One good way to start road-mapping a new season’s look is to create a mood board based upon the cues of a particular icon you deem worthy of emulating for the upcoming season. Will this person provide enough fodder to help articulate a season’s worth of outfits? Are the cues strong enough to proliferate or evolve with you? If you get sick of how the icon dresses, do you still feel confident that you will want to emulate the person’s character/behavior? These are some of the questions one must ask before submitting themselves to the gaze of a superficial deity.
I have gone ahead and decided that for me, said diety will be Goldie Hawn. I arrived at this conclusion after watching The First Wives Club and Housesitter in tandem (to hell with monotasking, says I!). Both movies effectively forced me to mull over two particular outfits: a white leather pantsuit with an inner white bodysuit and, similarly, a red tank-style bodysuit with high-waist jeans, camel suede boots and a leopard-print coat that could have easily been a stuffed animal from before it became a coat in the latter movie. Sure, these are cues taken by her characters — a has-been actress with a vague drinking problem and a high-key squatter-slash-pathological liar with beautiful blue eyes — but you know what I say, right? In order to do style, you’ve got to own the character you’re playing with everything you’ve got. And besides! We role-play every day when we get dressed, don’t we? So Hawn it is. And with the above slideshow come a couple of very important shopping lessons.
The first: No dress is off limits — be it mini, printed, tea-length, featuring fluffy sleeves or very un-ironically worn with a pair of straight-up dancing shoes.
Also, be strong and convicted in your accessories! Have a scarf so long it may as well be Karlie Kloss? Wear it. A jacket with feather trim as yellow as Big Bird? The camera would like it no other way. How about a comb so damn huge, it seems more appropriate to use it on a horse? Bring it out, bring it out, bring it out.
After that, though, if you’re too tired, or busy, or overwhelmed for a dress, there is no harm in pretending you are Keanu Reeves north of your nose and south of your forehead (so basically, just over your eyes) but being cool as a Lebowitz named Frank with a plain black blazer, white T-shirt and high-waist blue jeans.
Most important, though, remember:
Feature photographs by Joseph Klipple; carousel photographs by Frank Carroll/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank and Joseph Klipple via Getty Images.
