I’ve been quiet on my blog this week because I’ve been spending a lot of time analysing ‘chic’ and, in particular, midlife chic. It is after all what I set out to do. My plan is to create the ultimate timeless wardrobe of essentials that can then have the odd fashion accent applied to them. I’ve been studying the women who really inspire me to try to find what it is about their style that encapsulates midlife chic – I’ve made a celebrity chic Pinterest board they include:
Emilia Fox
Helen Mirren
Keeley Hawes
Kristen Scott-Thomas
Anna Wintour
and, of course, Audrey Hepburn
Poring through photos of them, I’ve come to some conclusions about why they are so stylish.
For a start, they are not trend driven. They dress simply but strikingly and they have great hair. They are also all women who have an understanding of what makes them look good in terms of cut and colour. Take Anna Wintour for example (and here’s another Pinterest board to show you what I mean) – I’m using her because she’s photographed so often in daywear. Other celeb shots tend to be in eveningwear or caught unaware in bikinis – poor things.
She hardly ever wears black which is really surprising when you take into account the fact that it is the fashionista’s fallback. In fact she works really hard with a core colour palette of dark greens, oranges, beige, ivory, grey, warm red and occasionally a bright blue. If she does wear black, she makes sure she has a bright statement necklace to lift it.
She certainly has a signature style of dresses or skirts, usually worn on the knee, almost always fitted to display her slender waist. Most interestingly she nearly always wears a crew neck with a statement necklace.
The other thing that’s really noticeable is that she never wears trousers. I managed to find one shot of her in J Brand jeans but nothing of her in trousers – why is that I wonder?
She keeps things simple. Unless it’s bitter winter weather, when she wears knee high boots, she almost always wears the same shoes, or rather nude coloured sandals (Manolo’s by the way):
Now this is truly difficult to understand. There must be so many shoe designers falling over themselves to offer her free shoes, I can’t imagine any other woman who wouldn’t fall instantly into shoe heaven. I can only imagine that it’s an accessory too far for her to think about. Her days are long with early starts and late finishes and I suppose, in her eyes, those nude sandals work with everything. She seems to take the same approach to jewellery – I’m sure those sparkly numbers aren’t from Top Shop but she wears the same ones again and again.
So really in this post about Anna I’ve given you an idea of what I want to achieve over the next few weeks. A plan for a core wardrobe for any woman over 40 who is aiming for ‘chic’ as her definition. Soon I hope to have a wardrobe that works for me in the same way that Anna’s does for her. A wardrobe that I don’t have to think about because it just works. Then I can go on towards adding nods to fashion. Sadly I won’t have the budget, the freebies or the stylists at my fingertips that she has – but then where’s the challenge in that!
Are there any celebrities that you think are particularly chic? Let me know who inspires your style and I’ll add them to my board.
