing tech made me feel more out of place.

Which leads me to now. I’m also at a casual place. (I, for better or worse, work at an office that’s mostly white straight dudes always in jeans/shorts and t-shirts.) But I’m trying to step it up a bit. I gained some weight and so I’ve started looking for clothes that are a bit above the bar in what I might normally buy. And have been trying to wear them too! And even have the big rack of heels in my bedroom reminding me to try to wear them more often.

So…  long story short, I’m trying to up my fashionista-ness again. And might be getting to a point where I’m about to accept that style is actually an important trait to me, and I need to embrace this and accept it. So this blog may be seeing some more use in the near future.

Until then… go wear something fun!

~ Sarah

Catching up on OOTDs

I’ve had more time recently and have been catching up on side projects. One of the things I definitely neglected is this blog. I don’t really expect a lot of readers, but I still want to keep it going for my own fashion growth, and maybe to try to build confidence. But I wanted to also catch up on posting outfits so maybe I can look through them and remind myself of outfits and try to think through new combinations of stuff I wear a lot.

To speed up things, I’m posting them without thoughts. Not that I really remember my moods or anything about it anyway.

I’m backdating them, so if you want to look, feel free to click the OOTD category at the top and peruse. I caught up on December-January, I’ll see if I can do February and March soon too. Then maybe for April I’ll write out where I got my clothes and things from.

~ Sarah