Guess: Fall/Winter Coats I love

Belted Asymmetrical Coat, $198

Santa Ana Coat by Guess, $198 Guess.com

Ashli Puffer Jacket, Amazon.com

Classic Trenchcoat

As my fans know, I am a HUGE Guess Geek; alas, I haven't been able to accumulate much of their goods, but I can tell you the best of the lot. 
Guess winter coats are extremely warm without making you look huge, while their trench coats are timeless. I love the largely black-and-white color palette, which happens to be my personal color palette!
These are the winter coats I've drooled over, and YOU, my faithful reader, should go purchase one so you can stay all snuggly warm AND be fashionable! 


Kelly

Some Vintage Halloween Love

Halloween has evolved from a "pagan festival" where people dressed in costume so they would be overlooked by the dead spirits that managed to sneak into the human world, around this time of year when the veil between the two worlds was the thinnest. For many decades now, it has been about finding a great costume; being whatever you wanted to be for one day. Unfortunately, many women seem to think it's a day to let their inner slut flag fly, but let's not go there. 
My inner vintage lover always wants to know what any aspect of fashion was like many moons ago; today I was thinking about vintage Halloween- what were some costumes people used back in the day? 
 Even before starting this post, I came across a similar one about creepy vintage Halloween costumes. Let me tell you- many, many scary ass photos to be found on Pinterest. Many WTFs?? 
 I did my own search, and decided to pull the best 3- these are the ones I thought were quite imaginative. I LOVE the butterfly in the middle- how ingenious!! All it would take is some unfolded clothes hangers to get those wings to stand up on their own!

This is what vintage Halloween looked like once upon a time....

Material Monday: Cashmere

So I'm playing with another idea for this day of the week; I would like to spend the post talking about a particular fabric, since I could use brush-up on natural and the human-made materials. 
 This week the focus is on cashmere, although I will say that I don't own a single cashmere item. Hmm...
 I started thinking about cashmere when I was folding some sweaters at work; it's such a soft, fuzzy-but-strong feeling material.  
 It turns out that it comes from cashmere goats (surprise!), which produce a double fleece; the undercoat is fine and soft, but its mixed in with the "guard hair", which is thicker and stiffer. It needs to be mechanically separated by special machinery, before it can be dyed. "Pure cashmere" is the fleece that has been separated, but also cleaned of all animal byproducts. Yum!  
 The U.S. Wool Products Labeling Act of 1939 (I am not kidding you) declared that in order for something to be labeled as cashmere, it had to meet these guidelines:

• such wool product is the fine (dehaired) undercoat fibers produced by a cashmere goat (Capra hircus laniger);
• the average diameter of the fiber of such wool product does not exceed 19 microns; and
• such wool product does not contain more than 3 percent (by weight) of cashmere fibers with average diameters that exceed 30 microns.
• The average fiber diameter may be subject to a coefficient of variation around the mean that shall not exceed 24 percent.^[1]     

^{Crazy, right? 
Cashmere shawls have been made in Nepal and Cashmir for thousands of years, Western civilization jumped on this excellent insulator late in the game. India, by the way, is the largest producer of cashmere. 
There's your Material Monday lesson, my fashion bambinos. Thanks for tuning in!! 
K.Q.}