CrushedVamp

I think a lot of it is personality, and that is whether a person is buying things or talking to a woman about woman's fashions. For me, I raised six daughters and been married for thirty years, I have gone alone to the store and bought tampons and yeast infection medication; NOTHING gender specific bothers me. NOTHING! Most of the time I employed a trick in the literary writing world called "Lampshading" which is where you cover what some would consider a misdeed with an over the top admission. I might start the conversation by saying, "I can't believe I am buying this stuff as a guy but here I am". We would all laugh and the awkwardness was over. But that was me. My mother in law on the other hand, she had a senior moment once and ordered "Donut Balls" when really she wanted what we call Donut Holes or Munchkins here. That was twenty years ago and she still is embarrassed by what she said.

You are there so it is hard for me to disqualify this statement because I really do not know your lifestyle as much as you, but it is really hard to say. While different from fashion influence, I was going through a VERY hard time in my life a few years back and out of the blue I had this younger guy come up to me and say that he had been watching me from afar and had a lot of respect for me for how I was handling all that was going on. It really surprised me, but it really showed, someone that was barely on my radar I was influencing. It is easy to say, "well that is with dealing with multiple cancers" and pass it off as being different, but I actually think its easier to be an influencer for fashion. All it takes is a person to see you a few times being bold and they may be appreciative and prodded to action themselves. I know people have influenced me on this site. As you guys know, I wear leggings for warmth and comfort around the house, but NEVER where I could be seen in them. Someone made the comment of going to Lowes wearing theirs and it was an influential post...

Zero offense taken and you are right, we do tend to be on the conservative side, but my wife's fear of the fashion police stems more from her mother (84 years old). She is a major influence in my wife's life and while that is normal to come extent, it is not always healthy. I have heard my MIL say over a dozen times, "My, your skirt is too short". Or "Your heels are way too high". If my wife gains any weight (my MIL is less than 100 pounds) she goes out and buys her diet pills. But it can be anything from the wrong color of her clothes, how tight it fits, to her choice of shoes... We were once at a restaurant and my MIL had just chided my wife on how her skirt length was too short and not thirty seconds later the waitress came over and said, "I love your outfit". That was nice to hear... So it is not so much me, or my wife, but constantly hearing it from her mother that makes my wife self-conscious and that is an influential person...

I think we are all more influencers than we know, and you especially. You just have this huge love of high heels that bursts through, a true passion, so I think you influence a lot more people than you give yourself credit for. That includes a lot of people on this site. And never forget, most forums have 99 people lurking for every one that posts a reply, so you might (and others on here) have far, far, far more influence than you think. But that is what being authentic does... it shows others its fine to like whatever it is that they like!

That is all so true. I also think motivation has a lot to do with it too. My wife straight up dresses for me because she loves me and knows I like it. Since she is not dressing for others attention, I think its a look she can pull off. But people also suck. My wife and I are probably some of the most humble unassuming people in the world, but we do like to dress up and most of the time are some of the best dressed people at a venue. Not over the top bling-bling, but sharply dressed. Yet we hear snide comments a lot. Most of the time it is my wife who hears them from other women in the bathroom, or walking past just loud enough to her husband but so that we can hear, and occasion for us as a couple. I think it just becomes unusual as more and more people dress down, and in doing so they either feel guilty about how they constantly dress, or flat out make the wrong conclusions on why we do dress nice. For us, its all about this: "You feel how you are dressed". Spend a week in the wilderness bush crafting it, you are going to feel gross and yucky. But dress nicely, and you feel better about yourself.

Good for you, and as others have said, it looks good on you. Sorry you were cold, but sometimes you just got to put fashion before performance! 🙂 I think it is a true staple of fashion because there are so many versions of the pea coat. It can be mini-skirt length, or trench length, or something in between which can really go well with various outfits.

You are right, here in the USA a Victorian House is of a certain style and not an era, although often that does fall into the time of her reign. My house is thus considered a Victorian because while it was built in 1940 it is built with most of the elements of Victorian house. I would say that it was built in that style because the area is loaded with mills, one major sawmill still operating today within site of our house. Because of its style, and how it is situated at the confluence of two rivers, what amounts to a really nice spot to put a house, I think it was built by the sawmill owners son or grandson. At that time, in producing material for the war effort in Europe, it would have been very profitable times as cheap Depression Era labor was producing high dollar war material and enabled them to build a lavish house. But it changed. It seems like the front part of the house was built well, and with quality materials, but the ell… the back part, was not. I think the reason was simple. Since we did not enter World War II until 1941, at first there was money, material and skilled carpenters but as the house neared completion, not so much on the back part of the house. And that is where I have found the majority of my issues. The front part of the house is bullet proof and hardly needed work, whereas almost everything on the back of the house needed attention.

Yes, I am in the same way. It is a really nice home since here in the USA most modern construction is rather cheap and gaudy. No character. No embellishments, and now with the USA needing some 250,000 carpenters due to the shortage, no skills in workmanship. My house sounds a lot like yours though, It too is three stories tall, six bedrooms, four bathrooms, two kitchens and a great room on the third floor with living rooms and formerly libraries. A big house with horse hair plaster, hidden rooms, but due to my location, was insulated well in the 1970's. The boiler has had an upgrade too. No central heating system though one of the two fireplaces is still installed, but rather a hydronic heating system that makes this house surprisingly easy and cheap to heat, but an area I am constantly improving with better insulation and boiler components. In all out honesty, it gets so cold here that a good heating system is a requirement, and more so because I live on a river. It is not only cold here, it is cold and damp between the region, and proximity to the river, and ocean not so far away. As for the style, here Victorian is a style of house. Of which there are several variations. It typically is depicted by bays on the front of the house, turrets or towers, wide trim inside and out and of course stained glass windows. For our house, even amongst others it is known in town for its many, and very prominent stained glass windows. In buying it, I have added the ability to do stained glass in my work skills just so I can add to that house legacy and have thus added a TON of new stained glass windows to the this house since buying it two years ago. I do not have a tower/turret on this house but hope to add it someday. In considering what I wrote above, I need further explanation. While I love old houses and always have, please do not think I would NEVER be impressed with yours perhaps. My reply above used a VERY broad brush to depict newer and older houses for sure. There are crappy old houses and crappy new ones, just as there are good brand new houses and good older ones. While I make my house to seem like it is perfect, it is HARDLY that. It has really rough walls, gaps and cracks, and unlevel floors. It needs a lot of work, but heck all that describes me at age 50!

My wife asked this very question last week. We were at church and she was wearing a rather short sweater dress. Appropriate but short, and for those that like details with beige pantyhose and heels. Because of the semi-circular arrangement of our church, as a guy returned from the bathroom, and how my wife had her legs crossed, he got an eyeful of a LOT of her leg. It was clear from his grin, he liked what he saw. Since my wife is oblivious to this stuff, I mentioned I was not the only one who liked her dressed as she was, and that was when she said, "But don't you think its wrong of me to wear shorter skirts and dresses?" We are on the young side of being old (50) so I am sure these days are coming to an end, but I appreciate her, and others her age, being age-defiant with their skirt lengths,

I love skirt coats because you can have a lot of fun with them. My wife has a gray Pea Skirt-Coat that looks good, and good on her. We have a lot of fun with it because if she pairs it with a minidress or miniskirt, with its length being longer than her skirt, it looks like she is completely bottomless, or at the very least, shows that she must be wearing a very short minidress or miniskirt. The interesting thing is, guys just admire it, but it's other ladies that have the most reactions to it. Some snarl, but with others you can just read their faces, "is she wearing anything under that coat". My wife is of course, but seeing others first reaction can be fun.

I dress typical to my male gender but often find myself in discussion with women about female clothing. I have had a few women ask why I am so open about it and just told them the truth, I am a writer and often describe women's clothing in my novels. I just know clothing, men and women, and since I have done some historical novels, I even know some about the history of clothing. I mean you cannot say "underwear" in a novel based in 1771 Virginia; your readership will call you out for poor research. Just yesterday my step-daughter needed some tights (not pantyhose) for school and her mother and her were trying to figure out where to buy them. I told them Wall Fart carries them. Neither knew that, but just from being with her mother in buying hers, I saw across the aisle they have a leggings/tights section. I have even had to buy female typical clothing alone before. In both cases it was pantyhose. Once because my wife had hers ladder so bad she refused to go into the store to buy them and sent me in to get replacements, and another time I needed some high denier stockings as a prefilter for my shop vac. Each time I just openly stated what I was doing. "These are NOT for me I assure you", I said in such a grandiose way that all suspicion was thwarted, "my wife refuses to come in because hers laddered", and saying I needed "a prefilter for my shop vac". I say this because if people are buying this stuff for themselves to wear and are nervous about it, just do what I did and use my real reasons for an excuse for you. It should not matter why you are buying it, but if it bothers you, a little white lie never hurt. Tell them you need a prefilter for a shop vac! 🙂

My wife does not have any rainbow heels but she does have some high heels that change color, from gold to silver depending on light, and often on light both gold and silver in shimmering essence both. Very cool high heels she wears often.

A practical use to high heels might just be in fighting dementia! It has been said that if you want to fight dementia to always put your socks on while standing up. The coordination that such a feat takes naturally fights off dementia as it uses so many different aspects of your brain. Well it would seem to me that if balancing to put on your socks would do that for a few minutes each day, walking in high heels would REALLY stimulate the brain and fight dementia? Thoughts?

My wife has found plenty of clothes in those places that were fun to say the least, but not so much shoes. It may just be where we live, but here the high heeled shoes tend to be black or white only, bought for some wedding they went to in 1980 and decided forty years later to give them to a thrift store as they would never wear them again. What is surprising is the number of miniskirts she has found there, and I mean MINI... I think that is because some teenager buys them and her parents see what she bought and says, "oh hell no", and they are given to thrift shops. My wife has found a few there that made her blush just buying them, and even then not worn outside the bedroom. We also wanted to do a "Trash the Dress" photoshoot and bought one there because she wanted to save the one she wore on our wedding day.

I tend to write a lot about clothing descriptions. Part of it is just my writing style, where as some writers leave a lot to the imagination of the reader which has its place of course, I tend to be a little more detail oriented. How detailed I get on a characters clothing varies, and I do not drone on and on about every article of clothing the character changes into from start of the book to its end, but I do find clothing can be symbolic of personality. It can even affect the pace of the novel. A case in point might be having a woman wearing high heeled pumps in an abandoned factory. Not only does it beg the question of 'who would do that', but also since she is not going to be darting away very fast if she is accosted, it can set the pace of the novel while also showing personality and increase tension and stakes. But as a writer I am a con artist: I am trying to make a convincing story about something that never happened, to people that never existed. It is non-nefarious con artist work because the reader WANTS to be immersed in the story and feel its plausibility, but clothing descriptions... and shoes... can help me be a better con artist/writer.

I bet that is nice. For me, who has a lot of shoes myself, I just like matching the right color or style of shoes with the clothes I am wearing. Since I wear traditional male clothes, but try to match my shoes with my pants, wearing something like olive pants and matching it with olive shoes shows I know something about color matching anyway. They say that the first thing people notice about you is what you wear for shoes because most people are looking down and thus see your shoes first. For me it is more about just getting details right... like color. They also say a lot of women have plenty of shoes because its the one part of their wardrobe where weight gain does not nullify them wearing them. So shoes can be discovered and always worn. My wife has a friend though who is interesting. She was born with six toes so needless to say she is not going barefoot on a beach for NOTHING. But she compensates for it by having plenty of shoes. I mean plenty, like over 600 pairs. Kind of an interesting phycological reason but I can see why she has so many shoes; she is super self-conscious about her feet.

I feel your pain: I live in an old Victorian House too. For the most part the house was better insulated than what I thought, but not always. Over Christmas the wife wanted me to remove some shelves and turn one of our libraries into a dining room. Not a big deal as it was just shelves, but behind it was some ugly 1970's paneling that only went half way up the wall. Clearly that had to go, so I ripped that out. and stripped off the horse hair plaster. Then noticed big areas of missing insulation. That was of course, behind 6,976,000 nailed on lathes. So to insulate I had to rip all those off and then get rid of the loose cellulose insulation. But being that old there was no outlets so in the end I had to run wires for several new outlets, insulate the whole wall anew, then put up ship lapped boards, paint, and finally apply trim and paint all that... just because she wanted some shelves taken down. What should have taken a day instead took all weekend. It's better now, and I am glad I went through all that to make it right, but there is a lot of extra work living in an old house for sure, and a lot more expensive with all the wide trim and other details that add up.

Not to steer the conversation aside, but curious if maybe you were sleeping in front of a heater or other air mover? A lot of times moving air while sleeping will give you nightmares. I have been having nightmares because its been so cold outside that the heater in my master bedroom has been running faster and longer than normal. Just thought I would mention this in case that is the situation for you. Deflecting the moving air might help you if it is. As for the pants I do not have many suggestions. I wore suspenders once and the wife laughed and said I looked like Paul Bunyon. That did not help. But I am with you, I hate how cotton slumps after a few hours of wear.

I am the opposite, though not truly about circulation. That I am unsure of. What I meant was, I am odd in that as long as my bottom half is warm, I am warm. I am known for NEVER wearing a jacket, typically a T-shirt, sweatshirt, then blue cotton button up shirt and that is it. No jacket, BUT I have to have my leggings under my jeans to keep my legs warm. Take them off me and I am SUPER cold. Edited to add that where I live, like right now, it is -7 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. That is -23 Celsius. It was -14 (f) earlier this week. There is one caveat here though, while I think the calorie rating of my button up work shirt is only 2-3, they tend to be thick because it prevents arc flash of high voltage circuits. Because of that they are warmer than most blue collar workwear.

Oh my, probably more information than you want to hear as I constantly say 'I do not wear heels, but my wife does'... Well, I have tried on a few of hers. Most just will not fit, but a few of her sling backs will. There is just enough elastic banding to them to stretch so they can be worn. But that is only about six out of several hundred pair!

I do not wear high heels but I cannot say that about leggings. I live in mine. In the summer I just lounge around the house in them long after the working day is over, using them as a sort of pajamas. Sometimes I will mow the lawn, run out to the shop, or even go to a drive-thru wearing them, but mostly they are just "soft pants" for sleeping and relaxation around the house. In the winter I wear them 24/7 because I wear them under my jeans at work. I work outside, often in sub-zero weather like we have now, and working at height, it is ALWAYS windy. I used to wear sweat pants under my jeans but they were too bulky and long johns were itchy... leggings are perfect. They are even unisex leggings now though I just get the soft kind at the dollar stores. As for pantyhose, I heard they were also warm, but could never bring myself to wear them. Leggings work for me.

Not quite the same, but my wife's first husband was shorter than she was, so he forbid her to ever wear high heels. Well for differing reasons they divorced and she married me, and asked if she could wear high heels. I told her I was not the shoe police so she started wearing them, but she went off the deep end. Not every pair of shoes she has are high heels, but she has A LOT of them. She has her own walk in shoe closet we call her "shoe barn". Its well over 200 pairs of shoes...

One thing to keep in mind with colors is that you can color your own clothes and shoes with dyes. I know this is a high heel fashion site, but my wife often buys white Ked's just because she knows she can buy dye and with 30 minutes worth of work get the EXACT color she wants to match them with a dress or other outfit that she has. This all began one day when she wanted a pair of faded denim colored Keds to go with a dress she had, that matched a shirt/pant clothing choice I had. We looked good together matching except all the Keds she could find were too dark, so we just dyed some white Keds light blue in color. But it need not just be Keds, a lot of things can be dyed and with Youtube you can get some pretty good advice on how to dye things. And some old clothing items can be completely renewed by dying them. You also can buy cheap white versions of the clothing/shoes you want to dye and do a test run before the more expensive article or shoes. Just know, dye is wet in nature so anything wet is going to dry a little lighter in color so keep that in mind, but color range also varies with time in the dye before it is rinsed with clean water, or can be double-dyed if it is too light for your taste. But it need not just be clothing and shoes, I keep a few paints on hand and mix and match my own colors to make custom colors for the rooms in my house. Too dark green? Just add a little white paint. Or have a drywall hole you patched and you need to color match, work your own paint up so it matches without having to go to the store for what would be just a dollop of needed paint. Have a concrete project that would look better with a bit of color? Latex paint is colored water... throw in a gallon and mix up your concrete to custom color it. The long winded point here is that a person does not have to spend a lot of money on custom colors on anything, dyes and paints can be done yourself, and is kind of fun to do.

And to be fair I have done this myself in a recent novel. In my case an adult daughter of 24 years old with a self-sufficient homestead was trying to figure out where her place was in the world and yet it was NOTHING like her attorney mother. This bothered her mother to no end. It was not so much in showing that her mother wore high heels as much as her daughter would not be caught dead in them, even when she went to court. While it was not THE PREMISE of the novel, in the end her mother had learned to accept her daughter even if she was taking a much different path. And what the two wore for shoes was true symbolism of that... her mother struggling down a hiking path on her daughter's homestead wearing high heels was as telling about her personality as her daughter was in wearing Birkenstock's to a court hearing. If this sounds like it was anti-high heels I assure you it was not. The novel was about self-sufficient farming with legal troubles. It was just how the story worked itself out. My wife and I adore high heels, and HATE the look of Birkenstock's but you can't always write about just the things you love when you are a writer. The story (novel) just has to work.

And this is where we differ; in the United States we hold our freedoms to be very dear. I understand that a lot of times criminals are let go because of a technicality resulting from the Fruit of the Poisonous Tree, but that is just how the system works. The police MUST abide by the rules set forth in the constitution. Those rights are not malleable. Freedom is scary. Freedom is very scary. Yet freedom is essential. When you let some minor things go, like a police officer charging into a house without a warrant, we as a society cannot let that happen. The loss of freedom as a citizen is MUCH worse to us then the teenager who had his music up to loud and the police officer wanting to arrest him. They just cannot do that, and if they do, then the city that hired that police officer collectively has to pay for that mistake. $5000 is not going to make them think twice, but $100,000 grand will. Does the taxpayers pay? Of course they do, but through our ability to vote, we can change future hiring practices that led to such a cost. We have a system that holds elected officials accountable. It starts with the constitution allowing citizens to sue the government for egregious infractions. The problem we have here is that the police (no matter the agency represented) thinks they are law enforcers, and they are not. They are law interpreters. The law enforcers consist of the District Attorney, and a Defense Lawyer or Defense Attorney, and the District Attorney is an elected position to ensure accountability to the citizens. In most cases, it will never go past this point as it is plea-dealed out. If it does go to a jury trial, the Judge is not even a Law Enforcer. That is up to the jury. All the judge does is ensure a trial proceeds according to court rules. He does not even give a sentence, that too is dictated by the jury, the judge just makes sure it is a sentence that is fair and within guidelines. That only changes if it is a bench trial and the defendant gives up his right to a jury and lets a judge decide. But here is the interesting part, the excessive lawsuit payouts have only ONE guilty party: the citizens of the USA since a Jury decides what the payout is going to be and a jury consists of friends and neighbors. That is VERY rare though. Most of the time the lawsuit payout amount is decided by plea deals so the one paying ultimately decides how much they are going to pay. It is all very simple when you skim off the dross.