Optimistic attempts at thrift and resourcefulness: Take 1

This last week has felt endlessly gray, cold, and icy.  Getting back to the daily scholastic grind is worse than usual when the weather is just determined to suck.  But today there was sunlight!  And the temperature was above 40!  I'm really, really hoping that the mild weather continues through the long weekend, preferably through the week as well.

To take advantage of the glorious, precious light from the sky, my boyfriend and I took some photos outside.  This is actually the outfit I wore yesterday, as I worked today and my job doesn't allow for such frippery. All photos by Louis:

Blazer: Vintage, Top: JMR, Skirt: Lane Bryant, Shoes: Liliana via ModCloth.  Accessories are all thrift or gifts, the belt is a piece of scrap fabric, scarf is cheap-o from some gift shop on Franklin St., and the socks were no doubt stolen form my dad's sock drawer.

Louis and I have this amazing opportunity to visit China in August, and if I want to make that happen I have to seriously pinch my pennies.  This means being very strict with myself in terms of how much money I spend on clothes.  This is something that's been hard for me in the past, but part of the reason I'm starting this blog right now is that I want this to be an opportunity for me to fish around in my closet, and experiment with all the things I own that I never wear.  I want it to be an opportunity for me to be more creative with my fashion sense--not me forcing a sense of austerity and sacrifice upon myself.  

Whenever I start feeling like I have nothing to wear, my first impulse is to go out and buy new clothes.  I think this is what a lot of us feel, but lately it's occurred to me that this is such a stop-gap measure for dealing with style ruts.  How many times have I gone out and spent money on buying some pretty new journals when I'm having writer's block, or new art materials when I'm dissatisfied with what I'm drawing?  Fashion is no different.  Whenever I impulse buy new clothes, what inevitably happens is I excitedly construct outfits around my shiny new things for a few days, and then when the novelty wears off I return to feeling like my style has become un-creative and dull.  In the end, having my dream wardrobe wouldn't automatically improve my sense of style or design; if you have the right feel for it, you can express yourself well through fashion no matter what clothes are at your disposal. 

So, this blog: I'm hoping that it will encourage me to put together new compositions out of what I already own, and thus save save save in the hopes of getting to Shanghai over the summer.  This is not to say that I'll never show off newly-acquired shiny things, but hopefully I'll be able to keep that to a minimum.  Maybe proclaiming all this to the internet will help keep me accountable.