Have You Started Road Mapping your Fall Clothing Strategy Yet?

Loaded question, I know, but inquiring minds (or is it mind -- as in, the singular one that belongs to me) are curious. Chiefly, I might add, because it seems like no matter how extensively I broadcast my putrid hate for the cold (last winter, I threatened mother nature by resolving to leave New York only to realize that longterm, I'd only be hurting myself), or how hard I beg for the sun to shine down on me, with its partner in crime: divine humidity, or for the wind to subside, or the snowflakes to take a hike, by the end of July, every single summer, I am ready for boots. Sometimes I feel like a masochist in the same way a single girl might while she waits and waits for a potential suitor to call her, having been sure she didn't even like him that much (as in, at all). But with every additional hour she waits, empty text message she does not open, Facebook notification that won't pop-up, the affection grows. Fundamentally, it's growing out of pride or perhaps a fear we're all familiar with: that of rejection -- because, really, what's worse than being afterthought-ed by someone you don't even like -- but when it comes to my boots and the hankering for them, why is my pride involved? Where is the scale of rejection? Maybe my attention has just grown so spectacularly deficient that it takes not three, not four, but a simple one month and some for me to believe that without substantial change, I've got nothing. Whatever the reason, here I am, gawking at the metal-padded black suede boots of one Saint Laurent, determining that I own at least five pairs of pants I will still want to wear into the distantly imminent season, wondering whether I will want my sweaters to come banded at the waist or loose -- you know, for layering dresses and blouses and long tees and the like. Will I finally want to wear dresses? Even though I convince myself of this every single season and then two months in remember that black tights are not for me? Will I wear skirts? Of the calf-length pencil variety? Wool crop tops? They'll layer so romantically! (show_shopthepost_widget id="170460") Or will I simply fall back into the navy blue hole of yonder, locating complacency at Uniqlo, with the help of distressed dark denim and boots as simple as those with a two inch heel and a pointed toe that hail from Zara. (show_shopthepost_widget id="170472") Or will they be knee-length? (show_shopthepost_widget id="170480") I guess I won't know until I get there but that, my friend, is why we road-map. So here is mymap, let's see how often it changes between now and then. (show_shopthepost_widget id="170484") ...Now show me yours or pay the price (purportedly, I suppose, of my map?) Image shot by Ryan McGinley for W Magazine

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