I probably should have just queued these posts up and released them throughout the next week instead of posting four in one day, but eh, I’m still firmly thinking of this whole thing as a hobby involving sporadically-produced content rather than an endeavor involving a targeted growth rate of views.

TL;DR:

As you may have seen in my recent post where I talk about Dividing A Wardrobe Into Style Sub-Capsules, I have recently started trying to think about my wardrobe in smaller, more manageable chunks so I can have an easier time creating cohesive outfits. After getting this new pair of pants and lighter colored ankle boots, I just had so many ideas for outfits I thought it would be fun to make outfits from an EVEN SMALLER subset of items from my “storybook romantic” themed capsule.

I mean really, it’s just easier. The hard part is picking the items to start with so they mostly go together, then you can just enumerate all the combinations. Also it seems like stylebee and unfancy just silently decided to stop doing the 10×10 challenge so I didn’t get my seasonal wardrobe curation urges out of my system.

I certainly don’t wish to have a tiny wardrobe, I just love the exercise as a tool to discover more outfit combinations within my wardrobe. It’s also good practice for creating travel wardrobes, since those are usually very small. I’m probably going to wear a bunch of outfits from this pool over the next couple of days because I think they look cool and am excited to wear them, but I’m not aiming to really ~experience the capsule wardrobe lifestyle~ so much as just come up with some nice looks.

I’ve done a couple of these before, and at this point I think the biggest issue you can encounter with mini capsules (besides potentially not including weather-appropriate things) is boredom.

Even if you pick a bunch of stuff you like, if you don’t typically wear the same silhouette or color of bottoms a few weeks in a row, you’re really going to start hating everything about 4 days in. To remedy this, I always try to keep in mind including a variety of

• silhouettes,
• colors,
• color values (light, medium, dark colors),
• and textures/prints

within each item category. That means not just picking 4 black bottoms and all my statement tops, but distributing the visual interest throughout the whole wardrobe. I use this concept heavily in my posts where I create entire wardrobes from scratch based off of Pinterest boards. Don’t forget about shoes!

I’m playing a little dangerously with this rule by including two of the same sweater but in different colors, but we’ll see how that goes.

Items

Anyway, here’s what I picked, zoomed-in:

Tops

What makes these pieces  “storybook romantic”? Balloon sleeves, rouleau button details (can’t really see on the flat, but the floral blouse has rouleau buttons on the cuffs and back closure), rich fabric textures (though not actually rich – that blouse is polyester), and generally nothing too sporty and modern looking. Also tbh these are just all my favorite tops ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

• spruce green velvet button-front camisole, Madewell
• navy floral blouse, H&M
• spruce green ribbed long sleeve top, H&M
• ochre blouson-sleeved cotton sweater, Madewell
• white blouson-sleeved cotton sweater, Madewell

Bottoms

Variety of silhouette! Doesn’t read too well in the flat, but those pants are rather loose around the thighs and taper to a dramatic cuff (because I’m short and cuff them aggressively) when worn.

• floral skinny pants, H&M x Morris&Co (I have a whole post about these)
• spruce green pleated corduroy trousers, Topshop
• tan cotton twill midi skirt, Uniqlo

Outerwear

Sometimes I don’t include outerwear in my capsules, but I think now I do have quite a few more fashion-y items so I want to try and practice thinking about outfits to include them more. I made sure to include a mix of cropped and longer pieces, as well as different amounts of drapiness. Unfortunately the drapey coat is too fitted to wear with sweaters underneath any thicker than the cashmere one, so it is a bit less versatile.

• Taupe cashmere blouson sleeve cardigan, Halogen petites
• Dark gray drapey clasp-closure wool-blend coat, Forever 21
• Black faux-fur lined toggle wool-blend coat, Calvin Klein via Facebook marketplace
• Tan fleece bomber jacket, Uniqlo U (from ebay)

Accessories

I’m not really going to constrain myself with what accessories I’m using with this, but here’s a sampling of the sorts of jewelry I’m planning to wear with the clothes. As usual, going all-in on the witchy and botanical motifs.

Shoes

Mostly mid-heeled items, but I’m quite pleased of the variety here. High shafts, low shafts, suede, leather, patent leather, lace-ups, buckles, pointy toes, round toes, colors besides black! The taupe/beige boots are new so I’m hoping this will really help kickstart their wears.

Outfit Ideas

Grouped by which top was used. I didn’t really include the toggle coat, but that one was meant more as a practical coat to chuck over the outfits rather than an integral part of them, although I want to wear that one more instead of just defaulting to my puffer jacket all the time.

As alluded to earlier, it’s pretty much just all the possible permutations of the tops and bottoms, so I’m not going to blather on too much about them here, besides drawing attention to the monochrome dark green looks that I’m low-key excited about as I hadn’t thought of combing those items before.

Also I realized a bit after I uploaded these that I forgot to swap in the gray flats into some of the outfits after I added them a bit late (can’t wear heels all the time), but as I’ve got so many shoe options here anyway hopefully the whole “variety” point still comes across.

I’ve actually worn a few of these outfits already or just have photographs of from planning, so here are some photos of the items on me. I’ll do a follow-up post with more of them, or possibly just link to my upcoming March Outfits posts if I do end up wearing these consecutively.

Edit April 18 2019: I don’t think I’ll be writing a follow-up post, but for the record, here’s a screenshot/collage of most of what I ended up wearing! (click image to view full res in new tab). Collage doesn’t include one outfit with the white sweater (just didn’t feel like wearing it). There’s also only one outfit with the cami (ended up that I didn’t feel like wearing it to the office much and it was too cold on weekends for it). The first outfit with the floral blouse I did wear during the challenge period but I just didn’t bother to retake a photo of it.

I think this is my best mini capsule yet! Really excited to wear all these outfits, which is great since that was the whole point of me spending a bunch of time figuring out which of my items would really mesh together and work with the current weather.

Let me know if you’d like to see more of these kinds of posts, even if they don’t include complete IRL outfit-on pics. I’m not a career blogger, so I don’t have endless outfits, but at least I personally enjoy making these little capsules so I figured I might as well spend a bit longer on them to throw them up on the blog.

I used the Stylebook app for iOS to make the outfit collages (I can at best say the collage feature and photo editor is mostly functional, although I wouldn’t necessarily recommend the app for wardrobe tracking – see Wardrobe Inventory and Outfit Logging Methods for more on that) and the befunky online collage maker to then collage those into outfit sets.