IT'S A RED 4TH!

 

HAPPY 4TH OF JULY EVERYONE! In more ways than one it has been a red 4th. It's hot, half the country's on fire, and politics are heated. So why not celebrate the holiday with some red? And isn't it nice to have Desirae on here again? She's wearing an absolutely lovely ruffled dress she bought from H&M a couple of seasons ago with a pair of Steve Madden shoes we seem to share a lot (that's what sisters are for, right?). The belt is seriously amazing from Forever 21 (quite the steal compared with this one from Neiman's). Actually, now that we think of it, now is a good time to talk about bow belts. Just take one look here, here and here and you'll see what we're getting at. The bow belt was seen all over EVERYTHING to do with Burberry Prorsum for fall. So you know what we're thinking of doing if we can't find a good one? This. And you know how we'll pair it? Right at the top of skirts and belting our coats like so (probably not in such a  bright color, but maybe in a great brown). We can't wait!

(CAUTION: this fashion accessory could go very badly, very fast. Don't forget to keep it classy by staying in classy colors and sizes!)

FALL COUTURE WEEK - Giambattista Valli

Goodness gracious! We just go from one fashion season to another! Well, it's couture week in Paris right now, so we're finally seeing the Fall couture lines. Again, Giambattista Valli showed a beautiful line, and there were a few things that stood out to us. One, try to ignore the butterfly mouths (it's supposed to be all garden-esque, as vogue noted "real butterfly specimens kissed their veiled lips," but all we see is the freaky image from the cover of Silence of the Lambs). We were wondering why we kept viewing this collection in a kind of horror.
       OK so besides this, one thing we keep showing you is how much the peplum has taken over the fall runways. Here it's very exaggerated. But another thing we keep seeing is the enhanced hip silhouette. We're not quite sure if this is going to actually take off in real life, we kind of doubt it will, but still, we keep seeing it. Vogue referred to it seen on the Marc Jacobs Fall runway as "exaggerated bell-shaped skirts," style.com took it a step further and called it the "padded hip" and to "Prepare ourselves." We saw it all over the Chanel resort line recently, which has been taken onto the red carpet by Emma Stone and Diane Kruger (see below). But Michaela Stephens might have summed it up best with her comment on the post below: "Nice dress, but I can't help but wonder just what is in it that makes the hips look so weird." Well Michaela there's definitely boning of some sort in there and we can't help but wonder what will become of it. We'll keep you guys updated if we keep seeing it. It's definitely interesting, because do you guys realize that if this were to take off, we wouldn't have seen this silhouette since Marie Antoinette's day? That's kinda crazy to think. We've seen the 20's, 30's, 40's, 50's, 60's, 70's and 80's recreated on the runway, but we haven't seen 1770's :). But regardless, some of these looks are very beautiful (eh hem, not incredibly original since some look a lot like this), but still beautiful.

WOMEN'S MOTORCYCLE JACKET AND CHIFFON

OK, so we gave you the skinny on leather the other day and its prevalence through the fall runways. Although we're not going hard core with leather here (like was seen by many of the designers) we decided to go more Zara-ish and give you the contrast of hard and soft. We must admit that this dress has been sitting in our "stage clothes" closet for years. It definitely needed to be resurrected since it's such a fun dress to wear - feeling so flowy and warm weather-ish. But it's very tempting for many of us to pair something like this with a cardigan or even by itself (which is totally fine when you want a more formal look), but it goes back to what we were talking about on the Valentino post. Those things would make this look feel pretty dressy (I mean, c'mon, we did initially buy this dress for stage). So here we've shown you kinda how to take a dressy look down to a casual one... it's all in what you pair it with. For instance we wore this out one weekday night to a tulip festival in spring and felt totally comfortable. So the moral is, if you live by the ocean or at a high altitude right now, or come late summer when the night air starts to chill, why not pull on a more casual jacket over your dressier dresses?

EMMA STONE IN CHANEL RESORT

So Emma Stone has just been knocking all looks out of the park for her Spiderman premieres, that we had to feature her again. They just had the L.A. Premiere 2 nights ago and she again looked awesome (and oh so modest!). Here she is in a Chanel Resort 2013 dress (we saw Diane Kruger in a similar dress at Cannes here). And we have to admit those Christian Louboutin shoes are really quite cool. It's like Cinderella's glass slipper on rockstar steroids. LOVE! We think she may be coming to an end of the premieres with the release of the movie on Tuesday (July 3), so crazy enough, we'll be sad not to see her stylish red carpet images pop up anymore!

CAROLINE SIEBER INSPIRED

This outfit was definitely inspired by Caroline Sieber at Paris Fashion week this past February. You've already seen this pink dress before, but I was excited to use it as a skirt in this look. I wished my sweater was a bit longer and navy but alas, you can't have everything you want! And I'm completely in love with these sunglasses as of late. I was in a jam down in Florida and finally couldn't stand the glare anymore sans sunglasses and stopped in at Riteaid. These little babies were waiting for me to find them! Anyway the moral of the story in this look is to start trying to incorporate basic sweaters over our springy dresses.   

MOTORCYCLE JACKETS

These looks are really just to prepare you for a look we have coming on Monday. You know how much we love our motorcycle jackets. And you know what's so nice about them? Is that they're still going strong through fall. Leather was all over the fall runway (in everything from blazers to skirts...just check this out...let's just say that we're not going to be putting the jackets away any time soon.). It is definitely an edgy season with so much texture thrown in. Here are a couple of looks from Zara, which we think may be starting to prepare us for the roughness of fall. These are looks taken from their Lookbook for June. Pay close attention to the top look...the pairing of rough and sweet (which we've talked about before here), because our look utilizes these elements as well. Thus far we'd say a jacket like this is a pretty cool purchase these days....

(p.s.....if you want some great wide-fitting trousers kinda like these, than you should definitely check out Zara's amazing sale right now on these. We actually think they're better than Melody's!)