Posts Tagged: Personal Style

Style

How To: Wear A Pink Leather Jacket

It's always a good day when you discover that your jacket matches your fake deer head.

But I'm not gonna lie: pink jackets always give me pause. I mean, I don't really want to look like a Pink Lady...but then, of course, I also sort of do (more in a Rizzo way than a pre-makeover Sandy way). For yesterday's shoot and meetings in the city, I decided to skip my usual skinny jeans in favor of  a simple black dress that I bought for our upcoming trip to the Dominican Republic but couldn't wait to wear, and graphic black-and-white accessories to keep the whole thing from going too girly.

Here's a more casual way to try out the look:

My Looks

This Is Today

In many ways it's the things that I wear on my "off" days (days when I don't have any shoots, meetings, or anyone to get dressed for besides my son, the mailman, and the cashier at the grocery store) that I have the most fun with.

My Looks

With My Red Bandanna On

During my senior year of college, I got a bartending job at Red Line, a bar in Harvard Square that had replaced the much-storied Crimson Sports Grille. (The Grille had been shut down in the wake of years of very accurate allegations that freshmen were routinely being let in with the very most pathetic of fake IDs; as an indicator of how closely they were examining the photos at the door, my own ID was a hand-me-down from the older sister of a friend. Who was Korean.) Red Line was struggling a little to match the Grille's popularity, and I was hired to promote and host a weekly Senior Night, which mostly meant serving a lot of Black & Tans and Kamikaze shots to extremely drunk classmates. Which was pretty fun, actually.

Now, Red Line was more of a Cobb salads-and-martinis-type place, but I've always been a dive bar girl; I like my beer completely uninteresting-tasting and hovering somewhere around the three-dollar mark. The place where I got my first bartending job, Hogs 'n' Heifers (the bar that the movie Coyote Ugly was based on, and yes I did dance around in cowboy boots, light the bar on fire, and yell song lyrics over a megaphone), was much more my speed. My "work uniform" consisted of things like cowboy boots, fringed leather, and denim cutoffs. At Red Line, it was black slacks and a black tee. No megaphone, alas.

But I couldn't resist bringing one little memento from my biker bar days: my red bandanna. When I worked at Hogs 'n' Heifers I had an enormous collection of red bandannas and kept one tucked into my back pocket at all times, using it for everything: wiping off my hands after a too-enthusiastic pour, tying my hair back when my elastic broke, patching up my jeans when they grew one too many holes. In all the bartending jobs I held in the years that followed - I worked everywhere from a tapas restaurant in the Valley to a pizza place in West Hollywood to a swanky club in Hell's Kitchen - I wore lots and lots of different things to work...but always, always carried my bandanna. To this day, whenever I upend a milk carton or spill a little water on my kitchen countertop, I sometimes find myself reaching towards my back pocket.

I kind of miss it.


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