Style Tribe is hosting this week's Carnivale of Couture:
"I want to celebrate our role as bloggers. What distinguishes us from fashion press is our lack of limits: we can express as we please, and our unique personalities make us more interesting rather than less professional. To that end, I want to invite everyone to write about their most significant fashion purchase. Not the most expensive or most exciting, but the one that was somehow pivotal, or meaningful to you personally."
My most significant fashion purchase are these Prada ballet flats. This is not my most expensive pair of shoes or fashion purchase. I got these shoes to just make me happy. (Sure that can be said for all of my purchases.) So why was this significant?
This was back in 2002, in the days after the whole dot com crash of 2001. I was one of the survivors (whether I liked it or not) of a bankrupt agency from which the remains were sold to a new one. A few thousand people in different offices around the Bay Area were whittled down and consolidated to a mere 150 all in San Francisco. Things were hard and I didn't shop much in case I lost my job as well as the fact we were working so hard in scaled down teams I didn't have time. There was just a dark mood all around San Francisco.
Around that spring, we all got a bonus of $500 because a minor profit was made. Not a lot of money, but it signified a turning point. Things were better. I wanted to celebrate. I needed to feel fashion, feel like a girl, feel like myself again. Sometimes after a really depressing week at work my friend and co-worker Olivia and I would just walk through the shoe department at Neiman Marcus to feel better. (Another key "feel good" place was Sephora.) I had been eyeing these beautiful Prada flats with a unique bow/buckle detail. A couple weeks later when we got our bonus, I headed straight back to Neimans and bought the $220 Prada flats.
Four years later I still have them. Not only do I wear them practically all the time, they are my most comfortable pair of shoes. Sure they may be a tiny bit scuffed, but these shoes will always make me feel happy and safe.
UPDATE 3/29: Merci beaucoup Angela Gunn of USA Today's Tech_Space for doing a write up on this!
