accessories Archives

Looking for a Wardrobe Spark? Pantone New York Fashion Week Spring 2025 colors

September 23, 2024

Ah, one of my favorite projects! "New" colors are always fun...

I feel like the Pantone people had a meeting at which they decided that their work needed to be more "green," and that someone misunderstood the assignment. Lots of shades of green in this list!

But let's start with Orangeade, which I kind of interpreted in a more rust direction, for autumn:

I like this warm light brown, but I might have tried harder to give it a more appealing name than Bran...

I don't know why you'd take a nice shade of light camel and give it a slightly greenish cast.... OH WAIT, this is the green season...

I wish I could think of any legitimate reason for me to own this next scarf, but it would be fiction! If ... View the Post

Can I Wear Toast Brown With My Current Clothes?

August 19, 2024

Starting very early last Friday morning, I was asked repeatedly if the "toast brown" cashmere sweater in this post could be worn with neutrals other than black...

This is the post, just to make it easy for you to see it again!

So I thought that I would pull together a little "French 5-Piece Wardrobe" in that lovely brown/taupe. It's a great color - sort of warm, but not yellowish - at least on my computer screen!

Maybe you weren't convinced that this colors goes with black, so I will show it again...

Honestly, if I didn't already have both a brown cardigan and TWO brown crewneck sweaters, I'd buy this one... I love the way these colors look together!

I think it's logical, and maybe obvious, ... View the Post

Do You Love Larkspur? Are You Passionate About Periwinkle?

June 28, 2024

OMG, tomorrow is my birthday! I will be 64... although I feel like I'm somewhere at the crossroads of 21 and 90. My brain is young, my knees are past retirement age!

What do I want for my birthday? For you to recommend The Vivienne Files to anyone who might enjoy our community, and my ideas...

Speaking of community - many of you - MANY OF YOU - really love the color "Larkspur" offered by L.L.Bean. They currently have THIRTY-THREE items available, so it's pretty easy to find something you can wear frequently. That said, many of these things are marked down, and therefore might just rush into retail oblivion...

I assembled this French 5-Piece Wardrobe in Larkspur to help me focus on how this color might be ... View the Post

Some Wardrobe Update Ideas – Pantone London Autumn/Winter 2024/25 Fashion Week Colors

June 26, 2024

Some of us are diligently wearing our well-crafted wardrobes regularly, but still have... an itch? a yearning? for just a little bit of an update. Something fresh (for us). A bit of a wake-up call for our usual outfits...

And Pantone delivers, with ten colors that they isolated from what they observed at the London winter fashion week. Does this mean that these colors will be readily available or easy to find? Heck no! But they do give us ideas, and ideas are where all beautifully-dressed women start!

Oddly, there is NO shade of pink here.

Please note that I really don't think anybody will wear ALL five items in these images at one time. I'm not sure that you should buy all five, unless you've got a serious ... View the Post

Chic Sightings: Modest Dresses and Nude Accessories

May 29, 2924

Last week I went for another cortisone shot in my wrist, as well as the ten millionth re-fit of my arm brace - heavy lifting is catching up with my wee bird-like wrists!

But the thing I remember most from the entire adventure is a group of people I saw walking OUT of the office building as I was walking in...

Maybe 30 or 40 of them, equally split between men and women. The men were all wearing suits or blazers and trousers, and ALL of them were wearing ties. That, in and of itself, might have caused me to swoon.

BUT THE WOMEN!

All were wearing either:

(a) a skirted suit,

(b) a dress and jacket, or

Please, of course, understand ... View the Post

How do Accent Colors Work? Trying 9 Colors with Charcoal Grey and with Olive

April 26, 2024

Now that we've taken a good hard look at the Pantone New York Fashion Week colors for Autumn/Winter 2024/25, we still have to decide if any of these colors actually look good with the majority of clothing in our wardrobes. No accent is useful if it looks icky with all of your best pants, sweater and jackets...

I wanted to look at some somewhat different neutrals than I usually use - no black, navy, beige or white this time! Instead, I'm thinking of Autumn and Winter, and I grabbed us two simples outfits, in charcoal grey and in olive green:

From here, it's pretty simple - I'm going to show again the colors from Wednesday, and then show our neutral outfits accessorized with each of the colors.

Some colors ... View the Post

Need a Fresh Accent Idea? Pantone New York Fashion Week 2024/25 colors

April 24, 2024

These are "new" colors for Autumn/Winter upcoming - maybe we can get a head start on having these in our wardrobes?

I'm very curious to know which of these you like and dislike... As always, I have a certain fondness for all of them - after spending hours looking for things in these colors, if I didn't love them, I would throw my computer from our very high windows!

Let's go!

First up - I would almost certainly wear this dress, and I would certainly have Skimmies under it!

This next dress looks MUCH better on a human being than it does like this - when the top part of the dress is "filled out" by a human torso, it balances the skirt much better!

yes, these earrings are very expensive, but ... View the Post

Four Neutrals x Three Accent Colors – Which Ones “Work”?

April 15, 2024

So once you've studied the Pantone Colors from London Fashion Week, (found here and here), you have to decide if you like the colors, if you would be flattered by wearing any of them, and how they might look with the neutral clothes you normally wear.

I can't answer the first two questions for you - obviously - but I can give you some visuals to help you picture how the accent colors might work with your existing wardrobe...

I've assembled four "core wardrobes" in white, black, beige and navy, in varying degrees of dressiness. The level of dressiness is going to be more important than I had realized - you'll see what I mean.

Here are the four Wardrobe Cores:

The black core is pretty casual:

The beige ... View the Post

Looking for a New Accent Color? Part 2 – Pantone London Fashion Week Spring 2024

April 12, 2024

It's always interesting to me how difficult it is to find some of these colors! One would imagine that a reasonable range of ALL colors should be available, given the literally hundreds of thousands of products I see...

Let's jump in and evaluate what I DID find!

The next color on Pantone's list was the beautiful Sun Orange... It wasn't terribly hard to find things, except a scarf that was mostly orange. So I decided that I would share with you this really pretty, bright, versatile and cheery scarf from Echo, which includes the orange and a bunch of other summery colors:

don't you like the way that the pattern of the earrings echoes the pattern of the headband?

They call it Fiesta, but I called it coral. ... View the Post

Looking for a New Accent Color? Part 1 – Pantone London Fashion Week Spring 2024

April 10, 2024

"New" Colors! Or at least we can say "colors that have been identified as being influential for this spring..."

I'm going to confess right now - I'm in a complete muddle about WHICH of the many Pantone seasons I have and have not covered, and further, I'm not 100% sure that this is the most recent! Neither of these facts is really a big deal, when you get right down to it; the big thing to learn from posts like this is to give yourself some room and some time to consider if a new color in your wardrobe might be fun.

Or might be super-useful.

Or might make you happy. Happy is really the bottom line for getting dressed...

Let's jump in with 5 of the 10 colors from London Fashion Week...

This first color? As ... View the Post

Do You Love Blue? Adding Accessories to a Start with Art Wardrobe – Blue on White, White on Blue by Paolo Quaresima

January 24, 2024

You thought that I forgot! Yes, I can get pretty immersed in those Echo 100 scarves, but there's no way I was going to miss revisiting this painting:

This heroine is going to look at each of her "wardrobe clusters" one at a time, and make certain that she has the accessories that she wants for each cluster...

She's already got her shoes chosen - that's a lot of the thinking out of the way already!

First up, her warmest cluster. There are at least four outfits possible here, if she layers her navy shirt under her navy sweater... If you're summering in a place where evenings can turn cool, this could happen!

And for what it's worth, we have cool summer days in Chicago! The sellers of souvenir ... View the Post

Want to Focus on Accessories? Start with a Scarf – Betty Soldi scarf by Echo

January 19, 2024

Wow. Just plain wow...

Not many colors, but who NEEDS colors when you have this?

I'm sure your not amazed to learn that matching the sepia tone of the image is impossible to find in clothing! But let's think for a moment... if this was a photograph, you wouldn't try to match the color of the frame to the photo, right? So you don't need to match the main color of a scarf - think of it as your outfit serving as the background or frame for the scarf!

This heroine is a BIG fan of accessories that channel her inner Elizabeth I.... so her clothes are simple and classic:

Wearing dress pants, and then packing a skirt and jeans, gives you a wide range of "dressiness" possibilities:

I'm pretty certain that our heroine ... View the Post