Mo Kim

While I’m still having plenty of fun with this challenge, I’m officially past the halfway point – and the honeymoon phase is decidedly over. Some of the themes I have left still make me scratch my head, wondering how I’ll manage to pull them off (if you have ideas for Viking Day, please let me know). Others feel a little impractical: would I really lavish that nice button-up shirt, I ask myself, on a day spent working-from-home?

Most of all, I’m realizing that maybe my personal style is so routine because I myself have become a fairly routine person! I’m a firm believer than fashion follows function: no need to dress for an environment or a context that you aren’t normally a part of, after all. So while I’ve enjoyed playing with my dress this month, my excitement is tempered by the reality of my relatively humdrum life. These are all great outfits to put together, for sure, but in a week that mostly comprises sending emails from bed, heating microwave popcorn in the office, and sweating like a pig at the gym, I don’t always have the right reason to wear them.

Maybe the real lesson of this February Fashion Challenge is that ya boi needs to get out of the house a little more often. Let me know if any of you want to go terrorize some museums or public parks sometime!

Anyway, today’s outfit. I was tasked with dressing in pastel colors, and though I had limited options, I’m pretty happy with the result:

The reason you’re seeing two versions of the daily outfit is simple: weight gain. The skinny green chinos on the left are genuinely some of the tightest pants I have ever worn in my life, and although my legs eventually acclimated to the feeling of being pressed from all directions, they weren’t the most comfortable pants to conduct three hours of Zoom calls in. (They still look great, and I’m for sure keeping them.) The jeans made this outfit significantly more comfortable, at the expense of deviating a bit from the pastel theme – that being said, I think the contrast in texture and color helps add a little bit of variety, so I don’t mind it!

Overall, I enjoyed figuring out my outfit of the day! I even got a few compliments from my co-workers during our last Zoom meeting of the day. I just hope that next time, I have the opportunity to wear it somewhere that isn’t my living room!

Steal the look:

• Bucket hat, sky-blue (Where did this hat come from? Why don’t I ever remember buying it?)
• Sleepy Peach, The Lighthouse Sweater (I absolutely love this sweater…and that’s why I rarely, if ever, wear it. I’m scared I’m going to, like, spill an entire cup of soup on it and ruin it forever. But someday I’ll actually wear this out of the house. Someday.)
• GAP denim jacket (I can’t tell if I’ve outgrown this jacket or if it’s supposed to fit the way it does. I just have pretty big shoulders.)
• Banana Republic skinny stretch chinos, thyme (The name is accurate. They’re skinny. They stretch. They’re chinos! And they’re a fun color to boot!)

Tomorrow: I enter the realm of academia…