pieces of flare

My summer wardrobe obsession was maxi dresses and skirts, and I'm getting the sense that jeans are going to be fall's wardrobe obsession.  I feel like that sounds boring on the style-front, but I'm actually pretty excited about it.  Having spent most of my adolescence in decidedly unstylish jeans-based outfits, I think it's taken quite a while to figure out how to wear jeans in a way that makes me feel stylish and creative.  One of the things that has hindered my ability to really delve into styling jeans is that for a long time the popular jean cuts weren't really suited for my body type.  I longed for high waisted jeans to come back in style for about a decade and now that they're finally here I'm hoarding them like Twinkies.  My mom has a pair of white high-waisted sailor-esque wide-leg (whoa, too many hyphens...) pants and I have lamented many a time that she was smaller than I and I could only ever barely squeeze into them.  
Wide leg pants are one of those things that petite girls tend to shy away from, it seems, out of a fear that they will make us look shorter, stumpier, and wider.  I remember thinking this same thing about maxi dresses, and the opposite actually proved to be true, so I figured my misconception might carry over to wide leg jeans. These jeans are very long on me, I have to wear my giant platforms and they still skim the ground a tad.  Thankfully these shoes are one of my most comfortable pairs of heels, so I don't really mind, and as a bonus it makes my legs look crazy long.  It's been forever since I had a pair of jeans in my wardrobe that wasn't a skinny jean.  It'll be fun figuring out how to style them in different ways!
   
top(on sale!)/courtesy of wildlife works :: jeans + shoes/courtesy of modcloth
bracelet/courtesy of musana jewelry :: necklace/courtesy of moorea seal
Remember how I was all, "I'm not ready for fall yet, I'm holding onto summer still!" Yeah, nope.  Over it.  It was hot as balls today.  Bring on the crisp air and sweater weather please.  It was honestly much too warm to even be entertaining the idea of putting on dark jeans, but I was so excited that they came in the mail finally I couldn't resist putting them on immediately.  
All that being said, I'm pretty excited these days about how "me" I feel in the outfits I've been styling this year.  For my Remix Archives posts I have to go back into my image banks and find images where I'm wearing the same item, and sometimes I go all the way back to 2009.  I actually like quite a few of the outfits from 2009 and 2010, but I started having a weird transitional style period starting in 2011 extending through part of 2012.  I like some of the outfits from that period, but there are quite a few things that I'm just like, huh?  But it's all a process.  Growing pains.  Learning what feels right and what doesn't.  What makes me feel more myself and what makes me feel like a hermit crab in a too-small shell.