Number Five: Menswear Prints and Patterns

In The One Hundred, Nina Garcia gives several examples of many articles of clothing that women have stolen from men, and ended up doing much better. The tuxedo jacket, trousers, wristwatches, crisp wbite button-down shirts... women have been taking men's clothes for a very long time.

I don't always like men's clothes, but I do love their patterns and prints. I have one shirt in particular, with a very feminine mock wrap silhouette, a deep V neck, and adorable cap sleeves. The twist is that it's in a bold plaid, that looks like it was taken right off of a kilt and reworked into a top that's just as easy to dress up as it is to dress down.

There are plenty of ways to try a little bit of androgyny in your look... a houndstooth scarf, a plaid heel, or a pinstripe hat would add to the look. Fortunately, you can go a little more extreme with this look as well, by mixing a pair of pinstripe pants with a checkered shirt. My only tip to avoiding the grunge look of the early 90s would be to make sure that everything is in the same color family. If you have a pair of black-and-white pinstripe pants and a black-and-white checkered shirt, you can go nuts on the scale of each pattern, and never look like a crazy person.

Trends I Can Do Without: The Skinny Jean

I absolutely hate skinny jeans.

I'm sorry, but I'm pretty sure they would make a skeleton look like it had a big ass. And not the good kind of big ass either. Any pair of pants that tapers down at the leg makes you look like a less-exaggerated version of one of those hippos from Fantasia. You know, wide at the hips and itty-bitty at the ankles. Yikes.

An addendum to the skinny jean issue is the whole skinny-jeans-tucked-into-boots trend. A boot that gracefully allows a bare or pantyhosed leg to emerge is beautiful. A boot that is wrapped around a pair of jeans is stump city. Ugh.

I don't know why anyone would wear a pair of pants that are that deliberately unflattering, and I REALLY don't know why anyone would want to look short and thick. Those of us that are short and thick (*raises hand*) have enough issues without having to hunt up jeans that look passable.