my first purchase…

… a cloche hat.

I’m actually a week into my skirts only experiment and so far there’s nothing extraordinary to report. I’m used to wearing skirt suits to work and skirts to church so not wearing trousers hasn’t been a noticeable inconvenience. Plus the weather has been incredibly mild, albeit rainy. Otherwise, it’s been pretty much my regular dress routine. I’m sorry I don’t have any anecdotes or more exciting news to share. I know. Yawn.

The most exciting thing that has happened this week was I bought a hat. I’ve never worn a hat for fashions sake. I’ve worn knit hats for warmth and visors or ball caps for outdoorsy excursions, but never a hat for the sake of having something lovely on my head. It sounds so frivolous and silly when you think about it, but I started looking over various fashion blogs and old photographs and the hats… I think hats might now be competing with shoes for my affections.

The hat I bought was a bright red felt cloche hat that is the perfect shade of red to match my wool pea coat. I got a $20 gift card from the office secret santa so the expense was justifiable. It’s hard spending money on myself, moms you can relate. Somebody always needs a new pair of shoes and buying a hat in comparison seems wasteful. I hate waste.

How is a hat practical? How does this have anything to do with not wearing trousers for 30 days? Well, for practical intents and purposes this hat will protect my head from the elements and disguise bad hair days and look 100xs better than a knit ski cap while doing so. If I don’t have time to fix my hair before running out the house – voilà. Again, my challenge is about dressing less casually and more grown up and breaking away from sloppiness. I also want to show that you don’t have sacrifice style for modesty, or even style for comfort and convenience. Also I am a firm believer in polished appearances positively affecting outward demeanor. So we will see… will the Crescat swear a lot less wearing a pretty hat or will it be 30 days of lipstick on a pig. Who knows. We’ll just have to wait and see.

Image: Twiggy