New Me, Budapest

REST WHEN YOU ARE WEARY. REFRESH AND RENEW YOURSELF, YOUR BODY, YOUR MIND, YOUR SPIRIT. AND THEN GET BACK TO WORK. RALPH MARSTON

After looking at the photos from the last five years just before leaving France for Hungary, I realized that it is high time for me to buy some new clothes.

There is a dress that I have been wearing for the last five years and another I have been wearing since I was 21, so that’s like 100 in cat years!

Not that I overly care, but I would love to have some kind of handle on fashion, and to have ‘looking good’ on my priority list for longer than a minute. I have tried before, but I give up fairly quickly and start wearing my comfortable pants again.

I have been holding on to a few items that I bought my last year in Canada like a lifeline home, or some cosmic connection to a life I once had. There are memories attached to those clothes, I am totally guessing here, but instead of the cute person that once wore those outfit, I am and they are both a shadow of the former. The clothes stretched out and faded from one too many times through the wash.

It is time to say goodbye to those old clothes, to Canada, to France, and to my former selves. And what a better way to celebrate a new start than with new clothes?

I am open to it. Especially working inside a school with teachers who are professionally dressed in clothes that actually match, and fit them! They even wear proper working / walking shoes! I know crazy right? My bio material sandals just don’t fly, nor does my laid back look; especially with my bright Mediterranean Sea blue inspired nail polished toes, loose fitted mumus, and beach blown hair.

Living in southern France I got away with very few items of clothing. In the summer it was bathing suits and bathing suit covers, shorts and T-shirts and my signature flip-flops. In winter it was tights and long shirts, scarves and boot or gym clothes with running shoes. I was in complete comfort all the time… It was bliss… But a grown-up woman of age forty-something must buy clothes that not only feel good, but look good. Remember Cotton Ginny the clothing line made of soft loose cotton fabrics. Once you start wearing them it was hard to go back to regular clothes. That’s where I am at, in the comfort realm. 

Budapest is a metropolitan city and we live in a fashionable neighbourhood where women come straight to pick-up their children from the hair dresser at least once a week. Designer clothes are not for the weekend but for the everyday. In this spirit the least I should do is to buy a few key pieces to show my new students I take my job seriously.

It is funny though, no matter how much money we have ever had or not had, my wardrobe has never been my priority.

Alfonz is far better at this than I am. He walks into a store and buys beautiful pieces of clothing and when he gets them home they magically go with his other clothes hanging in his closet. Me, I have to bring someone with me for a second opinion, and buy a complete outfit in one stop, because I know that the shoes I thought would go, won’t and my taste is less than good. 

I have always envied people with impeccable taste. You know the perfect shoes with the perfect matching bag, the sleek haircut and the nails in the exact same shade of sea foam green as her outfit. Just thinking about all the work and organization it would take makes me exhausted. I never understood words like; basics, casuals, formal or coordinates…

If I had to define my ‘style’ (I use this term very loosely here) it would be eclectic much like my education, and somewhat like the interior of my house, even my life, and my friends… Random things (people) that make me happy. Sometimes for a brief moment in time, other times I find them tireless. Sometimes I buy a dress because of the colour, or the way it flows when I walk however it rarely has anything to do with how I look in it. It is mostly about the way it makes me feel.

Today that all changed! I have hired a personal assistant. She is small in stature and definitely on the younger side with long dark hair and quite a personality.

Do you know who I am talking about yet?

She has very good taste and is always changing her clothes. In fact she is notorious for this, and I would know because I’m the one who cleans up the piles of discarded items off her bedroom floor. Yup you guessed it, my 10 year old daughter Angelina. Believe it or not, Angelina has impeccable taste, probably from her father’s side, a natural ability to see the whole picture and has an innate sense of what goes with what, how and why.

She has been dressing me for the last week and coming to the outlets stores to help me shop. We have hit all the name brand shoe and sport stores in search of just the right key pieces.

What a big difference she has made in my confidence and my new look.

Tomorrow I will wear my first Angelina picked outfit to school.