We’re talking KNITS! Specifically doing it up SWEATER DRESS STYLE! Whoop! They’re slinky, they’re cozy, they’re sweet – but not at all demure. This specific combo, the sweater dress over a turtleneck, was a fixture in my childhood. All of the Moms and Teachers wore sweater dresses like this, with chunky gold jewelry and pumps. Feathered bangs and pantyhose. They were the people you knew you could trust, and who you also didn’t want to cross. They could cut the crust off your sandwich just as easily as taking away your television privileges, and there was comfort in that.
I’m starting to think that nostalgia plays a lot more into my love of fashion than I ever realized. Every other outfit I put together nowadays has an element of yore about it. Perhaps it speaks more to our tendency as humans to look backwards in times of uncertainty than it does to my particular predilection for 90s vintage – but in any case, nostalgia plays a big role in today’s OOTD.
A little high-low combo went into this: a Target turtleneck I got on clearance under a Missoni sweater dress. The dress itself is cut beautifully, although very wide: so a belt did the trick for tightening up the silhouette. Practical, flattering, and cozy for a (distanced) day with a friend and errands, or beebopping around town. Whats more, a sweater dress has a hint of spice to it – but it’s place on fashion’s throne of cozy means you can plead plausible deniability to any of the more piquant effects generated by a clingy knit.
I enjoyed the color palette with this one: corals and teals (I suppose that’s trademark Missoni, no?). With styling nowadays, people are starting to layer on different iterations of the same hues, and the result is a rich, multidimensional mood more than a typical “punch of color” (what an overused term, ugh). Layering shades of coral on coral, or teal on teal, or of whatever color you’re going for is a situation where the phrase the whole is more than the sum of the parts. Here, the shades of coral, balanced with teal and green hues, create light-infused oceanic textures that I find at once captivating and soothing.
For me, that’s a win: nowadays, fashion is an exercise in sanity, in creativity, in grounding yourself in the past and present, in willing how you want to feel into being.
love,
Stig
Photos by my beautiful friend Kim Wong.
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