12 days until spring

24 October 2024

October November Autumn Outfit Ideas

Autumn offers a beautiful blend of warm and cool days, making it the perfect time to experiment with light layering. Here are some outfit ideas to inspire your autumn wardrobe:

Pair a basic white tank, light wash jeans with statement accessories such as watches, bag and ballet flats for the perfect autumn brunch outfit.

Top: Staud Top

Jeans: The Row Jeans

Bag: Fondazione Lisio x Fendi A/W 2002

Flats: Cream Leather Ballet Flats

Watch: Cartier

Sunglasses: Celine Triomphe

Or pair a simple white top with unique silhouette such as puff sleeve and textures with flared blue jeans, statement shoulder bag, sunglasses and ballerina heels for going out shopping for the holiday season.

Top: H&M White Puff Sleeve Top

Jeans: H&M Flared Jeans

Bag: Staud Tommy Bag

Ballet Flats: Black Ballet Flats

Add a pastel pop to your outfit with powder blue. Incorporate it through tank tops and one shoulder tanks and pair it with beiges, whites and accessorise with ballet flats and gold jewellery.

Top: Blue Top

Trousers: H&M

Bag: Polene Bag

Flats: Brown Ballet Flats

Utilise basics already in your closet such as beige trousers and black tank to create the perfect autumn outfit by pairing it with gold jewellery, fun shoulder bag and ballet flats.

Top: Black Tank by H&M

Trousers: H&M

Ballet Flats: Ballet Flats H&M

Bag: Kate Spade

Sunglasses: Glasses

You can also utilise autumn staples such as plaids and chequers in your outfits. Pair them with flared jeans, loafers and crossbody bag.

Top: Gingham Top

Jeans: H&M Flared High Waisted Jeans

Bag: Loxley

Loafers: Gucci

Sunglasses: Chimi

Embrace the cozy season with textured cardigans, cable knits, pullovers in burgundy. Pair them with dark wash jeans, Mary Janes or ballet flats and cute accessories such as earrings and bow hair accessories.

Cardigan: Mango

Jeans: H&M High Waisted

Bag: Chanel

Heels: Prada

Watch: Cartier

Sweater: Burgundy Cable Knit Sweater

Trousers: H&M

Bag: Luisaviaroma

Create the cutest outfits for your Adidas Sambas with a mini skirt, cute top and shoulder bag.

Top: Blue Striped Bow Detail Top

Skirt: Navy Mini Skirt by H&M

Bag: Celine Ava Bag

Shoes: Adidas Samba

For the perfect autumn date night outfit, pair a satin midi skirt with ribbed tank, gold accessories, sling back heels and shoulder bag. Throw a cardigan on top to keep you warm and cozy.

Cardigan: H&M Teddy Cardigan

Skirt: H&M Midi Brown Skirt

Bag: Miu Miu Leather Bag

Heels: H&M Leather Strappy Heels

Watch: Cartier Panthère

If you haven't had time to switch out your summer wardrobe, you can pair a summer dress with a blazer or winter coat for the perfect cozy autumn outfit.

Blazer: H&M Linen Blazer

Dress: H&M Dress

Bag: Baguette Bag

Ballet Flats: Ballet Flats H&M

You can also layer all the outfits with cardigans, coats, trenches and blazers. Tips for layering:

Choose pieces that complement each other in terms of colour and texture.

Experiment with different combinations to find your own unique style.

Consider the weather when choosing your layers.

Have Fun Creating Your Best Looks

XOXO

23 October 2024

November Reading List

Looking for books to reach your end of year Goodreads reading challenge? Here are some books which come with rave reviews and you will certainly enjoy reading. Irrespective of any month you choose to read them, these books are classics you will enjoy reading in every season and which will be a great addition to your reading lists.

Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart

The 2020 Booker Prize winner, Shuggie Bain is the unforgettable story of young lonely boy set in 1980s run-down public housing in Glasgow, Scotland. Thatcher's policies have put men out of work, and the city's notorious drugs epidemic is waiting in the wings. Shuggie's mother Agnes is his guiding light but a burden for him and his siblings. Married to a philandering taxi-driver husband, Agnes keeps her pride by looking good to brighten up her grey life. But under the surface, Agnes finds increasing solace in drink, as she drains away the family's savings. Agnes's older children find their own ways to get a safe distance her, abandoning Shuggie to care for her as she swings between binges and sobriety. A heartbreaking story of addiction, sexuality, and love, it is an epic portrayal of a working-class family that is rarely seen in fiction. It is about poverty, abuse and a real exercise in empathy. You can tell that Agnes is trying her best and you're rooting for her, but at the same time you also recognize that she is a terrible mother to Shuggie, who is in an incredibly unhealthy, unsafe, unreliable environment, even though she doesn't want to. It's a lesson in how two things can be true at the same time. Shuggie meanwhile struggles to somehow become the normal boy he desperately longs to be. Agnes is supportive of her son, but her addiction has the power to eclipse everyone close to her--even her beloved Shuggie.

Check it here

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

Set in southern Appalachia mountains, this is the story of a boy, born to a teen single mother in a trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father's good looks and copper-colored hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival. He braves the modern perils of foster care, child labor, derelict schools, athletic success, addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing losses. Through all of it, he reckons with his own invisibility in a popular culture where even the superheroes have abandoned rural people in favor of cities. Many generations ago, Charles Dickens wrote David Copperfield from his experience as a survivor of institutional poverty and its damages to children in society. Those problems have yet to be solved in ours. Dickens is not a prerequisite reading, but he provided its inspiration. Demon Copperhead speaks for a new generation of lost boys, and all those born into beautiful, cursed places they can't imagine leaving behind.

Check it here

Open Water by Caleb Azumah Nelson

Open Water is a modern love story, soundtracked by contemporary references to R&B and Hip Hop. It is an exploration of the city, masculinity, police brutality, the black male body and its role and perception in society. It's about the anxieties at the start of a new relationship, when you're feeling yourself starting to give yourself over to somebody, but you're scared of being vulnerable. Two young people meet at a South East London pub. Both Black British, both won scholarships to private schools where they struggled to belong, both are now artists -- he a photographer, she a dancer -- trying to make their mark in a city that in turns celebrates and rejects them. Tentatively, tenderly, they fall in love. But two people who seem destined to be together can still be torn apart by fear and violence. At once an achingly beautiful love story and a potent insight into race and masculinity, Open Water asks what it means to be a person in a world that sees you only as a Black body, to be vulnerable when you are only respected for strength, to find safety in love, only to lose it.

Check it here

Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie

Set in modern Britain we follow two sets of families. The Pasha family consists of twins Aneeka and Parvaiz and their older sister Isma, who has raised them in the years since the death of their mother; their jihadi father, whom the twins never knew, is also dead. Parvaiz attempts to follow in his father's footsteps by joining ISIS. He soon decides he has made a serious mistake and his twin sister attempts to help him return to Britain, in part through her romantic relationship with Eamonn Lone, son of British Home Secretary Karamat Lone, who has built his political career on his rejection of his own Muslim background. The concerns of the novel include the identity and security of Muslims in Britain. It speaks of the troubles of Muslims as they struggle to maintain a unique cultural identity while defending their ''Britishness'' and loyalty to the state against political and social activists who wish to alienate them.

Check it here

The Girl with the Louding Voice by Abi Daré

Set in Nigeria, it's about Adunni a fourteen-year-old girl who knows what she wants: an education. She recognizes that education is what can unlock a brighter future for her and that is her biggest goal. As the only daughter of a broke father, she is a valuable commodity. Removed from school and sold as a third wife to an old man, Adunni's life amounts to this: four goats, two bags of rice, some chickens and a new TV. When unspeakable tragedy swiftly strikes in her new home, she is secretly sold as a domestic servant to a household in the wealthy enclaves of Lagos, where no one will talk about the strange disappearance of her predecessor, Rebecca. As a yielding daughter, a subservient wife, and a powerless servant, Adunni is repeatedly told that she is nothing. But Adunni won't be silenced. She is determined to find her voice - in a whisper, in song, in broken English - until she can speak for herself, for the girls like Rebecca who came before, and for all the girls who will follow. This coming of age novel is about the way education can mobilize people. It is about a courageous girl determined to make more from her life than she has been given.

Check it here

White Teeth by Zadie Smith

wWe follow three cultures, three families, three generations in modern Britain. At the center of this invigorating novel are two unlikely friends, Archie Jones and Samad Iqbal. Hapless veterans of World War II, Archie and Samad and their families become agents of England’s irrevocable transformation. A second marriage to Clara Bowden, a beautiful, albeit tooth-challenged, Jamaican half his age, quite literally gives Archie a second lease on life, and produces Irie, a knowing child whose personality doesn’t quite match her name (Jamaican for “no problem”). Samad’s late-in-life arranged marriage (he had to wait for his bride to be born), produces twin sons whose separate paths confound Iqbal’s every effort to direct them, and a renewed, if selective, submission to his Islamic faith. Set against London’s racial and cultural tapestry, venturing across the former empire and into the past as it barrels toward the future, White Teeth revels in the ecstatic hodgepodge of modern life, flirting with disaster, confounding expectations, and embracing the comedy of daily existence.

Check it here

A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara

The novel portrays the lives of four classmates from a small Massachusetts college, who move to New York and who are best friends growing up together. It's about love and friendship. We watch them grow up and navigate life, face the peaks and troughs. They fall in and out of each other's lives. They're broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition. There is kind, handsome Willem, an aspiring actor; JB, a quick-witted, sometimes cruel Brooklyn-born painter seeking entry to the art world; Malcolm, a frustrated architect at a prominent firm; and withdrawn, brilliant, enigmatic Jude, who serves as their center of gravity. Over the decades, their relationships deepen and darken, tinged by addiction, success, and pride. Yet their greatest challenge, each comes to realize, is Jude himself, by midlife a terrifyingly talented litigator yet an increasingly broken man, his mind and body scarred by an unspeakable childhood, and haunted by what he fears is a degree of trauma that he’ll not only be unable to overcome—but that will define his life forever.

Check it here

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

This book is a haunting slow book about a character who is in an unknown and unknowable place. Piranesi’s house is no ordinary building: its rooms are infinite, its corridors endless, its walls are lined with thousands upon thousands of statues, each one different from all the others. Within the labyrinth of halls an ocean is imprisoned; waves thunder up staircases, rooms are flooded in an instant. But Piranesi is not afraid; he understands the tides as he understands the pattern of the labyrinth itself. He lives to explore the house. There is one other person in the house—a man called The Other, who visits Piranesi twice a week and asks for help with research into A Great and Secret Knowledge. But as Piranesi explores, evidence emerges of another person, and a terrible truth begins to unravel, revealing a world beyond the one Piranesi has always known. The novel's hundreds of halls and vestibules, triggers a gradual loss of memory and identity in newcomers. The story is told through the research notes of the eponymous narrator, who reconstructs the story of his own arrival as he explores this world. Susanna Clarke illustrates how blissful ignorance does not and cannot last forever.

Check it here

Happy reading.

XOXO

29 August 2024

Summer Parisienne Style Outfit Ideas - August Roundup

Summer is for fun. It's time for brunch with your girls, summer parties, weddings and trips to the beach. As you browse the web and your closet for outfit inspirations, here are my favourite summer Parisienne looks that I have been loving this August, which will help you in creating the perfect summer wardrobe of your dream

Pristine Whites

Summers are the perfect time to bring out the whites, which keep the heat away and make you look sophisticated and put together. White outfit pieces are closet staples in every season and are a great investment. You can play with textures, laces and different materials to create the perfect summer look.

Credits: Sophie Pirrung

Top: Tanzania tee by Annabel the Shop

Credits: Sophie Pirrung

Top: See similar from H&M

Skirt: See similar by Zara

Credits: Laman Maharramli

Dress: Kivari

Bag: Loewe

Credits: Solene Lara

Top: Similar - Maison Anje , H&M

Credits: Sophie Pirrung

Outfit: See similar here

Bag: Loewe

Credits: Paola Ambre

Outfit: Shona Joy

Heels: Bobbies

Credits: Laman Maharramli

Top: 303 Avenue

Pants: Dissh

Shades: New Bottega

Shoes: Ermanno Scervino

Credits: Laman Maharramli

Pants: Boheme

Shoes: Madewell

Shades: The Row

Bag: Little Liffner

Credits: Elodie Romy

Dress: Roselene dress by Rouje

Credits: Zina Charkoplia

Dress: Adeline dress by Anna Quan

Bag: Polene

Shoes: Louis Vuitton

Credits: Zina Charkoplia

Dress: Swara dress by Rasslife

Credits: Elodie Romy

Top: Zara

Bag: Claudie Pierlot

Credits: Laman Maharramli

Outfit: Selijan

Bag: Loewe

Shoes: Chanel

Credits: Héloïse Guillet

Outfit: Pearl by House of CB

Credits: Zina Charkoplia

Dress: Beige Tricot dress by Kaoa

Bag: Dior Bag Tote

Credits: Zina Charkoplia

Dress: Gont dress by Podyh

Bag: Mini Dior Book Tote

Sunshine Yellows

Yellow is the perfect colour for shining bright this summer. Incorporate this colour through dresses, skirta and shorts or pair it with other neutral colours such as black and white.

Credits: Julie Sergent Ferreri

Bodysuit: Calarena

Bag: Sezane blue gingham beauty bag

Credits: Solene Lara

Outfit:

Credits: Zina Charkoplia

Outfit: Eiko Ai

Bag: Louis Vuitton

Pretty in Pink and Red

Red and pinks can add a touch of elegance and vitality to a your summer wardrobe. Pinks and reds can elevate an outfit, providing a focal point or a pop of colour that enhances the wearer's natural appearance.

Credits: Sofia de Moser Leitão

Outfit: Mango

Credits: Paola Ambre

Top: Gilet Ivan Ecru Knit top by Stella and Suzie

Skirt: Brown Nalini skirt by Stella and Suzie

Bag: Jacquemus

Credits: Paola Ambre

Dress: Robe Flora - Mandarine by Paueme

Credits: Héloïse Guillet

Outfit: Flora Dress in Rouje by Paueme

Credits: Kate Ozerov

Outfit: Porto Ercole Dress in hibiscus by Oramai

Credits: Zina Charkoplia

Outfit: See similar by Na-kd

Summer Blacks

Make neutrals your best friend this summer. These pieces can transition from spring to summer to autumn. Simple solids in blacks and whites, browns and beiges can be combined for a breezy chic summer look. To elevate the look, add fun accessories and shoes. Neutral pieces can be also be mixed and matched with staples such as jeans or with a fun pop of colour.

Credits: Elodie Romy

Top: Honey shirt by Sezane

Bag: JW Pei

Credits: Solene Lara

Outfit: Phi 1.618 Haute maroquinerie Paris

Bag: DeMallier London

Credits: Sophie Pirrung

Credits: Zina Charkoplia

Top: A Day's March

Skirt: Posse

Eyewear: LGR

Bag: Chanel

Shoes: Dior

Credits: Sophie Pirrung

Top: Tanzania top in Black by Annabel the Shop

Black is also a great option for date nights and as dining out outfits. Keep it simple with strappy heels or flats . You can spruce up the look with fun jewellery.

Credits: Sophie Pirrung

Outfit: Rotate Birger Christensen

Credits: Sophie Pirrung

Outfit: Munthe Official

Credits: Solene Lara

Outfit: See similar by Zara

Bag: Bouret

Credits: Héloïse Guillet

Top: Black Palms

Skirt: Andiata Official

Bag: Le Tanneur

Credits: Kate Ozerov

Dress: See similar here

Credits: Héloïse Guillet

Outfit: Margot dress by Arcina Ori

Cool Blues

Cool and calm like a clear summer sky, blue is a must have in your summer wardrobe. You can incorporate it through staples such as jeans, denim skirts or linen skirts and striped shirts. Blue and white is another classic combination, you can easily recreate with pieces you might have already in your wardrobe. Elevate the look with cool statement accessories such as shoulder bags and shoes.

Credits: Sofia de Moser Leitão

Outfit: See similar denim skirt

Bag: Gucci

Credits: Elodie Romy

Outfit: Balzac Paris

Shorts: Balzac Paris

Bag: Claudie Pierlot

Belt: Celine

Heels: Chanel

Credits: Elodie Romy

Top: Laganini Studios Shanghai Vest

Heels: Petite Mendigote

Credits: Elodie Romy

Top: See similar here

Bag: Claudie Pierlot

Credits: Laman Maharramli

Shirt: Pangaia

Pants: Malina

Bag: Goyard Official

Sandals: Anine Bing Official

Eyewear: YSL

Earrings By Pariah

Bracelet: Tiffany and Co.

Credits: Héloïse Guillet

Outfit: See similar shirt from Zara

Credits: Julie Sergent Ferreri

Top: Na-kd checked tie detail puff sleeve top

Shoes: Khaite

Credits: Paola Ambre

Outfit: See similar here

Fresh in Green

Classic green white look for business casual chic a la Parisienne style. You can play with pastels, olives or deeper greens and pair it with bold colour accessories such as red heels or Mary Janes and bag or keep it simple with neutral accessories.

Credits: Elodie Romy

Outfit: Daisya shirt by Soeur Paris

Credits: Elodie Romy

Top: Athenais Blouse by Sezane

Credits: Sofia de Moser Leitão

Outfit: Mango

Credits: Zina Charkoplia

Outfit: See similar by MyTheresa

Bag: Raffia Bag Tote by Dior

Summer Florals

Summer is the time to have fun with your fits. Make a statement with fun florals. You can opt for bolder prints, ditsy prints, embroidered styles, lace details, or abstract floral prints. The options are unlimited. Style them with solids or wear them on their own. Keep the rest of your accessories simple, to let your outfit make you shine.