April 8, 2019
Remember our friend who designs installations for solar panels? Happy for her, she’s now traveling in warm weather! No more the “leave the snow, get off the plane in sweltering heat!”
So she’s packing light – just enough to visit her clients, and the construction sites…
This painting is her inspiration:
She’s driving to her next clients, so she’s wearing sandals on her trip! Normally, she doesn’t fly in sandals…
Cardigan – Halogen; earrings – Oscar Figueroa Escorcia; tee – Lands’ End; scarf – Scarves & Hankies of London; watch – Marc Jacobs; pants – J.Crew; tote – Bao Bao Issey Miyake; sandals – Lands’ End; suitcase – Calpak
Many of her clients can be hard to read, at first. Some of them want her to put on a hard-hat and steel-toed boots and climb ladders (she doesn’t go quite that far…) and other just want to sit over a cocktail at the country club and review the plans. So she tries to pack with those various potential scenarios in mind!
Diamond earrings – Carriere Jewelery; grey dress – Eileen Fisher; necklace – La Soula; dark grey tank – Lands’ End; print dress – Lands’ End; square bracelet – Jenny Bird; scarf – Faliero Sarti; orange clutch – Nancy Gonzalez; cardigan – Lands’ End; silver sandals – Rebecca Minkoff; dark grey capris – Lands’ End; grey tee – Lands’ End; sandals – Wolky; grey suede loafers – Me Too
She’s really enjoying her core wardrobe of grey with the unexpected orange and green accents:
She’s not prepared for a black-tie dinner, nor for climbing up on the roof of an installation, but she can easily be prepared for just about anything else!
Again, just in the interest of looking at this heroine’s growing personal style, I combined her wardrobe from winter with this current wardrobe…
Her style is interesting, and I think it’s quite distinctive. I wouldn’t have thought to put orange and green with grey, but if it’s good enough for Picasso, it’s good enough for us, right?
love,
Janice
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If orange didn’t make me look sickly, I would adopt this wardrobe in a heartbeat. It makes me happy.
By the way, have you watched “The Mystery of Picasso” (1956)? It’s mesmerizing to be able to see him create in “real time” and get a feel of the process. In one example, a succession of seemingly random scribbles is suddenly transformed by one squiggly line into a bull. I highly recommend it.
Janice,
While the brown family is more friendly to my skin than the grays, I am seeing how two values of a given hue ( both light and darker gray ) can add the variety within a capsule that I do crave ! Thanks for showing this aspect !
And I also echo the uniqueness of the orange and green paired with gray !
Please give our heroine a pair of orange safety toe sneakers and an orange hard hat so she can climb on that roof. She’ll look and BE far more professional if she’s able to make a thorough inspection of her job site.
Are you a fellow member of WISE (Women In Safety Excellence) subgroup of ASSP? We do wear a light of high-visibility orange and “lime yellow”!
Hi, Safety Specialist – I’m a civilian scientist leading environmental cleanup teams for the Army, and I get to wear orange (and other safety colors) on my job sites a lot. I like to coordinate that orange with the rest of my outfit—trousers, boots, and hard hat—so our heroine in gray and orange really struck a chord in me yesterday.
Grey is my favorite neutral. It pairs well with so many colors!
Grey used to be considered a color strictly for fall and winter. I’m happy to see it used year round these days. I’ve seen pretty light grey shorts, sandals, and crop pants in the stores this year.
I really like what you’ve done with grey here.
It would be fun to take all the grey neutrals in this wardrobe and swap with other contrasting colors to see how it holds up: purple and yellow, teal and fuchsia, lime green and cobalt. It’s such a nice base palette for brights (much better than black I think).
I feel like I need to study this one—grey is one of my neutrals, and it struck a chord for sure. I also layer dark and light versions of the same neutral, and I like green a lot, too. Maybe I’ll give it a try for our road trip this summer! I’ve been wanting to pack light for it.
Wow, this is really great! Thanks!
I like the cohesiveness of the prints with her palette, and the gray is a perfect accompaniment. – nancyo
While grey is not a colour I can wear, I love the look of this wardrobe. Often orange is associated with gold accessories os it is lovely to see it paired with grey neutrals and silver accessories.
Hello Janice,
I am a huge fan of the color green. This particular capsule made my heart sing!!
I stumbled upon the Vivienne Files about 2 years ago and they have been tremendously helpful for me as I slowly determine and evolve my own style. The concept of the capsule wardrobe delights me and I’m slowly working in that direction of having cohesive core & accent pieces.
Which leads me to my question. In your posts about the 4×4 wardrobes, you show these grids with clothing arranged as tops & bottoms. I’d love to be able to do this with my own wardrobe. I use Stylebook (the app) currently to track what’s in my wardrobe. (I have it on my phone and having easy access has saved me from some poor purchase decisions.) I’m curious about what is your process to collecting and curating the clothing photos into the 4×4 grid. Is there a particular app or software you use? I’ve browsed the blog and haven’t found a post that describes exactly how you curate the pictures that you do. I’m a very visually centered person and I believe doing a few grids on my wardrobe would really help me to see the “gaps” I need to fill. I’d be fascinated to learn more.
Regards,
Theresa
I use PowerPoint to assemble the images, and the Snipping Tool to grab things from the Internet. Easy!
hugs,
Janice