Digitize Your Wardrobe!

After years of impulse buying and sale seasons of indiscriminate spending sprees, our wardrobes are now stuffed – largely with things that we no longer even know we own! This calls for intervention, to re-discover these clothes and start getting more mileage out of them. With all of us counting our pennies during the downturn, it becomes even more practical to do this

For this purpose, Microsoft invited us to review their latest programs which could help us organize our wardrobes by digitizing them! We spend half our lives on the computer, so the idea of being able to scroll through a library of everything we own is an appealing one.

The most appealing part? How easy it is to get it done! Just 4 simple steps, easily done on a lazy Sunday afternoon…

My New Lipstick <3

Say hello! to my new lipstick (:

Go closer: it’s from Marc Jacobs!

Read about this online and absolutely hunted everywhere for it. I just had to have it. I went to hunting for it in town and the sales people went like ‘uhm, I don’t know that product.’

How can you not know that your company is holding the cutest lipstick ever produced? Blasphemy!

Then I promptly forgot about it out of shopaholic grief of not finding it, until I saw it on a boutique counter while I was paying for another purchase.

Anyway, it is a pen & I love it very much: I stash it in my bag when I go out, which says a lot because I make it a point to change my bag with every outfit and I’d always miss things out in the process. It’s also in a steady relationship with my Moleskine organizer.

A Paperpoint is a pen. A Signo is a pen. A Montblanc is also a pen. Same goes for this product, but a pen pretending to be a lipstick is just a lot cuter isn’t it!

Maybe I should try to write with it on a mirror?
Stephie

Pa-pa-painted Nails!

My new manicure: hand painted squishy bows with faux gems on it!

I think they are darling (:

My idea of a manicure is more nail art. I went with a dear friend of mine on our weekend getaway and as an afterthought, she told me that manicures should be more of a pamper treatment for your hands, including the removal of dead skin which us mere mortals aren’t so capable of doing…

…which got me thinking! I’m always admiring the manicures of my friends, with rainbows or marble-effects on their nails and perhaps beautiful nail shapes, but I do not take note of their cuticles at all.

Do you even bother looking at the nail ’standards’ of your own hands? Are you particular or anal about it? I know for a fact that its definitely cheaper in Asian cities such as Batam (Indonesia), Bangkok (Thailand) and Guangzhou (China). The exchange rates are also really favourable for us Singaporeans to do manicures in these areas!

If you’re in Europe, Australia, Japan, USA, are manicures cheap or do you consider it to be a luxury? I’d never do manicures in Singapore because they are so darn expensive. It costs about USD35 SGD35 (whoops typo!) for a good manicure in Singapore: I can buy several pairs of shoes for the price of a manicure session!

Tell me tell me tell me! (:

Hope your weekend’s good so far!
Stephie

Things to Do this Weekend

+ Haji Lane is having their regular Sunday Market again this Sunday, 5 July, from 12 – 8PM. Running low on quirky pieces? Pencil it in your Moleskine now!

+ Have you caught the Month of Photography exhibitions and events happening around town? I keep hearing about it and this month I am determined to make more ME time for myself. Will be rounding up my friends to catch the Steve McCurry exhibition, he’s the photographer who took the Afghan Girl. It’s on until 19 July, at the Asian Civilization Museum. Admission is free!

+ I’ve been hearing a lot about the Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen movie, but when I caught it I thought it sucked. ): Let me know your opinions if you caught it!

While Singapore’s a city state that is really small, I’m really glad to be able to find things to write about every single week for Things to Do this Weekend!

Dorothy and I just stopped our respective work for the day and we’re going for dinner and drinks with The Girls! (: I’ll show you my new manicure and new shopping acquisitions in just a bit, check back this weekend, yes?

whoots for the weekend
Stephie

On Internet Addiction & Boredom

(photo from her, first seen on Gala Darling)

Hello!

I’m back from a trip to clear my head and at the same time, to spend quality time with a dear friend. Trips are always the best antidote to uninspiration and I’m back feeling refreshed and ready to write away again (:

I’m posting the above photo, which is taken in Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Room, because I’ve been trying to clear my Google Reader and I am getting so bored of reading blogs. Whatever I read (for the fashion genre) fall into two general categories: personal style vs. fashion news.

While it does kill time, I find that fashion news are generally repeated. For example, I’ve been reading a lot of coverage on The Uniform Project. It’s a really great idea, I love it! But when I read it for the fifth time I get pretty bored of it.

I read a lot of personal style blogs too, but sometimes after reading and ‘getting’ the person’s style, you get kind of bored from it too. Like I really like reading the Rumi, Camille, Lulu blogs but after some time I stop clicking for two weeks… and then I read them all at once.

I think I spend so much time on the Internet that my attention span is decreasing constantly to the point where I need to be excited every time I click on a new page. If I don’t, I feel disappointed and bored.

My solution to this is to schedule a day every week to be totally offline. I take my journal, sit in a quiet cafe and write my thoughts away. I work on paper instead of on screen. I’m also working hard not to write out of ‘bloggers guilt’, but to write only with quality content.

Are you suffering from Internet overdependence? Do you constantly feel a need to read blogs or your Google Reader, or check out blogshops daily? If you didn’t get online for a day or two, do you feel like a part of your life is missing?

Let’s see how dependent the citizens on Fashion Nation are to the Web. (;

Your fellow Internet addict
Stephie

Party Kids

I’d always like photo shoots of kids, especially if the subjects are acting and looking like real children instead of just trying to imitate the poses and expressions of older models.

This spread by photographer Lee Chower for Cookie Magazine features great pictures which thread the thin line of being child-like but not childish. The rather formal clothes (which bring to mind summer garden parties) also tone down the cute factor, and that’s good, because overly sweet-looking children are such a cliche

And I will definitely wear the following dresses:

Once again, I find myself wishing I’m small enough to fit into mini-adults clothes.

Party away!
Dottie

Michael Jackson: 1958 – 2009

Stephie is away and I just got back from another short weekend getaway yesterday (somehow I’m doing a lot of that this year). I’d also been feeling sad about the demise of the King of Pop, so the writing has been a little slow here while I mourne a little and binge-watch Michael Jackson videos on YouTube.

Smooth Criminal is my absolute favourite, so I’ll like to share it with you.

Hope you’ll like it too!

xoxo,
Dottie

LG Microsoft Smartphone Giveaway

[Normal postings continue below this entry.]

[EDIT: Deadline to submit entries extended to 12 July.]

Now, we’d like to invite you to re-discover your own wardrobe. And you could stand a chance to win one of the latest LG Windows smartphones, the LG-GM730.

Simply put together creative outfits mixed-and-matched from your wardrobe, take photos and upload them onto Windows Live SkyDrive – your personal 25 GB of online storage.

The most creative and fashion-forward entry will win.  You must be residing in Asia to participate as we will not be able to ship the prize to countries outside of Asia.

Step-by-step details to enter:

The Fashion Nation Girls Escape

Last weekend, Dottie and I celebrated our eleven year friendship anniversary with our friends, The Girls, with a weekend trip to Batam. We booked a suite and did basically nothing! It was filled with sweaty dinners at hole-in-wall diners by the sea, hours-long massages, manicures, coffees, A&W(!) and bedroom fights involving peanuts.

This week, Dottie and I will be separately taking trips of our own this weekend as well. We have been busy with work, our lives in general and Fashion Nation appointments regarding Manifesto and Shop Nation.

I have so many new acquisitions to share with you: stationery, shoes, dresses! Yet life is getting the better of me and everyday I rush off to the next appointment… I can’t wait to sit down with a new notebook, a pen and a coffee to get my thoughts sorted out.

If you are like me and kind of lost this week, take some quiet time out from your life, your friends and get away to a little cafe! Do nothing, read a magazine (Monocle has a great issue out, I heard!), stay hydrated. Don’t let the stupid Singapore heat get to you.

I’ll see you next week and hopefully feeling a bit more settled to start writing proper again.

(photo from here)

blowing cool air & love!
Stephie

Dear Cathy, I Heart You

In the image-obsessed world of online fashion, its a wonder how much I love the insightful musing of Cathy Horyn on her New York Times blog/column – pictures are spare and some posts are made up entirely of words.

What she writes is not so much fashion journalism to me, but prose, less technical and more beautiful.

My favourite of her recent entries will have to the 2 posts she wrote on “The Bigger Picture”, which included a speech she made at the 6th annual Citi Women & Co. event. I enjoyed this piece that is both a retrospective of the fashion industry in the last 50 years and a reading of what is to come or rather, what must be done to knock the commercial imperative out of fashion.

But my favourite quote will have to be this:

The other day I picked up a $16 pair of classic white jeans at Wal-mart. Love them. They will be part of my summer wardrobe.

Its great to know that even the fashion insiders buy cheap denim – if they fit well

Because this blog is after all part of the online world of fashion, I feel compelled to break the wordiness of this post with a picture of the new Celine collection.

[Courtesy of Celine]

That dusty pink jacket with the bright purple pants (and is that a plain white tee I see?) is quite perfect.

Words are cool (if they’re the right ones),
Dottie