A walk on the old side and a start on my capsule wardrobe

Having the Teenage Mutant Ninja at home (he´s actually sleeping on my living-room floor on a mattress) not only improves my diet and exercise habits, I also am forced to be a little bit social…

Today, Sunday we decided to take the bus down to the Old Town (Gamla Stan) to watch the tourists and also have a look in the Science Fiction Book Store.

Die schönen blauen…

You remember my color palette?

Färgkarta

Here it is. As I´m taking the next step towards planning my wardrobe according to the vivienne-files I´m checking out my wardrobe as it is today. I´m not going to throw anything out right away, if I like it and its in line with the scheme – it´s staying. That goes for a lot of my dresses, and even a few dresses that are outside the box. Simply, I will not have to buy any new dresses for a while!

Colour me purple

So I have been spending an obscene amount of time on this site the viviennefiles, checking out colors and starting from scratch with a capsule wardrobe.

I am not much of a basic dresser so when I get down to planning a wardrobe it strikes me as pretty boring, but practical of course, to have a wardrobe filled with crew necked t-shirts and basic trousers. Not me at all.

But then I saw this page in the American Issue of InStyle (March 2017)

 

And realized that I can stick with my color-scheme without being boring.

Because my color-scheme is a no-brainer. BLACK, NAVY, all kinds of striking blues and a little bit of reds (maybe pink?) and a splash of purple. And some clear white to wash all that down:) Click and you´ll see (I hope, I have tried to find a way to make a pic of this but not succeeded).

Färgkarta

Style gurus

Whenever I am trying to find inspiration for my style I google, and like everyone else I also check out pinterest. But when it comes to style for women 50+, I have to say there isn´t much out there. At least not if you are a curvy lady, like myself. The curvy girls seem to loose their confidence once they hit the big Day. I am desperately looking for a style guru.

Balancing things out

At this moment in my life I´m trying to find a balance between work and free time, being a mom and letting go and getting to grips with being single and on my own for the first time in sooooo many years.

Whenever I´m thinking of changing

my style-concept, like right now when I´m sort of introducing boho-elements into my wardrobe (and JEANS!!!) something happens to make me think again.

Last night I met up with a few ladies I have never met before to participate in a tv-recording of a game-show programme. Really nice, and its always interesting to meet new people, right?

I had decided to take a break from Boho, and went with a vintage-themed retrogress from Boden, partly because the gameshow featured antiques. And I got so many nice comments and questions about my dress and the style, that it again made me think about why I prefer that style, why people usually react to it in a positive way and why it is so hard to follow one´s own heart in fashion.

The ladies all loved the dress, and we discussed the fact that the very popular and trendy fashion today isn´t for everyone and not always flattering for an older figure with its clean, boxy lines. I can love that, but it´s not for me, I would need something resembling a sack to dress like that because my shoulders and my bum are the same, and my waist is tiny in comparison.

I love the hippie-style for summer, but I have to admit a lot of the dresses are not figure flattering, although beautiful, comfy and relaxed. I will need to find ways to make that work for my figure.

But look at this, isn´t it just beautiful?

http://agenciesturquoise.nordicshops.com/index.html?submenu_id=-1

 

 

 

 

 

Clean-up spring wardrobe

Part of my wardrobe – very organized and neat!

 

So it´s that time of the year when I need to clean up my wardrobe, which I do on a regular basis twice a year.

Most times I´ve just pulled out all my stuff and then promptly gone through it and

1.put everything back that I love and use

2. put everything that I hate, am bored with etc in a pile for throwing away/selling

and

3. ended up with a huge pile of maybes that I have to try on, maybe fix (hem,zipper etc) or just save because I love it too much.

This year I am doing a few things differently. I am re-assessing my style which have been more or less vintage inspired for 7 years now, and thinking about ways to change that a little bit. I still love my retro clothes but I don´t want to look like a costume drama when I walk down the street…

Country roads, take me home…. day 2

So you´ve been waiting for a long time for day 2 of my roadtrip, and here it comes! I hope you notice I brought a long a huge wardrobe, to be able to take nice photos of my dresses in perfect situations:)

The first night we stayed over in Nora, a pretty little market Town, most famous for being the setting of a long row of cosy detective stories written in the 50´s and 60´s by Maria Lang, whose real name was Dagmar Lange. She originated from Nora and set a lot of her books in this Environment, but simply changed the name to Skoga (skog=Wood in Swedish). Very aptly named as the place is surrounded by Woods, and one huge lake…

We stayed in a nice smaller hotel and tried to find something interesting to eat, which was quite hard even though we walked around the whole Place looking at menus. In the end we gave up and had a schnitzel.

The second day we decided to tour the Three lakes that surround Nora, because we decided to stay in a manor house for our second night.

But the road there took us around Three beautiful lakes and real countryside, scattered with junk sales and antique shops. This truly seems to be the thing right now for keeping the countryside alive! We found a junk sale everywhere we went, but it was damn hard to find a proper café!

TOM (the Old Man) isn´t as keen as me on junk sales, but he did agree to one visit:)

I Think you can guess why? It was filled with wonderful junk, and had several shelves with old electronic stuff…

As for me, I had a hard time choosing, but ended up with a Little bric bracincluding some old buttons and flowers and lace that I hope will come in handy when I do my DIY Projects this autumn.

I did have a hard time saying goodbye to this hat though…

And then we were on our way again, heading straight for the manor house hotel…

 

I´m not vain, I just think everyone is looking at me

Well, last weekend TOM (The Old Man, but you should know that by now) persuaded me to go on a little excursion to Norrtälje, a small hamlet just north of Stockholm. The reason for this was The American Motor Car Show.

I´m not that into cars, to be honest, but he has very graciously and with no complaints, followed me on a few vintage fairs recently and since shopping is NOT his favourite pastime it was time to give back.

I look like shit obviously, so you can´t say that I´m vain when I show you these pics here on the Internet. I spent almost an hour on my hair, doing big nice curls. But the minute I walked around the show-area in the 30 C -heat, all sweaty and as you see windy at times, my hair decided to give up. In the end I just put it up in a ponytail.

The dress is Trashy Diva, the bolero is an oldie from Monsoon and the bag is vintage.
If you want to look at more American cars please head over to http://www.anderslutz.se/?p=3837

Pinup with a middleaged lady

Two months ago I visited the Burlesque Fair 7.0 wich is a regular twice a year-event in Stockholm. Last year I had a small stall and sold of some of my reproductiondresses and even some vintage-stuff, and I was really impressed with the relaxed and friendly atmosphere at the fair.

Between the shopping in the different stalls this fair also boasts of performances by up-and-coming burlesque artists, pinup photography and workshops of different kinds. I have to admit I am a girl of the 70´s and I still find it pretty embaressing to see young women take off their clothes in public, but some of the more burlesquey numbers are very artistic and fun to watch.

This year I decided to leave the Selling to others and take a plunge into the Deep unknown, so I booked a pin-up photography shoot! Doing a shoot in a fair (albeit in a special more private room) was definitely testing my limits but I had loads of fun. The photographer Katja Elmén was really good at making me relax and I Think the photos turned out pretty good for a curvaceous 56 year old:)