Most of the colors I'm drawn to lately are neutrals. Even my non-pastel pieces tend toward cool, muted hues that seem conflicted as to what color they really are. As I mentioned yesterday even for my spring colors, I'm seeking a particular strong mauve that wavers on the dusky balance between pink and purple. For this chilly vision of summer I'm yearning for those indeterminate, quiet sea colors: sleepy grey knit, variegated sandy fur, moody blue-greens and green-blues, all offset by a perfect, simple, self-contained whiteness like the foam from the waves that strands itself upon the shore.
This lookbook is a little more reasonable than my spring one, and in fact that white dress and top blue dress were ones I ordered (I digitally altered that bottom dress to be the color of one I already own), as well as those sandals which you probably recognize as a repeat. I have my own slouchy grey cardigan, though I haven't yet rigged up any buttons for it, though I only wish that I had a snuggly faux fur capelet for tucking my arms up into against brisk ocean beezes! (Seriously... if you need gift ideas...;).) I had a beautiful seagull necklace too, a gift from my boyfriend, but the chain wound up breaking and the pendant getting lost. I still feel awful about that.
My favorite parts of summer are the stillnesses and the easy sounds you don't get to hear any other times of the year-- cicada hum, wave sigh, the way the brilliant chorus of birdsong cues from the morning sun but tapers off into heat-exhausted extempore by noon; I love frog serenades during indigo nights huddled around molten orange bonfires and the way your front is burning and your back icy against the dark. I love the way the air crawls up nervously against one's skin at the coppery scent of storm clouds on the horizon. I love grass and ceder fences bleached pale gold and silver in the sun. I love the dusty, sometimes salty, sometimes yeasty smell of the bone-colored haze of midsummer from dried everything sticking to the sweaty underbelly of the panting sky. Everything about summer is perfect. I even love jumping into cold showers two or three times a day in non-air-conditioned dorms and dealing with the wacked light that results from desperately shading the windows at day and bursting them open at night to try and manage the crushing humidity. I would rather be hot, feasting sweatily naked on fresh-picked blueberries with dumplings, than cold and huddled around the oven any day.
And those are all the things bouncing around my head for this summer "lookbook". As it's still pretty darn cold around here in real life, I can't deny that there's a definite iciness about the look, though. It's, in any case, a very northern New England coastal palate... salt-bleached wooden houses by a grumpy green sea and all that. I went to Maine a number of times this past summer, where even in mid-August at my boyfriend's house it was a downright cool (though hazy) 75*. In Bar Harbor it was so foggy that you couldn't even see the other sidewalk while walking down the road; the sky and sea and misty cobblestones all blended into each other. The text on the picture ties all these ideas together-- it's an Anglo-Saxon poem now called "The Wanderer". The wolfish seacolors (just as bright shiny things like silver were called "black" in Anglo-Saxon, so was the ocean "yellow"), the bitter almost romanticizing of a very sober wanness, the hardness and sharpness of every pretty phrase....You can read it in translation here (Tolkien fans read the footnote!) and hear it read by my professor here.
....He thinks in his mind
that he embraces and kisses his lord,
and on his knees lays
his hands and his head....
Then the friendless man wakes up again,
He sees before him
fallow waves,
only seabirds bathing,
preening their feathers.
Frost and snow fall,
mixed with hail....
Beautifully, bravely hopeless... ahhhh that Northern Courage. Hurts so good.
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