Hi all

I haven’t posted lately. Taking a little break. But I’m back now reporting to you from the frontlines of summer.

It’s been a wet and cooler than usual summer in my part of the world. But with full dams, no bushfires, and no lockdowns, I’m not complaining.

Summer is my most challenging style season. I like summer from a lifestyle perspective (it is mango season after all), but not so much from a style perspective. Heat and humidity are the enemy of all the things I like best in fashion (boots, cosy knits and jackets). My favourite colours become almost impossible to find. And traditional “summer colours” look and feel terrible on me. Plus I like a moody look, which is challenging in summer.

My particular problem is summer casual wear. In summers past I have tried everything that seems to work for other people - casual summer dresses, white jeans, culottes, denim skirts, denim jackets, cropped pants, linen. All fails for me. It’s frustrating and wasteful.

As a result, I feel like my summer casual wardrobe is half baked (pun intended) and kind of neglected. Not helped by having worked in an office for years. If you like to dress up, you focus resources on office and “dress up” wear. But I’ve been WFH for 2 years now, and it’s time to change that.

So last summer I committed to a strategy to get my casual wardrobe into shape over the next few summers. It was carefully planned. It would take too long to explain my thoughts here, but basically I’m going with a capsule approach. I will focus on building one capsule per summer.

I started with a midi skirt capsule. These outfits are from that capsule. I built the capsule around my existing collection of midi skirts, many of which are trans seasonal. The new items are the tops. I shopped carefully for tops that would dress down my skirts for casual wear and that would suit them (and me) in terms of shape, colour and fabrication. I ended up buying several high neck cotton tank tops, a shirred tank top and a couple of cropped boxy tees.

The colour palettes shown here were also part of my strategy. I like variety but I am determined to get more wear out of my clothes. So I really focused over the summer on working the remix. I used the colour palettes for inspiration.

And...it went well! I’m kind of astonished.

Quite a few photos here, but I wanted to give you an idea of how everything mixed and matched. To my eye anyway. I liked some of the outfits I came up with better than others but generally they felt true to my style, casual, comfortable and appropriate for my activities. And I wore the heck out of my clothes, as Angie would say. Which was very satisfying!

I’m going to continue with this approach next summer. I think I’ll do a shorts and skorts capsule next. I need to do something about shorts!

Your thoughts welcome.