I was excited to learn that I looked cute in someone else's opinion-- perhaps I have finally gotten the hang of this "layering" business. After moving here and leaving my apartment a half dozen times, I became frustrated and believed that my collection of lightweight sweaters had rendered me completely unprepared for the foggy chill of San Francisco. But I perservered. I used my bookstore gift certificate (given to me by the school- how awesome is that?) to purchase a nice warm fleece sweatshirt makes up for its slight frump factor with the fact that it has the school's name on it. And then I took another look at my clothes and realized I actually do posess a number of the raw materials to make it through at least the summer and fall months. I have jackets and sweaters and long and short sleeved shirts... it's really just a matter of learning to coordinate them into functional, comfortable, carryable, cute outfit combinations.
Getting dressed is not always the easiest thing in the world for me. When I was little my grandmother sewed most of my clothes for me, which is awesome. And then in middle school we had a uniform. In high school I would wear anything and tried to be different from everyone else. I wore leopard print pants as if they were jeans with my Dad's lacoste sweaters (which are actually popular now, who knew?). I shopped at Urban Outfitters when it wasn't so insanely overtrendy and overpriced. I wore a skull ring that I bought at the fair. I painted my shoes with glitter nail polish. In college I settled down a little and wore less... interacting(?) outfits. But I will say that if I found something I liked, it was hard for me to take it off. I can remember finding a combination of clothes and wearing it to class 2 or 3 days in a row, because they were different classes and I was proud of the one cute outfit I had come up with. But when I started working and saw the same people every day I had to (finally) learn how to put together clothes I liked on a daily basis and rotate them through the weeks. It took some getting used to and some outfits I couldn't wait to get out of when I got home, but I did it.
And now moving to this new city and new climate has presented other challenges.
So I told Ian that I had some trouble getting started since I was from LA where people don't really layer. He disagreed and said that people do in fact wear layers in LA.
I realized that this is true. But the layering in LA is generally achieved in a rather nonfunctional, borderline frumpy manner, such as this:
I'm not saying that some people can't pull this off and look adorable while doing it... I'm just pointing out that I don't happen to be one of them. And so the layering does not come naturally to me, which explains why I'm still glowing from the compliment.
