In volume three hundred and forty seven of the "nothing much happened today except a woman in Myer confused me for a salesperson and I spent twenty minutes recommending gifts for her two year old great-niece, none of which she approved of, and all depsite my not black and white but green dress and lack of nametag sugesting I am in fact a customer myself" (true story) files which mean I will simply nab something from another blog to share with you - a newsletter from Frankie landed in my inbox today just in time to cure my 3 o'clock fuzzies, and in it was a link of such joy and glee and fond reminiscience that I can't help but share:
You know how books when we were kids were just so much better (Harry Potter excepted)? There were no twatty faced Mileys preening about. There were beautiful blonde twins who managed to fit an awful lot into a year or so of high school, in a Utopian town in California called Sweet Valley. There was a group of business minded, intelligent and super friendly kid-minders in Connecticut. They all wore remarkably creative outfits, no brands required. What Claudia Wore is a blog devoted to those outfits (well, the BSC ones anyway), "a delightful mish-mosh of Gossip Girl obsessing, American Apparel mockery, explorations of the term 'hipster' supplemented by Toothpaste for Dinner cartoons, anecdotes about falling under buses, etc." What began as merely indexing outfits became fullblown editorial and commentary, all of it funny and gloriously indulgent. This is the bit that got me:
You know the classic "I had 10 Mickey Mantle rookie cards and my mother threw them all away!" sob story? I think our generation's (well, the subset of our generation that was literary/dorky enough to be really, really into the Baby-sitter's Club, at least) sob story is going to be "I owned a complete collection of BSC books and my mother sold them at a yard sale!" I hear this sentiment a lot. From fully grown women. And they are still upset about it.
I am. A good few years ago I sold an entire SET of original Babysitter's Club books for a pittance. I think I bought new shoes and was happy at the time, but I am kicking myself now. Hmph.
Heck these posts are even annotated and referenced in far more detail than an Arts degree at Utas ever required. Quotes like this mean that my tiny mind is highly amused for the evening, and conveniently fill up space in my own blog, making it look like I have achieved more this evening than just giggling over layered push down socks and overalls:
"Claudia's style is unique. She doesn't often wear jeans, but she was wearing them today - only she'd cut patterns in the legs of the jeans (which were major faded) and was wearing leopard tights underneath so that they showed through. [I feel like we've all seen this on lookbook.nu.] She was wearing her Doc Martens with yellow shoelaces, and she'd used matching shoelaces to pull her hair back into a thick, long braid. Her earrings were a pair she made herself, out of little yellow feathers and black beads. And she was wearing a black and yellow striped flannel shirt buttoned up to her throat, with another pair of shoelaces made into a sort of bow tie."BOW TIE.(I hope season three of Gossip Girl brings us a scene in which Chuck Bass pulls open a drawer and it is just filled with, like, 100 bowties in perfect rows on some sort of custom-made bowtie organizer. They should be organized by color.)"
I'm being serious.* This is Gen-X & Y genius. Which means Ann M Martin should've been the costume designer for Sex and the City. Just think about that, while I leave you with this:
You know how I'm always talking shit, scoffing at sub-par Kishi concoctions and whatnot? Well, I have no complaints here: ". . . her eye for color and style shows in the way she dresses. It's always distinctive and funky. Today she was wearing purple-and-white-striped tights, Doc Martins [sic] (except she'd taken them off to sit on the bed), a short black ruffly skirt that looked like it was part of a women's Olympics figure-skater's costume, a purple cropped sweater with silver button covers on the back buttons, and a scrunchy black velvet hat decorated with purple and red velvet flowers."You know, I have a skirt that sounds kind of like that, although it's just a short black cotton skirt with ruffles of layered lace - not so figure skate-y. I haven't quite figured out how to wear it yet. Stacey wore: ". . . she had pulled her blonde permed hair back into a complicated braid threaded with green ribbon. The ribbon matched her shoes. She was wearing silver capri pants, an oversized shirt [surprise!] with a green belt [I still don't care for the over the shirt/extraneous belting, but that's just me], a green checked short skirt [over the capri pants? do they mean capri leggings?], and gold leaf-shaped earrings."
Watch for Supre's new BSC collection to hit stores soon.**
*mostly. It is pretty inspiring, and at least original.
**Joke. But it will probably come true.
