december's dress

I mentioned a few posts back that my New Years fashion resolution is to only buy one item per month. The main reasons for this are that I have enough clothes to cover most occasions, but I still love getting new dresses (or whatever). With my travelling lifestyle, clothes are basically the only things I can practically collect, and even with them I'm severely limited as to space/weight, so they may as well be items I love (and then I better wear them). Anyway, if I were to apply my New Years resolution retro-actively, this would be December's dress.





I, (and Albert) love the easy, flattering shape and the bow, but possibly my favourite detail are the three layers of seams along the bottom. It reminds me how dresses used to be made longer and hemmed, then let out as children grew so as to maintain a decent length. Anyway; love. I wore this dress all weekend; to lunch with Albert's grandparents, for two empanada breakfasts in a row, to a restaurant, to a nightclub, to the Sant Antoni Sunday morning book market, for a walk in Raval. I have a more urban lifestyle than the average Nadinoo heroine, but I think this dress couldn't be more perfect for Barcelona's narrow streets, crowded markets, and nighttime warehouse district. I had fun headbanging in the dress too for a while...probably not what it was intended for!



I got a few second-hand books at the market, including scoring the only French copy of a Tintin book I could find. I'm trying to improve (read learn) my French again. People who aren't Canadian always think that we're all perfectly bilingual but um--we're not. Here, people always assume I can speak French (I can't) since I'm Canadian, but also assume since I'm a native English speaker that I can't speak Spanish or Catalan (I can) because everyone knows that English speakers are dumb and can't learn languages. Le grrr. Anyway, I'm trying to learn French again.

dress: Nadinoo, cardigan: car boot sale, necklace: craft fair (gift), shoes: Fly London, pin: Sherlock Holmes museum, London, bag: vintage via Mom

a canadian in barcelona

I don't actually have anything profound to say on the subject of Canadians in Barcelona--apart from anything else I'm the only one I know--but it seemed a fitting enough title for this post with the city spread out below. I took these pictures on Montjuïc, where I spent some time skulking in the bushes waiting for a couple to vacate the ledge. In the bushes I met about a thousand wild cats, who growled at me throughout.





This outfit is actually the dressy version of what I've been wearing most mornings. I've been really pushing myself to get out to a café by 8am to work on my book for a few hours before the rest of the day catches up with me. It's working out really well so far, but it does seem to mean a daily outfit of black pants, blue airline socks, and whatever shirt is closest to hand. It's kind of silly that all fall when I had hardly any clothes I was obsessed with getting dressed up every day, and now that I've brought back a lot more things to wear, my priorities are elsewhere. Given all of that, I think I look surprisingly put together... and that unrolled trouser-leg is getting filed under the excuse of "artistic temperament." Anyway, to jazz things up a bit I added some sparkly flats and a star-studded beret. The shirt was box-dived, and is an old union shirt. I'm not sure which of my family it belonged to, but we do have great collection of vintage slogan t-shirts, from "Muskoka Jazz" to "Cuba Si" to "My Karma ran over your Dogma."







t-shirt: family vintage, pants: H&M, beret: very old, shoes: Ardene (gift)

what do nicole kidman, kosovan refugees, and my outfit have in common?

... Not that much, as it turns out, but if you do want to know the link, head over to Virginie's Cinema--head over anyway; I love her blog! Here you'll find me waxing semi-eloquent about cinema and so forth...

wardrobe reinvention--without the classic white shirt

There have been a lot of fashion-specific New Years Resolutions floating around the blogosphere lately. There's a recession-friendly trend towards wanting to build the kind of wardrobe that will last for years. However, I notice that those in style circles, when discussing wardrobe building, frequently talk of a) cleaning out your closet and getting rid of at least a third of your stuff and b)repopulating it with white button-ups and little black dresses and black pencil skirts--the "basics."

This may work for some, but outside of office wear it definitely doesn't work for me. LBDs are classic, I guess, but they really put me to sleep. And isn't fashion supposed to be fun? Here are my alternative pointers to wardrobe building.


with a box-dived parasol this past summer, originally and uselessly bought in 2004

a) Unless you have to, don't get rid of all your stuff

If you're bored to tears with your clothes, put them in boxes, stick them in the attic or wherever, and leave them to marinate for a year or two. Things that don't fit or are unsalvageable should certainly go, but anything you've ever loved or which is really good quality should stay. Trends and silhouettes come around. I've put everything from vintage lumberjack shirts to berets to leather ankle boots in the "to donate" pile. Luckily, in each case, someone in my family rescued the above items, and where would I be without them now? If you've read my posts from Canada, you'll know that half my wardrobe is a result of "box-diving" in the attic, including my New Years Eve dress. It's amazing how exciting your old stuff can be after an enforced absense.


box-dived sandals and bag.


Who knows how many times this hand-me-way-down wool shirt escaped the donation pile?

b) Buy things you love, and the occasional basic to support them.

I don't love little black dresses, at least, no more than little yellow dresses. I suppose I could wear an LBD every day for a year with a different coloured scarf and call it an outfit, but yawnnnn.

I do love dresses though. I want to fill my wardrobe with good-quality, exciting dresses in whatever colour they come in. I know I love dresses the best of all the different fashion items, so they don't need to go with everything... everything needs to go with them.

The basics for me come into play in the form of tights, shoes and sweaters. Here I make sure (or I try) that I have black and brown and red (a neutral colour) shoes, grey tights, and so forth. A wild dress will always have its place in my wardrobe. A wild cardigan may cause problems if it doesn't go with the dresses (which are the priority).


Whose basics? These would make it into my suitcase before an LBD anyday... Calivintage, The Styling Dutchman, and me, back in August.

This is just me, I love dresses. If your passion is shoes, you might want to build a wardrobe from the feet up. If you find you gravitate towards patterned and colourful tops, you'll probably need neutral skirts to go with them, and vice versa. Keeping this in mind helps streamline a wardrobe and makes the decision as to what can and can't come in easier. I can easily justify a new fire-engine red dress, but turquoise floral shoes might be a little more difficult.

My own fashion New Years Resolution is to buy only one item per month**, which should limit the amount of time wasted thinking about things I "need", while still giving me something to look forward to. I know that several months will be claimed by dresses... and I'm looking forward to it.

What do you think of my "prioritizing a fashion item" technique? Do you have any tips for making a capsule wardrobe without getting boring?

**excepting perfect basic cardigans when they show up (almost never). I never have enough (currently only two) and they are a basic, after all!

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smoke gets in your eyes

I love the old factories that Barcelona is full of, the brick chimneys rising suddenly from a small plaça, or jutting beligerently from behind the wall of a long-abandoned industrial complex. In fact, I've been wanting to do a "chimney" photoshoot for ages, but it's a bit difficult since they often tend to be right in the middle of the city, surrounded by other buildings, and behind large walls. I was delighted, when leaving work in Poble Nou, an old industrial warehouse district which is sadly being transformed into "pretentious-architecture company headquarters zone," to find that one old factory was right across the street from a park. The light was anything but ideal at that time of day, but I grabbed a few shots anyway. And yes, I put the out-of-focus one in deliberately. I liked how my abstracted self mirrored the column of the chimney, with even the plaid pattern referencing the orange bricks. Wow, I haven't written anything like that since I was inventing some symbolic meaning to a scene in To the Lighthouse for my literature degree. Got an A on that ridiculous paper, too. ; )

Am I alone in finding the trappings of the industrial revolution beautiful? I also love working ports, complete with cranes and chaos. Any takers, or do you all subscribe to the "bucolic forest" version of an ideal landscape?





dress: Pepe Jeans (gift), blouse: Zara, shoes: Camper, necklace: gift

the wards in jarndyce

The lovely and thoughtful Rosalind recently asked who among her readers uses literature and film as influences in getting dressed. I'm guessing many of us, but I will say that I love literary inspiration. I have already dressed up as a Victorian orphan (here) but sometimes the influences are more subtle.

In Charles Dickens' Bleak House Richard and Ada are pulled before the courts in Chancery Lane, as claimants in Jarndyce and Jarndyce, a case involving a fortune which has dragged on for so long no one can see the end of it. They become the wards of Jarndyce, and go to live in the paradoxically idyllic Bleak House, but the long shadow of hopes and aspirations, always thwarted by the dithering ways of the Victorian British courts, already has a deathly hold upon one of them.

If you're wondering what on earth this has to do with my outfit... a Miss Flite lives in a tiny dreary flat in Chancery, herself a former ward of the courts, herself waiting for a settlement that may never come, and keeps in her room flocks of caged birds-- named Hope, Joy, Youth, Rest, Peace, Want, Ashes, Life, Waste, Dust, Madness, Despair, Death, Words, Wigs, Rags, Folly, Cunning, Jargon, Precedent, Sheepskin, Gammon, Plunder and Spinach--to be released upon the "day of judgement." And through the course of the story she adds two more little birds to their number, named "The Wards in Jarndyce."

Ah Dickens at his long-winded, sentimental, delightful, nonsensical and profound best. I hope my robin necklace and empty-birdcage skirt do Miss Flite a modicum of justice.











Photos by Albert

skirt: Snoozer Loser, sweater: Ralph Lauren circa 1998, vintage beret, scarf: gift (for someone else), boots: Camper, necklace: gift from my sister

anyone fancy a €22,000 guitar?

no, not that one...





No, I'm not giving one away on the blog, but should you want a vintage Fender with hand-painted hula dancers and a hair-raising price tag, you'll find it in the back of a pink vintage car on the second floor of Europe's biggest music store in Cologne, Germany. Albert and I caught a train and went thither last weekend, and while I confess I dozed off for part of our stay at the old-fashioned soda bar, he was a kid in a candy store. My problem is I always seem to gravitate towards the pretty guitars, especially when they come in appealing sea-foamy colours, but apparently that's what you're not supposed to do--like judging a book by its cover I suppose. Anyway, at least the coffee was only a Euro!


that's the one in question!


a rare sighting of the man behind the camera.

and all of that jiving around

I don't generally subscribe to the idea of grunging up a pretty dress with a leather jacket and motorcycle boots... for one thing, I don't own a leather jacket and motorcycle boots look awful on me, and for another I tend to steer away from the lacier dresses that work with that look. But this particular dress is so creampuff (see here) that I thought it could use some playing down. I quite like the layered result, which is more casual and more comfortable.

I wore this outfit to Europe's largest music store in Cologne (probably more on that later) and then to a party. Albert and I cycled to the party; that is, he cycled and I perched on the back of the bike, cursing and moaning at even intervals. Most uncomfortable means of transportation ever! Although it was better on the way back when I sat on a cardigan. Anyway, yay for trying new things I guess!







P.S. I've had this sweater for fourteen years! Finally fixed the six moth-holes (though have discovered a seventh, grrr)

Photos by Albert, in Altstadt, Bonn

dress: See by Chloé via ebay, sweater: Ralph Lauren (sales, circa 1998), scarf: thrifted, hat: vintage, shoes: El Naturalista

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canadian, eh?

So, I left Canada last Saturday, am back in Barcelona and back and work, and pining a little bit for my home comforts, I have to confess. After my grandfather left I was able to move back into my cozy childhood bed and put my Hudson's Bay blanket on it. I'm obsessed with the Bay's (a department store that's been around, at first in the form of a fur-trading company, since 1670) iconic traditional blankets and similar products--check out my scarf here, for example. When I graduated high school my mom asked me what I wanted for a present, and I said a Hudson Bay blanket! I think she was a bit shocked, but anyway, I got it. And then I proceeded to live abroad for ten years so I never get to use it.

The history of the Hudson's Bay Company is inseparable from the history of Canada. I remember visiting some of the old forts when I was a child, and the beds were always laid with a blanket like mine, and we were told stories of the legendary voyageurs, canoe-travelling, fur-trapping, insouciant French Canadians at the height of the fur era. Of course, as with any history so long and important, there are many ironies and abuses along the way, which sometimes make me wonder if I'm right to love it as I do. Like it or not, the history is one of colonialism in Canada, and the Hudson's Bay Company was much stronger than a government in earlier periods of our history. Then there's the whole fur thing. Then there's the fact that it's a massive corporation. Then there's the thing that Canadians like least of all--it's owned my an American company now. As Canadians, we often define ourselves by what we are not, namely that we're not American, so the fact that this enormous piece of our history is in fact owned by them is a bit of a sore point (we'll have Tim Horton's back too, please). ; )



I find nostalgia a difficult concept, especially with my pessimistic grandfather never failing to remind me that the ruling class has always been oppressing the rest of us (we have always been the 99%) or my parents there to say "the fifties: what a horrible damn decade!" But there are certain things I just have to love, like my Hudson Bay point blanket, my vintage Canadian pure-wool lumberjack shirt, or even a certain kind of Englishness as portrayed by the chubby robbins on this tea-cup. are among them. You can't really escape who you are, I guess.

I'm including a few shots I took in the downtown Vancouver store during the 2010 "spring" Olympics. The Hudson's Bay Company asked various Canadian designers (including Erdem, for example) to design a piece using the blankets. They were pretty amazing (just ignore the fur this once). : )




(Shona was in love with the canoe)







my 'outfit:' vintage lumberjack shirt, socks hand-knitted in North Yorkshire, England, Hudson Bay blanket, Dunoon tea cup (yes, the blanket and cup count as part of my outfit).

Misery personified facial expressions c/o the dentist.

European programming resumes next time, plus I promise I'll give plaid a little break! ; )