Style Envy: Jenna Lyons

I have never been a huge fan of J. Crew.  My friend Michael used to be a walking J. Crew ad, and he had incredible style, so I can say I am a fan of the men's line.  For the women's side, I always just lumped Banana Republic and J. Crew in the same category.  It's all nice clothes, professional, inoffensive, maybe a place where I can pop in to grab a dress shirt or suit for work; really nothing special.

Jenna Lyons is the creative director at J. Crew.  She just finished up a guest spot on Girls, as Hannah's stylish and intimidating boss.  I instantly looked up her outfits from the show, and stumbled upon her entire catalog.  Holy. Crap.  This woman is so unbelievably chic!  After analyzing the looks she chooses for herself, I looked at the back catalogs for J. Crew, and these images really clicked with me.  She really incorporates herself into her work.  Everything she personally wears could easily show up, piece by piece, on paper in the lookbook.

The way she styles herself encompasses everything I love about fashion, and so much of what I have been writing about on this blog.

Here are two separate looks incorporating a lovely fur coat.  It works so well in a formal setting, and also in a more dressed-down setting.

The layering with this fur vest is so interesting.  The cross body bag in both looks is a perfect touch.

The contrast of this plain button up shirt with patterns that I would never think to pair it with.  Somehow, it works!  

SATC and Feathers

In an effort to make use of our usually dormant HBOgo account, I'm re-watching Sex and the City.  I'm in the middle of Season 3, and getting a huge kick out of the outdated tech, fashion, and pop culture references.  In one episode, Samantha was telling Carrie about a cutting-edge new service that guarantees a delivery person bring a DVD movie of your choice to your doorstep "in one hour or less."  I had to laugh out loud, because I was watching this episode from said HBO account on our Roku, which also contains our Netflix and Hulu.  It's hard enough to get us to wait for anything for one minute, let alone one hour.

Anyway, in typing up this blog entry, I can't help but feel a bit like Carrie Bradshaw  After all, isn't a blog in 2014 equivalent to a newspaper column in 2004?  There's a few key differences between Carrie and me: I prefer Brian Atwood to Manolo, I gave up smoking, and Steve is way cooler than Mr. Big.  However, we are both city girls to the core (albeit she the East Coast, and me the Best Coast).  And we both share the same affinity for off-the-wall fashion. Check out this killer feather dress, I knew I had to have this the second I saw it on Jessa:

[I've been trying to hunt this creation down to no avail.  I'm beginning to fear it was custom made.]

And a similar one I also love from the pages of my Teen Vogue from this month: