Ann’s Fashion Fortunes

By Ann Rosenquist Fee

DEAR ANN: How can I embrace spring/summer fashion trends without being a mindless puppet with no signature style of my own? DEAR READER: You’re in luck because never in the history of caring about style has there been a season in which the trends are so closely tied to actual for-real individuality.

Specifically I’m referring to what Harper’s Bazaar (February 2022) called “fashion’s current preoccupation with the body,” which sounds goofily redundant until you think about “the body,” i.e. the lines and shapes and angles of our actual bodies, as different from “old ideas about who gets to wear what.”

Bazaar notes that, compared to the usual forces driving a style wave, this one “… seems to be driven less by designers reasserting old codes of sexiness and what body type is deemed ideal or desirable,” and more by “a greater cultural shift in how we relate to those ideas in a post#MeToo, post-COVID-19, postgender world.”

How this translates to reallife clothes-wearing this spring and summer is that whatever combination of revealing-vs.coverage makes you feel strongest and most ready and most like yourself, that’s what’s in style.

Honestly. There’s no brandname silhouette reigning over it, no single dominating aesthetic you’re supposed to know about more than you know your own mind. Which is jarringly exciting if it’s true, and I say we test it.

Quoting Harper’s Bazaar quoting designer Bryn Taubensee, “… everyone feels confident in a different type of clothing: covered, naked, formal, casual, chaotic … a wide variety of looks that could all be considered sexy depending on Who would you be if everything you clutched walking into a fancy event was the same stuff as what you’d clutched to get there? (Foreground: Dinghy bag. Background: All the bags needed to get there.)

your personal definition of what that means.”

Get clear on what makes you feel confident, let yourself be drawn to that as the foundation of your spring/summer wardrobe, and you’ll be spot-on with the trendiest of trends.

DEAR ANN: Is there a word for the outfit you want people to see you wearing once you’ve arrived at some fancy place versus all the stuff you’re wearing just to get there?

I’m thinking about coats and boots, of course, but also the big bag full of everything you might need which you bring along but then leave in the car versus the smaller bag you bring into the event to hold nothing but your phone and some gum and some lip gloss and some tissues?

I am a list maker, and so when I’m packing lists for a trip, I like to keep these two things separate. It would be easier if I knew the term. Thank you. DEAR READER: Why not your car key as well in that tiny dinghy bag?

Do you know why that’s not on your list of essentials that come into the event with you? Because your husband has the key.

Your man-husband has the key in his heteronormative man pocket. I point this out not to devalue your perspective as a straight, married, purse-clutching woman, but to point out that it’s a very specific thing.

I think you might be assuming it’s just the way things are for people in general, which is not true, but you kind of have to step outside yourself to see it.

Try: Ask yourself who you’d need to be, coming from where and doing what, if everything you wore and carried on your person walking into a significant event was the exact same as everything you’d worn and carried while getting there.

Would you live in a palace, where your dressing room and your events take place in the same building? Or would your events take place in wilderness, which is also your home?

Either way, you can see how the “big bag/little purse, outer outfit/real outfit” demographic is a subset smaller than you realized.

It’s very possible there is no terminology to differentiate “outfit we’re really wearing vs. the one we want people to see” because anybody who’s tried to define it thus far has quickly realized the problems inherent in the question and fashioned themselves a solution comprised of deliberate new choices in fashion and life.

Whatever you figure out, do report back, because there are few things in our style community more exciting than a major life overhaul that can be traced (as they often are) to a moment of epiphany about a certain lip color or moisturizing routine or hairstyle rut or or purse/bag combo or some other thing just not working anymore.

Good luck. Pursuit of your truth looks super cute on you.

Got a question? Submit it at annrosenquistfee.com (click on Ann’s Fashion Fortunes). Ann Rosenquist Fee is executive director of the Arts Center of Saint Peter and host of Live from the Arts Center, a music and interview show Thursdays 1-2 p.m. on KMSU 89.7FM.

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