Of the two, the yellow was the win, even though it was the least considered of the two. I wore the yellow chinos all the time, and they seemed to go with almost everything, despite the fact that I am wearing white in the photo above.
I wore the blue less often. In fact I mostly wore them working in the garden. I've always preferred loose, ankle length pants for gardening, and they look good with my blue sun-proof shirt. They are perhaps an expensive purchase for garden pants, but if they work they work. However, when a spell of early fall temperatures came through in the first part of September, the pale blue chinos came out of the closet more often. The yellow seemed so overtly summery, and although the pale blue is a summer color, I could wear them with light sweaters and jackets more easily. They felt psychologically right as a transitional garment.
However, the chinos only account for half of my summer clothing purchases. While I was in Anthropologie trying on chinos, I saw a little baby-doll top and took it to the dressing room, certain I would hate it. I did not, despite all my reservations about grown women in baby doll garments. It has proven to be a great top for those days when it is so hot and humid that you really don't want anything actually touching your skin, and I convince myself that it looks good as well, although that may be pushing it. It looks cute layered with a long slim tank over skinny jeans, but I didn't actually wear skinny jeans much during the hot days. Usually I wore it with shorts when I was just hanging out. And yes, I actually wore shorts this summer despite the fact that I refused to wear them when I was younger and had better legs. Perhaps it is true that I just no longer define myself by other people's opinions.
But probably the best purchase, one that rivals the yellow chinos, and might prove a better investment, was a pair of wide-leg cropped jeans with dangling fringes. They are slim through the hips and wide through the legs, reminding me somewhat of gauchos. But wearing them makes me feel so happy. I wore them all summer. I'll probably wear them with boots all fall.
In some ways all of these garments pushed my sartorial boundaries a little bit, were part of the process of letting go of notions of defining what I should wear by what I understand to be expected. Not that I am ever going to go way out on a sartorial limb -- I'm more comfortable being an artsy cousin than full, in-your-face bohemian. But in these garments, and these outfits, I feel most like myself, most confident to negotiate the world, and if the proportions are occasionally "off" by someone else's scale, I find they are perfect for me. But it took me a long time to accept that the private me could come to terms with the public me. I liked having a structure of expectation to fall back on. In the corporate world there are parameters that are not there in the casual world, and I had trouble negotiating that transition. It seems I am finally claiming my space, my voice, my place.
