Style Yourself

I recently purchased this little gem of a book and am so glad I spent my gift card monies on it. I devoured it in a matter of minutes. It has everything I want in a fashion book!

Style Yourself is a very light-read, perfect for flipping through to gather some quick fashion inspiration or to learn a thing or two. It has lots of pretty pictures and it features 95 international fashion bloggers with a foreword from Jane Aldrige of Sea of Shoes. It's a great fashion book which provides tips for shopping, tells us what the wardrobe must-haves are and offers personal style advice from the bloggers themselves.

Here you see 3 different bloggers styling the same cape in Cape Remix. Same cape, but rather different looks. The look's perfect for Autumn.

Here, some bloggers show us how they wore stripes. I've tried to steer clear of horizontal stripes because I've always heard they make you look wider than you really are, but apparently, stripes can be figure-flattering. Who knew?

The book's also great for getting to know a bit more about some of the bloggers behind the blogs we read. It's really interesting because you get to see where some of the bloggers draw their fashion inspiration from. Like many others, Shini of Park & Cube shared with us her inspiration for her outfit (ice cream, apparently!) and where she wore her outfit to.

This book has so much useful information, I find it very educational. I never seem to know the right names for certain patterns or materials and this book has certainly taught me a lot.

Having this book inspires me to try to be a bit more descriptive from now on in my outfit posts. A blouse will not be just called "a blouse", but I'll try to give it its proper name.

It has also got really cute illustrations. Look at these shoes. Amazing likeness!

I really like this book mainly because it's not fashion on the runway, but fashion worn by real people. There are plenty of photos of style coordinates in here from bloggers wearing vintage to bright neons. So it's a fantastic lookbook and a very good fashion dictionary, but I'm not sure it really teaches me to "Style Myself", but rather it provides the inspiration. Still, a great book, nonetheless.

Me in my bag

  Me in My Bag by Yi Ying Wang

Lately, I find myself glancing frequently towards this wonderful coffee table book sitting no, not on my coffee table, but on my book shelf in between Banksy: Wall and Piece and Debretts's Etiquette for Girls (oh, the irony). So today, I pulled it off the shelf and decided to do a blog post on it.

Can you guess what this book is about? Well, in a nutshell, it's a wonderful collection of pictures of 100 Londoners and things in their bag. Yi Ying Wang, Hiromi Iguchi and Will Farrow decided to go around London and ask random people to expose the contents of their bags! What an interesting project! The result is this charming little book, Me in My Bag.

To quote Wang on her website Noodoll.com, "This fun project blends design, London life style, fashion, trendy bag styles and photography together and plays on people's insatiable curiosity as to what people have tucked away inside their bags."

Ahhh…a book to feed my voyeuristic needs.

As you can see, this delightful book comes in the shape of a bag! Also, the clever page layout allows you to open up the pages so it feels as if you're truly peering into someone's bag.

The hundred Londoners were also given a short questionnaire to fill up, mainly to ask them about their bag and its contents. Some of the answers are really funny and some are creatively decorated. Oh, there was one by a 2 and three quarters year old toddler and his questionnaire was random bits of coloured paper and ink blotches. His bag must be one of those bottomless bags you see on children's tv because he had a lot of toys in it!

It’s definitely not the type of book you want to rush through in one sitting. Take your time to slowly devour it. Look closely at the items on every page; are they tutti fruti or minty fresh? Read the ticket stubs to see where they've been or what they've watched. Do they dump all their receipts to the bottom of their bag or are they a neat freak? With every page I turn over, I see how different lives are summarized between the pages of this book. Can we really tell how a person is by looking at the contents of their bag?

A lot of the artsy ones doodled on their questionnaire.

Besides your wallet and your phone, what is the one thing you always carry inside your bag?