I was once asked who my "style icon" was, and after a bunch of waffling - I'd never been asked that before, and my instant reaction was to say "Audrey Hepburn", because despite the fact that there are few people on the planet whose style resembles mine less, she seems to sort of be a de facto icon - I landed on Kate Hudson.
But you know who it really is?
I'm going to have to add one more item to my list of easy (and affordable) updates for your autumn wardrobe: an olive-green anorak. It's such an easy piece to toss over leather leggings and jeans...but my favorite way to wear it is with a gauzy floral mini (yes, in the fall; this is how you do it) and clogs.
(OK...the "dress" I'm wearing in that center shot is actually a "blouse" - I picked it up back when I was eight months pregnant to wear with jeans - but tomayto tomahto.)
Some suggestions pour vous at a wide range of prices (my favorites have a zip-out lining so you can wear them all the way through until full-on winter and a furry hood).
There are some things that you rarely use, but are just super cool to own.
Like, say, a black, floor-length beaded gown that's really better-suited to the Oscars than anything that your real life actually involves, but that you found about a decade ago on Fifth Avenue for 80% off because some beads down near the hemline were missing and thought, "hey."
Or a bedazzled mask.
It's strange: when I lived in L.A. "laid-back" is not a word I would have used to describe myself. I mean, I definitely did my fair share of pool-lounging during the years that I lived on the sunny side of the world, but the pervasive sense of not being where I wanted to be, not doing what I wanted to be doing colored every single day so thoroughly that it was often difficult to see the beautiful things that were all around me. I tried to see them...I just wasn't always so successful.
Experiencing L.A. nearly a decade (!) later - and from a whole different perspective - is another thing entirely.
You know how they say that women who have gone through childbirth experience a kind of selective amnesia about the truly atrocious parts of the process that enables them to even begin to conceive of doing the whole thing over again? Well, I don't know if that's necessarily true for everyone - I've got some crystal-clear recall going on, thanks - but that's sort of how it felt hanging out in L.A. again after all these years.
