white - The Seventh Sphinx

It’s a shame how rare it is to see an ascot these days. Rarer still than seeing a bowtie. Such an elegant way to add a bit of color or interest to a plain shirt or outfit, for men and women alike, with an endearing element of eccentricity. It creates the sense of an additional layer that is really only the illusion of a layer.

Any light scarf can be made serve the purpose.

This would have been better if I’d worn a shirt that buttoned up farther, maybe. More color this way but there’s something appealing about a small triangle of color peeping out, too. The loose, casual interpretation vs the severe, polished interpretation. Both have their strengths.

Silk is a nice way to go.

The most enjoyable part of wearing a shirt or vest with buttons is the art of leaving certain of them undone. I like the idea of this look with no ascot, nothing at all at the neck, and another button on the shirt undone. Love the looks I’m seeing across runway shows recently (to say nothing of American Hustle, long may it be an inspiration to us all) of extremely deep Vs (front and back). I have many personal aspirations re: the deep V. The smaller breasted of us can wear it relatively innocently, I think. Relatively… It still makes for a potentially distracting eyepath, but one that is much more suggestive than it is revealing.

So much more appealing to me to create the impression of revealing than to literally reveal, which is like explaining the joke.

Vintage silk scarf from Jones New York, H&M vest, Banana Republic shirt (thrifted), Express jean leggings, Mulberry bag, Trotters loafers. Sunglasses: cheap (retro, no?). On the lips: Shiseido Lacquer Gloss in RS 306.

I never get it when people with broad shoulders want to disguise them. Shoulders love to be accentuated. They seem to jump at the chance.

But maybe it’s just me, and some lingering 80s influence.

Have been browsing for a pair of leather driving gloves for a good 5 years or so, always finding it difficult to find them in a brick and mortar to try on, especially women’s gloves with their sleeker fit and more delicate fingers. The most promising options were in British menswear shops with understandable-yet-still-galling postage fees, and I delayed. A few years ago a glove shop opened on Newbury St, Sermoneta gloves, selling Italian-made gloves, and I finally gave it a proper browse last week.

I found the salesperson pleasantly tolerant of my endless trying on (I have large hands, and glove sizing is been pretty inconsistent in my experience, making it quite a risk to buy a pair without trying them on first,* not to mention feeling the quality of the leather first).

*As there is variation in each pair, this means not only trying on multiple sizes, but trying on multiple pairs within the nearest size.

I pronounce the visit a success.

I do not always feel that my shopping is a success, reader. I return a fair amount (though, too, there is some amount of returning built into my shopping methods re: sizing and comparison, etc.), and have to sometimes resell or eat the cost of something I changed my mind about. My whims are fallible, my tastes are sometimes—only really in retrospect, inconveniently—questionable. Often I return something because I recognize that I have made a compromise (of fit, construction, quality, adherence to some vision) I did not want to make, and should not make. It’s a steady stream of stuff coming in and stuff going out again over here.

It’s all the more satisfying, then, when there are no doubts and no reservations. White 1/2 finger driving gloves? Don’t mind if I do. I was looking for basic turquoise gloves but…that’s how it goes. These were the ones that sang.

There is something about a pair of sublimely fitted gloves that is as sensually tempting as it gets.

It’s satisfying when you get home from a bout of acquisition and can say, I got this.*

*Like, in the sense of ‘I’m all over this’…not like ‘I acquired this’…though you do technically now have it…oh never mind.

Tag: white

the ascot

the leather driving gloves