a sassy 90's/grunge/punk reference

A couple of months ago, around the same time that I started to be inspired by the fashion blogs mentioned below this blog's title, I started a project/experiment for purging my wardrobe of items that I don't wear often enough. I turned all the hangers in my closet around so that they're backwards. When I wear something that was on a backwards hanger, the hanger gets turned back around. I'm supposed to get rid of all the clothes on hangers that are still backwards in six months. My collection of costumes and formalwear are of course excluded from the experiment. I stole the idea from either apartmenttherapy.com or ReadyMade magazine. I can't remember where I saw it first.

This experiment has encouraged me to find new ways to wear clothes that I don't wear very often (or haven't worn in years), by mixing and layering them with other clothes I already own rather than shopping for new clothes to wear them with. This outfit it one such result. It's also partially a result of the fact that I felt like wearing my Doc Marten boots, which I only don every once in a while because they're heavy and uncomfortable for standing for long periods of time.


I love this red plaid jacket, which I purchased on ebay when trying to build my professional wardrobe during my first year at Rowan. But I have a hard time finding ways to wear it. I think I hadn't worn it for two years. It's boxier and longer than I like, but taking it in and shortening the hem would be so much hassle that I don't think it'd be worth the trouble. Due to the boxiness, I feel frumpy when wearing it with any of my jeans, pants, and skirts. But when I tried it on over this rather short and flimsy, girlish dress, which I normally wouldn't wear to work, I liked how they balanced each other out.

The skinny belt (fabric tube) that I draped around my neck is something that I used as a necktie when I was Charlie Chaplin for Halloween when I was in high school (freshman or sophomore year?), and I hadn't used it since. I just added a decorative yellow stitch all the way down the middle because the tube of fabric wasn't laying together smoothly after I pressed it this time.


I actually wore this dress backwards that day. I get away with it because the dress's shape is so simple and flimsy that it doesn't affect the fit much. I've been meaning to hem it in order to even-out the hemline, because it dips down further in front than in back (a problem I often have with skirts and dresses due to my ample junk-in-the-trunk). But wearing it backwards fixed the problem! My black slip is too long for this dress, so I wore my white one, but it sticks out when I lift my arms. Looks like I'm going to have to add "shorter black slip" to my clothing wishlist.

My friend Heidi loved this outfit because it reminded her of what she wore when she followed punk-rock bands in her coming-of-age years.