Dress: Black Crepe swing-y mini dress with sleeves like a tree-topping angel and metallic gold polka dots. I bought this dress at a shop in Edinburgh I covered previously, and dragged friends to last time I was in Scotland (September 2022) . It was, once again, my last day in town, but the weather was abysmal. Not just the lingering overcast pissy drear you might expect, but something much warmer and windier and wetter with solid “Fill up the clawfoot, Marie, this bastard feel like it’s coming in Category 4” vibes to this southerner. We were so drenched and battered by weather by the time we cleared the shop threshold, it’s possible I made a bad witch trial joke and then, upon realizing that there were three of us, all weirdos, a terrible “Macbeth” joke. Shockingly, no one kicked me out of the store although eyes were rolled. I knew as soon as I saw this dress on the rack that I loved it. I wear it all the time.
Leggings: On the front edge of Covid, before I even realized Covid would be Covid, I bought a pair of faux-leather leggings from a company that makes shapewear. As pants, these are the perfect accessory for all of us who believed until quite recently that “girding one’s loins” meant wearing something that would smooth you out and make you feel less self-conscious about your butt/thigh area when heading into a trying circumstance. I’d give them about a 7 on the comfort scale. That’s pretty good, basically a down comforter by shapewear stanrads.
These were my “going out” pants during the pandemic when “going out” was sitting in a camp chair around someone’s cul-de-sac firepit with some sad dad music and a flask in your pocket like some sort of post-modern suburban hobo. I tried to enliven the sweatpants endtimes vibes with big leopard scarves and gold lamé blazers. I don’t know if I brightened anyone’s corners but I did acquire an extensive wardrobe that smells perennially of forest fire and managed not to get Covid until October of 2023. I call it a provisional win.
Boots: Covered elsewhere.
Earrings: The way in here is Lindy West, author, columnist, memoirist. Her private life is quite public. I mention this if you’re unfamiliar, so the sentence “I bought these earrings because I watched a semi-uncomfortable video in which Lindy West and her husband discuss adding another partner to their marriage and mostly what I got from it is that whelp, polyamory is so not for me and wow those are gorgeous earrings” will not make you think I’ve been spying on couple’s therapy.
Turns out Lindy’s earrings were made by While Odin Sleeps, a small workshop that makes arcane, macabre, and vaguely metaphysical jewelry in the North Carolina town with one of the state’s best breweries and my no-contest favorite of the two former state mental hospitals whose proposed conversion into a mixed use development will likely be plagued with tales of gentrification-fueled hauntings. They didn’t have Lindy’s earrings in stock, but I found these delightful Gold Open Doors, instead. I found them both architecturally interesting and a fine summation of my personal moral code, in which Be Open and Hospitable is perhaps the foundational tenet.
Outfit: I wore this to my best friend’s sister’s surprise 50th Birthday. The party was in a semi-private nook at Forestry Camp, an outpost of my other favorite brewery located on the grounds of a former Civilian Conservation Corps outpost up a winding hill over Biltmore Village. I have a real affection for the place, maybe because it both does and doesn’t feel like a brewery (there a picnic tables, but they are artfully placed; it is rustic, but it feels like someone cares about aesthetics.
The real selling point of Forestry Camp is that it feels a bit like Old Asheville, despite being the very essence of New Asheville. And in this case, I don’t mean the smoke-drenched, crushed velvet art party downtown Old Asheville, but the ramshackle, neighborhood fairy tale I grew up around, where it might be possible to take ballet lessons in a sprawling, deteriorating Victorian hotel and eat homemade bread and soup at a restaurant there a few hours later. Where you might hang out at a friend’s house and find an amphitheater or an elaborate Jazz age formal garden (with broken fountain) buried under the brambles in the woods behind their house. I don’t know why Forestry Camp hits this for me, but it does. How can you experience such tidal waves of nostalgia in a place that didn’t exist until four years ago? No idea, but I did.
The party was also a success. How am I attending so many 50th birthday parties? How am I just a couple of years from my own? WTF. I’m still trying to figure out what I’m wearing to prom.
Dress: Essentiel Antwerp , ALC Edinbugh, Fall 2022
Legging: Spanx faux leather leggings, 2020
Boots: Dr Martens, 2022
Earrings: While Odin Sleeps, 2022
Tiny Commotions 
