So I had a mini meltdown over linen pants
Continuing my postpartum personal style journey with a styling fail and a big shopping mistake
Downtime Edit is a new column exploring personal style post-pandemic (and postpartum, for me) and featuring the best shopping finds. (To opt out of this column, you can edit your email settings here.)
Today’s post was originally supposed to be about how to dress yourself in really hot weather without wearing shorts, a topic that recently won a poll on my Instagram. My plan was to show you how I’d style a simple article of clothing that I own: linen pants.
However, things did not go according to plan. I’m not one to bury the lede, so I’ll just tell you: my outfits were a disaster. Instead of throwing away the story idea altogether, I thought it would be helpful to share my shopping learnings from this saga. Learn from my mistakes!!
In particular, there is one piece of style advice that’s shared repeatedly on social media: “It’s not about the item; it’s all about how you style it.” (Or some variation thereof.) From my experience, though—and this particular one proves my theory—there are just certain lengths, shapes, cuts, and colors that will not work for you. As a petite woman, I know this very well. A big part of rediscovering my personal style postpartum has been to nail the right silhouette for my body. I can’t simply “throw on a belt and the right shoe” and magically feel great about my outfit. Sometimes, the details of the thing are all wrong.
This is why I’ve been so stubborn in my pursuit of the right “building block” pieces in my closet lately, like the perfect white tee, the perfect pair of jeans, and so on (which I owe you an update on). It can’t be just any tee—it has to have the right sleeve, collar, length, and shape for me. I’m curious about what you think about this popular piece of styling advice in the comments.
Anyway, here’s how my styling saga unfolded, the pieces I ended up adding to my wishlist as a result, and some other big shopping and styling takeaways.
My first step was choosing an item to style
As mentioned, I chose linen pants. I only own one pair of linen pants: these from Quince. They were so accessible in price that it was a bit of a throwaway purchase right before we left for Italy two summers ago. I didn’t put much thought into how I’d style them (my first shopping mistake), so they never actually got worn and have mostly sat in my closet for the past two years. The weather report read 88 degrees, I didn’t want to wear shorts or jeans, and I love a good challenge, so I thought—why not?
Next, I gathered a bit of style inspiration
When looking for outfit inspiration, I do two main things:
First, I do a quick Pinterest search. You can type in “____ outfit ideas” to come up with a few outfit formulas.
Second, I do a quick scroll through my Instagram saves (I have a style inspo collection that I save to) and my existing Pinterest saves to see if I can spot something interesting to try.
Here are a few of the outfits I pulled from my quick ten-minute inspiration search on Pinterest and my saved folders. You’ll see that I grouped them by similar outfit formulas. I only pulled outfits that I could recreate using similar items already in my closet:
And here are a few other styling ideas I found that I loved but couldn’t pull off with items already in my closet.
A longline vest with wide-leg trousers, an
classic! (Here’s a similar idea by Monikh - a linen top with wide-leg bottoms.) Unfortunately, I didn’t have the right shape of trousers or a long vest to make this work.
An oversized tee with trousers look. I value comfort, and this outfit looks like the pinnacle of comfort! I don’t own any oversized tees, though, so I set this look aside. (I made a mental note to buy these tees from Uniqlo, modeled recently by
.) (Here’s another example of the oversized tee and loose pants look.) A structured handbag with some hardware would help keep this outfit from feeling too casual.
Linen bottoms with romantic detailing paired with a simple light sweater. I love how the scalloped hem and embroidered detailing of these pants, shown below, add a romantic element. The trousers do most of the talking in this outfit. (Looks like they’re by a Copenhagen brand, Garment.)
Wide-leg linen trousers with a cropped top, tee, or vest. This was my next favorite silhouette. Easy, unfussy. By the end of my getting-dressed journey, I ended up adding these to my cart in black (and petite!).
Finally, I tried (keyword: tried!!) to style the pants
First, I tried this look inspired by the breezy pajama-esque look up top.
It’s not bad. I like the airy top paired with the airy bottoms, and I think the more masculine leather bag creates an okay balance. But I didn’t have the right type of bra to wear with this…
… so I threw on a cotton sweater over my shoulders. At this point, though, the outfit was leaning a little too Eileen Fisher (lol), so I threw on a bright scarf to brighten things up a bit. I liked the look, but it all felt too overdone for my activity that day: mostly WFH and out of a cafe.
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