On style. Well, my style, anyway.

[ghostpaw]

Back last Autumn, Dan bought what we thought was a morning suit in Snoopers Paradise for not much money, with the idea of just wearing the tail coat. Long story short, it turned out to be a set of bespoke evening tails, made by a Saville Row tailor, and worth considerably more than he paid for them. This lead to him, and then me, getting a bit lot

Comments

[shebit]

I've started to construct my 'teacher wardrobe', though appropriate clothes for teaching D&T are slightly different to standard teacher clothes: I'm wearing grown up, ladylike dresses, but teamed with DMs, because I need reinforced/steel toecaps for the workshop (and 'workboots' are pig ugly, but DMs come in every colour!)

[ghostpaw]

I'm thinking Future!Career wardrobes, too, making sure that I'll have some sufficiently respectable looking things to wear in front of clients. It's somewhat easier for me because people expect counsellors to be a bit weird, but I want to stear well away from the the middle-class hippy look because in my mind I associate it with quite a lot of woo and unexamined priveledge.

[miss_adventure]

From one tiny, curvy lady to another, tailoring is really important for nicely-fitting suits, especially when one doesn't want to look like a drag king. If you buy off the rack, you pretty much have to have it tailored to look right, even if it's just getting the pants hemmed because these days everything is cut like we all spend out lives in towering heels. Or such has been my experience as I increase the lawyer drag part of my wardrobe. For me, that tends to mean getting the waists to fit, since all the lifting means that if a jacket fits my waist it will be too tight across the shoulders and if it fits my shoulders then there will be a lot of excess material at the waist. Not a flattering look. But it gets pricey, both the suits and the tailoring. Lawyer drag is a PITA

[ghostpaw]

tailoring is really important for nicely-fitting suits, especially when one doesn't want to look like a drag king
I thought this would be the case. Also, in the UK, off the rack women's suits are either really naff, synthetic rich fabrics, or prohibitively expensive. Thing is, I don't particularly want to go down the dapper suit route. It's a great look... on other people. It feels a bit too masculine/ androgynous for me, though.

It's funny, I think what I'm trying to find is a bit more of a uniform. Trying to find a bit of an identity and then bloody well project it, y'know? Being a social chameleon is a useful skill, but it's easy to get lost.

Those boots sound very cool, btw.

[miss_adventure]

If I didn't need suits for lawyerly stuff, I wouldn't own any. (Or maybe one for those occasions when I need to prove that I am in fact an educated and responsible adult.) Nice wool off-the-rack suits are pricey in North America as well, plus tailoring and dry cleaning and on and on... I agree that they are a great look on other people, and they flatter me when tailored properly, but...not my personal style. Too formal and high-maintenance; I'm a wash-and-wear kind of grrrl and scheduling trips to the dry cleaner is a bit odd

[the_smut_fairy]

Was Dan's suit the one you found when I visited last year? In any case, whoa, Skor!

Second what miss_adventure said about suits. Especially about the trouser length. I don't get this thing about having trousers long enough to trip over; do the retailers think that destroying their trouser hems by getting them all frayed and muddy (because, y'know, I have to get to my desk somehow) would lead to me buying new trousers from them sooner? The one time I got trousers in a shop where they custom-hem them for you, I had to tell them several times (to looks like I just suggested something unthinkable) that they were too long, and they still got it a bit wrong in the end.

I shouldn't really get started about suits... As I'm sure I've ranted about before, going into a menswear department of certain High Street shops tends to end up with me leaving in something like a big feminist strop mixed liberally with jealousy: all_five_aces and I have a very similar taste in suits, and he can get nice jackets that fit both above and below the waist. OK, I'll stop now, I do have

[ghostpaw]

Yes, it was that suit we found when you came to Brighton. So, he took it to a tailor to see if he could get the sleeves lengthened slightly, and the tailor got quite excited. Turns out was made in the 70's by a company called Daks as a bespoke suit and would have cost £1600 new. The quality of the materials means that even with wear it'll last forever, and when Dan decides he doesn't want it any more he'll be able to re-sell it for several hundred quid. So yeah, definitely Hail Skor

[the_smut_fairy]

What, this Daks? Nice one.

Addams Family classic? I like. Yeah, I suppose that covers most of it. I noticed a few years ago that I ended dressing like a mix of my mother (sober suits, blouses and hats, although she's not into boy suits) and her younger sister (the whole bohemian magpie thing) with added goth (partly your fault).

As for your overlying style, well... When you were goth and then hippie, I thought the underlying "floaty grungy punky / riot grrrl / Hard Femme / depends who's talking and when" sort of thing* was there the whole time. It changed over the years and surfaced under different guises.

Also, stompy boots go with bloody well anything. I got my first pair of DMs in 1st year of uni (first pair of non-PE flat shoes I'd owned since the age of about 14), and what a marvellous decision it was.

(*not having come across it though music, I first encountered this approach to style at the age of about 11, when I read about it in a magazine article which called it "London Girl". When I first came to London a few years