pretty playsuits, personal style, & ‘fashion’ blogging

Currenly I’m rocking a no makeup, coldsore cream on lip, boring outfit banger of a ~look~, so rather than treat you to that delight, now seems as good a time as any to throw it back to slightly more glamourous times.  Times when my makeup was done nicely and I worked with fab photographers and wore pretty playsuits.  Because ain’t this a darling outfit that needs showing off?

No prizes for guessing that the playsuit is from my faves Joanie Clothing – their kinda-vintage-kinda-not style is usually very recognisable and you’ll have seen it on many bloggers. That slight nod to vintage but not too extreme is just the loveliest.  I’m slightly biased now having met the team and really enjoyed working for them, but anyway.

(Sidenote: can’t wait for the AW18 stuff to hit the website.  IT SO CUTE).

I actually thought about chatting all things ‘subtle-vintage’ in this post but realised Amber had gotten there before me, and also that in this case the nod is extremely subtle.  More of a slight tip of the head than a nod.  Slightly 1940s ish sleeves and neckline with a hemline more reminiscent of a 40s bathing suit than a day dress… pretty sure that’s exactly what the designers were going for.  Whilst I love vintage fashion photos for inspiration, I don’t want to look like I’m playing dressup or am stuck in a timewarp, and am basically just a fan of a good nipped in waist or sticky out skirt.  Come to think of it, that’s probably the one consistent thing with all my outfits – a nipped in waist in one way or another.  I don’t feel ‘me’ with a baggy waistline and having just procrasti-scrolled through my Insta, I can’t find the last outfit without one.  They’re just ‘me’.

Some folk are instantly recognisable for their style and in a way I envy them.  Take Audrey of Frassy.net for example – her colour palette, photography, and wardrobe is so refined that you could spot one of her images a mile off.   Josie of FashionMumblr has a very recognisable muted pinky palette, that even my mum picks items up in shops and says ‘that’s very Josie’.  I could go on listing bloggers and influencers with recognisable personal style, but the same goes for people I know in real life – without perhaps intending to, they have a ‘look’ and I could pluck an item off a shelf and know whether they’d wear it or not.  (I’m a good friend to go shopping with BTW).

As for my own style… well I don’t know whether it’s the slightest bit recognisable or not.  Besides waist belts obviously.  I’ve always struggled with those ‘describe your style in 3 words’ thingymajigs that bloggers tend to get asked – preppy, (hopefully) classic and… I guess simple(?) are what I usually go for, but I really don’t know.  Sometimes I’m all YES COLOUR LOVE IT and sometimes I go all black.  If you saw a photo of my outfit with my head/frizzy hair cropped out, would you recognise it as me?  Is that something to aim for?  Are you a fashion/personal style/whatever you want to call it blogger if you don’t have a defined ‘personal style’ in the first place?

On that note, ‘fashion blogger’ might be the easiest term and the one we’ve all been using for years, but it kinda feels a bit daft.  At least I thought so when I was filling in a questionnaire for a reader’s dissertation the other day anyway.  I’m 3 years late to every trend and haven’t attended a catwalk show in my life, so I can’t claim to be Miss ~Fashun~, nor do I particularly want to, so ‘personal style’ seems more fitting.  Gone are the days of following bloggers purely for their outfits anyway it seems, as what warranted a ‘Lookit new jeans and here’s what I’ve been up to‘ blog post 3 years ago has made its way into a quick Insta snap and rambly caption these days.  I won’t bang on about the changing online world because every second blogger has done that already, but I will say that I’d like to post more ‘outfit diary’ kinda things over on here again.  Maybe in short snippety posts, maybe as roundups, who knows.  Thinking of giving it a go though.

So.  Back to the playsuit at hand!  I thought about going for the retro kinda-kitschy look as modelled by the beautiful Charlotte on the website, and posing in that classic fake-candid blogger way, but decided to bring it along to a test shoot and style the whole thing a little differently instead.  I’m super happy with Zak‘s shots!  His idea was to shoot in The Patron in Manchester’s Northern Quarter, and I love how the location looks with a bit of soft bokeh and late afternoon lighting.  I might have looked a ~little~ strange posing it out in a busy-ish restaurant, but any Manchester people will know that pretty much anything goes in the Northern Quarter, so a little restaurant photoshoot won’t raise any eyebrows.

On a final (and unrelated) note – this is the first blog post I’ve put together using the new Gutenberg WordPress editor which I think is going to take some getting used to.  Thanks to Vix for the heads up on the impending change.  I like the idea of having more flexibility for jigging layouts around and adding different media, but as always the ‘super easy!!!’ plugins are confusing at first.  So hopefully I haven’t managed to turn all the writing upside down or anything ridiculous and I’ll learn the ropes soon enough.  In the meantime, if anybody has a clue what they’re doing with it please do enlighten me.

Note – tried drafting this post with Gutenberg but bailed out because I had a fight with WordPress and couldn’t get it to work.  Help appreciated!

Lily Kate x

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Photography by Zak Chowdhury – thank you to The Patron for kindly letting us shoot inside and Laura Gibb for doing my makeup all lovely!