I’ve said it before: I don’t Pinterest. I will, occasionally, buy a cute dress I’ve seen someone else wear, but that’s about as far as I’ll take the inspiration game. I find the whole outfit inspiration thing counter-productive, because rather than making me want to get more creative with my own clothes, it usually just makes me want to go out and buy new things. Buying things is not something with which I need help, ever. So. If I’m looking for outfit inspiration, I usually just poke around my closet for a bit.

Let me go on a tangent, briefly. I’m slightly obsessed with stationery. Notepads, sticky notes, journals, cards. Especially cards. I save all the cards I get for birthdays and the like, and I sometimes buy cards just because I like the pictures. My intention is always to frame them, but I always forget, and they end up languishing in forgotten boxes all over my house. No more. I recently took one of my faves to work, and pinned it to my sad-looking cork board. Baby steps. As a bonus, it inspired me to put together this outfit – even though I don’t have a cute bateau neckline striped top, a red beret, a cute poodle, or a plane ticket to Paris. More’s the pity.

This exercise made me realize two things. One, I need more striped tops. Two, I need it to be summer again, stat. I have a feeling one will be easier to rectify than the other. If only money could buy off Mother Nature!

… would be a lot less stylish. What have we got? Pea soup green? Toddler mucous discharge? Yeah, exactly. Chartreuse, on the other hand, is French, and we all know that French things are automatically stylish. It’s, like, a universal law.

I happen to be a fan of chartreuse, although I think the verdict’s still out on whether chartreuse is a fan of my complexion. Or vice versa. Typically, I’m all about relegating questionable colours to my bottom half – don’t go Freudian on that statement – to avoid as much as possible looking sicklier/pastier than necessary. I threw that caution to the wind when I bought this blouse. I also committed to an awful lot of ruffles. Or, as the French say, volants. See, already more stylish.

This skirt+cardigan combo has been one of my work uniforms for as long as I can remember. There isn’t much you can do in the way of updating it (especially if you work in an office environment that falls closer to the conservative side of the spectrum than the creative), but incorporating new pieces always makes things more interesting, if not original.

Or, in this case, more fancy. Sorry, fancay.

What’s so fancy? Mixed in with my ubiquitous J. Crew pieces is a (thrifted) Boss skirt and a vintagey Mulberry bag.

I had a bit of an internal tussle over the Boss piece, because of the company’s history during the ’30s and 40’s. I eventually bought it because I felt that, in doing so, I wasn’t directly supporting the company, but rather my local thrift store. Have you ever struggled with similar ethical qualms? Where do you draw the line?