After attending a ladies' luncheon, I can say with certainty that I am not now nor will I ever be a lady who lunches.  At least not in the way that I use that term.  My companions were great.  They were pleasant, welcoming, friendly and fun to chat with, but do you ever find yourself in a situation where you are thinking, "One of these things is not like the others?"  It was me, and I did it to myself.  It had nothing to do with age or economic background.  We ranged in age from 25 to 70.  One person had not had a steady job in two years, another was just starting a career and one was getting ready to retire after a career spent in consulting.  Social, networking lunches are so different from working lunches.  I'm really good at working lunches.  I'm not so good at polite chit-chat which can lead to making connections.  I need to work on that.  I'm entering a new phase in my working life, I'm starting a business, and meeting women  like these and forming connections could all be essential to my future success.  I need to look at networking opportunities just like they are part of my job because they are.  Every cup of tea has to be treated like a working lunch.

I've analyzed and over-analyzed why I was so uncomfortable in this situation: I just couldn't relax.  After years of working on not caring about what people think of me, I sat there for two hours worried about what they were thinking.  In situations like this, where I don't know anyone and it's a new environment, it's so easy for me to slip back into that negative, self-doubt mindset.  I need to just be me.  Just me doesn't really like tea that much even though I spent last week drinking a ton of it while I had a sinus infection (my favorite right now is Good Earth but I think I'm ready to go back to Republic of Tea's Ginger Peach which used to be the only tea I drank when I was sick until I got, well, sick of it).  I will always choose coffee first and always in a huge mug (I love my new, huge Nightmare Before Christmas mug which was a gift from my husband) because that is just me.

Linked to Visible Monday

That's my cuff as the lead-in photo for this week's Fashion Bloggers Weekly Round-Up on Fashion Treatment.  Please visit as many of the bloggers as you can.

The outfit I would buy today if I won the lottery...


Except you have to play to win.

You know that old saying about the kindness of strangers?  I've been really thankful for that lately.  Starting this blog has brought some really lovely people into my life, and although I may never meet them in real life, they have inspired me and helped me in ways I never would have imagined.  I started this blog A) because my husband told me I needed a hobby, and B) because I was frustrated with the way my face and body were changing after I turned 40, and I wanted to become comfortable with and accepting of myself as I aged.  I've always prided myself on trying to be fashionably dressed, and I wanted to still be that way while dressing appropriately for my age.  I have learned so much in the last year: I realized after years of fighting it, I had to do some form of exercise, and even if I will never be a size 4 again, I need to make conscious decisions to eat a healthy diet.  Those lessons or should I say my realizations of those facts I'm thankful for, but they were things I hear everyday.  I just had to accept them which I have.  Some recent lessons though have been far more exciting.

I received a lovely email from a new reader of the blog recently.  She was very kind, thoughtful and complimentary.  Then she challenged me: "It seems like you spend a lot of money on clothes.  I don't have extra money.  It's easy for people like you to look good."  I know the part I've quoted here may not seem lovely to some of you, but it really was a kind email, and it shocked me because I say that about celebrities all the time.  Of course actress X who is the same age as me looks like she's 30, she has a personal trainer, nutritionist, chef and stylist.  I would look that good if I had her life too.  I know I don't live that life, and I know that I don't look that good, but I do have a lot of clothes.  I knew immediately that the reader is frustrated and not so much at me but at circumstances.  The reason I knew this (or maybe it's just an assumption): I've lived that life.  I've written about my life before here, but to quickly review, there was an 11 year period of my life when my annual clothing budget was around $500, and I never had more than $100 to spend on myself at any one time (and that was a rarity).  During that time, I always held management positions at a Fortune 500 company (where the rest of my money went is not on topic for this kind of blog, but I assure you it was not illicit or illegal).

How did I manage to go to work dressed professionally from my late 20s to 30s on this budget?  I narrowed my wardrobe down to four basic colors, black, white, beige and grey, shopped at stores like Target, TJ Maxx, Marshalls and Ross, and only bought basic items.  My uniform every day was trousers or a skirt, a tee shirt or blouse, a blazer and basic black pumps.  When shopping for my uniform pieces, I would always be looking for a unique cut or extra detail like contrast piping around button holes or ribbon trim.  I became a pro at sticking to my color palette and my uniform pieces while shopping clearance racks but having unique details kept my outfits fresh and made me still feel as though I was expressing style.

Back to the letter from my lovely reader.  She questioned if I could dress like "me" if I were on her budget.  In my defense, I have quite a bit more in my closet from H&M, Zara and Forever 21 than I do from Neiman's and Sak's.  On a daily basis, I mix high and low and usually have a lot more low to mid-priced items in an outfit than high, but having lived on a strict budget, I completely acknowledge that the price point of a mid-priced item from Ann Taylor can seem like a fortune.  The outfit I put together here was pulled from things already in my closet and some of them for a long time, so I had to estimate the price but here goes: Vintage Jag dress $17.00, Target jacket $19.99 and shoes $21.99, H&M bag $12.99, JewelMint rings $29.99, Brighton necklace gifted (I wouldn't have worn the Coach sunglasses in order to make my price point, but I was squinting unattractively without them.  Please pretend they aren't there).  Total for outfit $101.96.

I wrote back to my reader to ask her what a reasonable budget for an outfit would be for her.  I really wanted to give an example that was true to her world, but I have not heard back from her.

Here is where the learning something part of the story kicked in for me, and maybe I'm just stupid or naive.  There are truly a lot of people who struggle with this and they shouldn't have to.  Send me a homework assignment.  I love to do this.  The focus of this blog will still be my personal style outfits, but maybe there is another home for me to do this and I just have to pull it together.  Until then, post a comment or send an email if you want to talk about body types or party clothes.  If this post wasn't already making you yawn, I would tell you about my training in Image Styling in the 80s.  But that's a whole new post.  

Linked to Monday Mingle

Every outfit starts with the first piece, right?  No matter how you put your outfits together, you have to take one piece out first to build from.  I know that sometimes it's hard to even figure out the first piece, and that's what leads to the "I have nothing to wear" syndrome.  But if you can get past the first piece, you are on your way.  Sometimes the outcome is better than others.  Let's face it, even the highest paid stylists sometimes don't get it right.  If they did, why do people end up on the worst dressed lists?  I'm happy with the way this outfit came out although the journey to come up with this was convoluted and difficult.  Thank goodness the following events happened on a vacation day otherwise who knows how late I would have been to work.

I love this blazer.  Last year, it was the one piece of DKNY I made it my mission to buy.  It has leather trim, it's boucle, and it has a faint metallic thread running through it.  I eventually bought it on sale at Last Call by Neiman Marcus for a ridiculously low price which made waiting for it worth it.  I planned all summer that as soon as the temperatures fell below 80, I was going to bring it out.  We had a few cool days seen here and here, and I still never wore it.  Then I went to a luncheon and the woman I sat next to had a blazer with a fur collar on.  If she could break out the winter-wear on a 70+ day in Southern California, I could wear a boucle blazer.

In my head, I had styled this blazer for work at least five different ways, but I wanted to wear it on a day off.  I turned to a J Crew catalog for inspiration where I saw a similar blazer style with skinny pants and a denim shirt.  Looking for denim in the wardrobe, I came across this denim dress with velvet trim which I've had forever.  Perfect I thought.  Then I tried it on.  Somehow the dress had miraculously shrunken to ridiculous heights just by sitting in my closet (no, I'm not that obtuse, but it's a lot easier to delude yourself with that then the real reason it's four inches shorter than you remember it).  I stubbornly wanted to wear the dress though, so I started trying on skirts to go under it.  Nothing seemed right, so I abandoned the dress and went back to this black H&M dress which I was going to wear with the blazer originally.  Teamed with pointy-toed pumps, I felt fully dressed for work on a vacation day.  Feeling ridiculous, I decided to abandon the whole thing, put on jeans and a tee shirt and wallow in self-pity.  Instead, I pulled the denim dress on over the black dress.  The pumps suddenly didn't work, so I pulled out the pair of boots which I had only worn once before here.  I'm really happy I didn't shell out more cash on the spike trend than for these inexpensive boots.  I've also tried the tread with the shoes worn here and on a bag from Zara which I haven't used yet.

This outfit actually consists of elements that I pair often and think look good on my body type: long under short, booties with a dress, texture of any kind somewhere in the mix.  I also favor a dress over another dress if it doesn't add too much bulk.  I'm a huge fan of layering which is why I probably struggle so much with summer outfits.  It's hard to wear four layers in 100 degrees.  I liked this outfit, I felt comfortable in it, I received complements on it.  Would I wear it again?  Probably not.  I don't have a simple reason why except that I had to work really hard for this, and that takes some of the fun out of it for me.  I enjoy my style the most when it feels effort-less, and this was far from it.