No. 37

Bold SS25 dresses and even bolder earrings to match

Some argue that fashion is all about balance: chunky loafers with a delicate mini skirt, a sculptural bag with a simple dress, flowing pants and a tight blouse. I am a maximalist, which means that too much is almost never enough. The one element I will almost always pull back on is a simplified color palette. I believe you should never have more than two adjacent colors and two neutrals in an outfit. This means if a dress is tangerine and sunflower yellow, I won’t add any additional color aside from creams, ecrus, or metal tones. Too many colors reads disorganized to me. This also means that I can immediately tell whether I would even remotely consider a garment based on the number of colors in the pattern and how close or contrasting they are on the color wheel. Someone once told me this is a very French way of thinking, to me it just looks right.

But this article isn’t about color, this is about maximalism. As the temperatures rise it’s easy for us to pare down our wardrobes to match: luxurious fabrics and architectural silhouettes become minimalist shapes and lightweight accents. Personally, I don’t want to give up on texture and pattern and drama just because it’s hot as hell outside!

This week, I fell in love with the idea of something beautiful, something I decided I simply couldn’t have. A gorgeous caped and embroidered dress from Bernadette retailing just under $3,000 USD, paired with luxuriously funky statement earrings from Schiaparelli (another $2,500-ish) paired with a few newsletters-ago Sandy Liang bag. Imagine….me, in a French twist, at a friends wedding in Boston, absolutely living to serve? Same! But I simply couldn’t stomach spending $6,000 pre-tax on just the three items I’m unlikely to wear more than a few times (at the least, not while house hunting, commissioning a large painting and a custom mahogany room divider screen, all at once).

One of life’s greatest fools errands is falling head over heels with a look, and trying to create it for less. Yes, it’s possible to get the general vibe of an outfit (in a hand-wavey sense) using other items, but if you’ve fallen in love with the items specifically (not just how they look together as an outfit - which is different! Think about it for a second!) you’re unlikely to be satisfied with anything else.

Nevertheless, I found myself searching for statement earrings that could scratch the same itch of our holy grail Schiaparelli eyes (I didn’t even bother trying to find a replacement for the Bernadette - she is truly one of a kind), and put together for my loyal readers some maximalist, sophisticated, and cheeky statement earrings + summer dress combinations (for all sorts of occasions!). God, I am such a giver.

Bernadette dress, Schiaparelli or TOUS earrings

Alemais dress, Dior or Cult Gaia earrings

Coperni dress, Herve Van der Straeten or Yves Saint Laurent earrings

Halston dress, Ulla Johnson earrings

Cult Gaia dress, Simuero earrings

Significant Other dress, JADED or Cult Gaia earrings

Agua Bendita dress, Yves Saint Laurent earrings

And just for fun, these gorgeous Hermes earrings

All in all, I decided against the Bernadette dress, for now. That being said, if 30 of you upgrade from a free to a yearly subscription to support my writing this week, I will, in fact, purchase it. Fair trade off? I think so!

So for the time being, what am I going with for the weekend?

Welcome party:

Wedding:

Vintage Bernadette from The RealReal, Zimmermann heels

xoxo