Fashion nails! ~ Blog win!

I've finally found someone as obsessed with the NAILS on the high fashion runways as the clothes!

You don't know how hard it is until you've tried to find good pictures or any sort of spotlighting on the manicures that go with contemporary runway shows - much less anyone talking about what colors they are or showing the designs up close. And if they do, they're scattered around every random fashion article along with all the other stuff about the collection, and you're lucky if they actually tell you the color (and then usually only if it's some partnership between the polish company and the designer!)

This blogger even tries out the styles herself! - Even though it hasn't been updated this year, I am right about the same point she is at in catching up on the runway shows from previous seasons, so I'm happy. I love most of all to find photos, details, and even an example collected all in one place, at least a good amount of them if not up to the minute!

Three sided greige ~ Nuance Evening Haze

My favorite nail color of all time is GREIGE. There is some dissention by now about what color actually constitutes greige, but to me it is a blend of tan, purple, and grey; you could call it a purple-tinged beige or a warm, rosy grey. I collect greige nail polishes now and am always trying new brands by buying greiges.

This is Nuance Evening Haze; Nuance by Salma Hayek turned up at my local CVS and I couldn't wait to try it, not in small part because there was a greige AND this purple-greige! They retail for around $7 USD. The bottle design is great; I love the flower print on the cap (it goes all the way around).

Chanel Spring 2013 RTW: Euro-aero-chic

A few years ago one of my obsessions was Style.com and browsing runway fashion. (I had another blog at the time but I tried to do too much and the fashion part it kinda tanked but it was fun to look at and save a little archive on my laptop!) I got an idea of what the big designers were and a sense of their style, and accumulated my own favorites. It's been invaluable to developing my personal style, knowledge of the fashion world, and the "feel" and history of different styles and trends in fashion.

Coco Chanel and her fashion legacy will have to be an entire other post. Anyway, I normally wouldn't consider myself such a "Chanel girl" or even a mainstream "fancy lady" chic sort of person. But I gravitated to this collection immediately in a way I almost didn't for most of the other tweed-n-pearls sort of Chanel collections!  One of my favorite things, obviously, was the presentation with the giant wind turbines and solar panel runway.

J-Street

It all began with ...

I was looking up 18th century fashion for my doll-clothes-making at my library, and stumbled across this book in the fashion section, and fell in love with it. I skirted around various Japanese subculture styles (decora, gothic lolita, mori etc) in my online art circles, but now I am actually delving into them and they are fascinating! Tokyo street style is famous for being colorful, creative and eclectic, but when you really study it, it's a complex synthesis of many subcultures and specific style sets (kei) that each person puts together in unique ways. I enjoy working within strict guidelines just for fun when I'm making art, so the way these guys and gals are so creative within these style frameworks are so interesting to me.

I'm also fascinated by how Tokyo and other large cities have this vibrant street style culture, so that young people dress and go out in certain neighborhoods and possibly get photographed by professionals for magazines specifically devoted to street style. It's almost an institution there, unlike US or European street style, which seems to be a more informal thing individual people snap with their smartphones and post on personal blogs. Maybe they were inspired by Japan's street fashion magazines and are trying to bring something like it to Western culture? I think it would be amazing to put together your look, go out on the town, and expect you could be photographed for a professional style magazine! (I already do two of those things!)

A collection of things that inspire me from the Tokyo streets lately! Images have a watermark to show where they came from; if not, they are linked to where I got them.

Mori Kei

I grew up in a little town on the edge of the woods, so perhaps it's no surprise that I came to rest on mori kei (forest style) as one of my favorite Japanese subculture styles. I don't so much wear it myself as gravitate to the world of it, but I did buy a tan-hued floral tank the other day, so I think it is creeping into my own style!