Tag Archives: Insufferable Dastard

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

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The Ayoun dress and clutch from Baiastice for the July round of Collabor88 is a delicately feminine little frock with a dropped blouson top and a gently gathered flounce skirt. With spaghetti straps and a deep cleavage, it bares a lot for the summer sun. It comes in ten solids and five prints. What is so exciting is that the five prints are all different, not just recolors.It seems the essence of summer. The lovely clutch purse has a subtle nod to summer with the fabric rose on the flap. 

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.

My mother wanted to be an English teacher when she was growing up. Many of her older siblings went to college, but when she was still a child, my grandfather’s bank manager ran off with all the money in his bank. This was before FDIC, so people could have lost everything. Instead, my grandfather sold his mill, electric company, his farm and his house and made all the depositors whole even though he was not obligated to do so since it was a corporation. This left him impoverished and having to start over from scratch in his late sixties. He began again as a dairy farmer on contract to a local creamery, paying $1.00 per acre, but obligated to sell his produce only to that creamery for 30 years, a northern form of share-cropping.  This ended any chance my mom had of going to college.

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Sweeter Than Honey

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What is sweeter than honey? How about a dress that can be worn 248,832 different ways. The Nautica dress from Miel (Honey by any other name would taste as sweet.) There are 12 colors (n) and 5 options (r), order is important and colors can be used more than once. You can test it yourself. You can even type in the colors and generate a list of all the combinations.  However the specifics really don’t matter, do they, with this deliciously casual dress with all the right details from the gorgeous front pleat to the rope shoulder straps.

Nauticaa's Color Change Hud

Nauticaa’s Color Change Hud

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Summer

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Sissy did it again! I just love her new series of summer gowns. Form-fitting bodices and flowing skirts in an array of summer colors as well as prints and ombre’s, her new Arya gown will leave you standing in front of the display struggling to choose just five, let alone one.

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With a lightweight summer-weight silk and a barely there bodice showing off your shoulders, it is the perfect summer formal for all your events. The pretty nails come courtesy of FLAIR’s fabulous nail appliers for Slink hands.

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Circumnavigation

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This simple little dress from Drift is a perfect summer dress, loose-fitting and casual. It comes with a HUD so you can choose all the colors. In fact, it comes with two textures, a cotton knit and this lovely satin and each texture has its own little hud full of color. However, I thought I would wear it with some leggings because it was a little breezy and I was afraid the wind would catch it and cause an indiscretion. The Lydia Slingbacks that Ingenue did for Collabor88 are as perfect as can be.

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The bolt leggings from MichaMi sure look great with it. I had to go to XS to get it to fit under the dress, but that okay since the dress covers the skinny butt. Well, not completely. When I walked, the dress and leggings intersected from behind, so moving was more of a circumnavigation so that I faced forward.

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She who dies with the most shoes wins.

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Vero Moderno Kaleidoscope V-Neck Dress

Our virtual extremities have gone through some extreme changes in recent years. Shoemakers responded to the deficiencies of the avatar mesh by creating sculpted feet with shoes that we could match to our skins. The tinting methods designers employed were varied and highly idiosyncratic and tinting a pair of shoes to match could take anywhere from 30 seconds to 30 minutes, depending on our skill and the sophistication of the HUD interface. This year, with mesh rigged to fit perfectly, a few designers have taken steps to ease our pain and make our desperate clicking about in color selection boxes and frantic sliding of RGB numbers a thing of the past. Because the path of innovation is never straight, two different routes were chosen, but whichever one you take, you end up with gorgeous shoes and skin that matches.

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In exploring the pros and cons of these two paths, I am going to look at Gos shoes and SLink Bare Feet with add-on shoes from another vendor. However, N-Core is also following the same path as Gos and I am sure some other shoe-makers will as well. The thing is, these are fundamentally different approaches to how to match the foot to your skins. Gospel Voom of Gos has chosen to provide the foot and shoes as one piece, the traditional way. His innovation is creating a skin color database and a scripted hud that accesses that data and applies it directly to the foot. Siddean Munro of Slink has taken another road, creating a foot that can be tinted and a free developer’s kit for skinners to customize for their skins and allowing shoemakers to use to make their own shoes to her form.

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I only have eyes for you

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A couple weeks ago, I checked out the Billboard Jazz charts and discovered the new-to-me vocalist Cecile McLorin Salvant and fell instantly in love. I hope I can persuade you to take a listen. She reminds me of Billie Holliday, more so than any other jazz singer. I watched her performance of the old standard I Only Have Eyes For You – with her unique interpretation. I hope you check her out on iTunes or YouTube. You won’t be disappointed.

This top from Goucci makes me feel very jazzy all by itself. It has a classic Chanel-inspired shape and aesthetic. Everyone will have eyes only for you if you wear it. It comes in red, blue, yellow and black. I paired with some black and white striped pants from Coco that are truly hot jazz in fabric.
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Pink

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Countdown has a new cocktail dress with a snug strapless snakeskin bodice and a frothy, sheer full skirt. It is the perfect marriage of modern and traditional, hard and soft. I decided to tip the scales a bit adding a short, cropped white leather jacket from Coco.  Continue reading

Tangerine

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Tangerine, she is all they claim
With her eyes of night and lips as bright as flame
Tangerine, when she dances by, senoritas stare and caballeros sigh
And I’ve seen toasts to Tangerine
Raised in every bar across the Argentine
Yes, she has them all on the run, but her heart belongs to just one
Her heart belongs to Tangerine
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Leather and Lace

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Leather and lace probably would have become a fashion cliche without Stevie Nicks, but she certainly helped it along. Has there been a season of Project Runway without some leather and lace walking down the runway, usually with flowing tulle. Well, it does not have to be a cliche as you can see in this very modern minimalist one button jacket with the small lace punctuation for R2 for Collabor88 and these great Napa leather pants from NYU for faMESHed.

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Modern sensibilities continue with the jackets square cut open back. This is as angular as the front is curved. This is a jacket that is thoroughly modern with its few touches of romanticism nearly invisible, as in the black on black brocade sleeves. It is still feminine, but strong and modern. It looks forward, not back and there is not a sentimental stitch in its fabric. You can find it at Collabor88 in an array of bright colors as well as this black and white with a coordinating miniskirt. I opted to pair it with the NYU leather pants to change it up and drop any possibility of it bursting into song “you give me your leather…Take from me my lace.”

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