How to Wear a Literal Print in 2015: Show, Don’t Tell I’m sort of allergic to prints, I think. (The kind you wear, not the kind you hang on your wall.) And considering the fact that we, as a nation—and I’m not sure whether it’s geographical or generational, but it’s true—fling the adverb “literally” around so rashly, so widely, and so blatantly incorrectly as to really do it irretrievable harm (try typing “misuse of the word” into Google and watch the search bar fill it in for you, literally), when it comes to the matter of next season’s quite holiday-party-perfect literal prints, well, could you blame me for my hesitancy? I love them on other people, the way I imagine you might appreciate your friend’s penchant for lobster if you had a shellfish allergy. Oh, how terrific! What an interesting protein! What claws it has! What a ruddy sheen! But I actually can’t remember the last time I even touched a printed article of clothing in a store. It’s almost like I don’t even see them there, the proposition is so beyond my comprehension. Like most things, I feel free to blame some early life incident that I’m sure has been subsumed into my personality and that I can’t remember but has left me with the deeply held belief that goes something like: “Prints? Unflattering. Too loud. Too look-at-me. Too brash. Tough to wear. Tougher to repeat wear! Not me. No thanks.” Let alone literal prints, which seemed just sort of intentionally “wacky” in the way that a) I’ve never found particularly appealing, and b) renders them unrepeatable because everyone remembers the last time you wore a dress printed with some elaborate rendering of seahorses. So my acquisition of a raincoat printed with a leaping zeal of zebras (too bizarre to refuse, too beautiful to avoid) was a departure enough to provoke my editor to suggest this article. And sure, I may never have quite given prints a fair shake. (My typical garment assessment usually coming down to an equation along the lines of Is this flattering? + Blending potential into existing wardrobe/Where does this fit into my sartorial narrative? x Would Jane Birkin/Belle de Jour–era Catherine Deneuve/Jacqueline Bisset/Charlotte Rampling wear this? Prints, historically, have rarely passed muster. And then Louis Vuitton spring 2015 happened. All sorts of leggy, gamine dream girls with the hair I want and the eye makeup I want (essentially, the look I want) trotted out in the best of all of 2015′s trends, a good portion of which were printed with, ahem, very literal renderings of things like race cars, salt and pepper shakers, hair dryers, and even last season’s hotly coveted LV-emblazoned micro-trunks. Add a good dash of Opening Ceremony’s pre-fall green juice–inspired mélange of pineapples, et al., and you’ve got a recipe to start gunning for the literal print. And when I really think about it, there’s something so holiday-friendly about prints: They’re cheery. They’re interesting. They’re lively. Why am I hiding behind a fear of looking busy? I am busy. And it’s not like I’ve ever been afraid of standing out before. Why not look alive this party season?
Posted on: Fri, 09 Jan 2015 19:35:52 +0000
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