Shopping in the Bay Area

One of the great things about taking a vacation is getting to experience local farmer's markets, boutiques, grocery stores, and restaurants. Chris and I recently went to Oakland, California and spent a lot of time in San Fransisco while there. We were in town for a wedding but got to spend time with family and explore!

The shopping was great! We spent a lot of time on Haight St. where Chris bought a pair of pants from Villains and many records from Amoeba. I bought a Manoush dress on sale at Ideele. It was discounted because it was lacking the pin:
Which was fine by me, as I would have removed it anyway!

We also visited Nordstrom Rack (which I hope will soon find a home in Pittsburgh), and Bloomingdales, where Chris bought a Trovata shirt. We tried to go to Barneys and Anthro but it wasn't in the cards. Nordstrom Rack was running a great promotion (half off lowest prices on all designer clothes) but everything looked really bad when I tried it on. It is for the best, since I did so much shopping before the trip and have so much holiday shopping to do this month! I might have bought something at Bloomingdales had it not been for the horrible service which turned me off from buying anything.

On the other hand, all the sales associates we encountered in small boutiques were very friendly and helpful. They lamented to us that the only people buying were out of town visitors like ourselves. Many feared for the future of their jobs and the future of the boutique market. This was an important reminder to me that I need to frequent and patronize local shops, especially those that have offered me exceptional customer service like Pavement, Hiptique, Moda (for men), and Karma Fashion. If I received better service in some of the others, I would be naming them too. But due to bad service experiences I refuse to even return to some of the places. I am going to have to return for this project I am working on about critical shopping. But that is for the purpose of research.

I'm not sure what elicits positive customer service experiences. I am often dressed in what I regard to be appropriate attire. Yet on marathon trips I can visit three different places in the same hour of the same day, in the same outfit, and get totally variable service. I will say that shopping with Chris's mom is the ticket to getting the best service you will ever have. I shopped with her in Vegas, in St. Barths, and last weekend at Saks and the sales associates treat her (and by association, me) like a queen everywhere she goes. I'm sure her gorgeous Burberry coat and David Yurman jewelry didn't hurt on our most recent excursion. But it seems like I almost always get better service when I shop with another person. Whether it is Chris, his mom, my mom, or one of my girlfriends, the service is almost always more attentive with a partner. The one exception was when I shopped with China at a boutique, downtown that has notoriously bad online customer service, so I shouldn't have been surprised that the same was true in person.

Recent purchase: wins and fails!

Whenever I acquire new things online or in stores, I like to take or save stock pictures of the items. I immortalized them on digital film for a number of reasons. I have a flickr that I like to keep updated (though I usually set privacy restrictions to those particular photos). I like to keep them archived in my fashion folders on my hard drive. And I think having pictures of things helps me decide whether or not I should keep them around, return, sell or donate them.

I am willing to bet that in the recesses of my subconscious I do this because of the closet scene and archive program in Clueless. But it might also be because I am so accustomed to picturing stuff (both mine and things that aren't mine) in ad copy, magazine editorial, and online boutiques.

Accordingly, here are some pictures of things I bought recently.

Orla Kiely bag on sale from Anthro:
When hunting for stock photos of the bag, after ordering I discovered that the inside of the sling strap was bright green. I hated it for that and returned it in store.

Fredflare had a 25% off coupon so I made an order for this Orla Kiely folding grocery tote:
And I bought a few other items for xmas gifts (but I can't post because I don't want to spoil the surprise). I love to buy silly items from Fredflare that I know I would want to receive but can never justify purchasing for myself. I am still waiting for the items to arrive so I don't know if they are keepers. We'll see.

I already own this cashmere boyfriend cardigan by Cece in a zillion colors. I bought them last year from Bluefly. But this year they had it in eggplant purple!
It is a keep because I got a good deal by using click-through coupons stacked with additional $ off coupons.

I bought and re-bought this Callixta sweater dress with vintage-looking buttons to wear as an extra layer of dress and as just a regular sweater dress. It was sale at bluefly but I hadn't worn it by the time it was marked down further, so I returned the first one after purchasing it again. It saved me around $40!
Sephora sent me a $20 off $50 coupon so I bought Nars blush in Orgasm (as I was almost out), O.P.I for Sephora nail polish in Caffeine fix and Metro chic, and lip stain. No pics of that, though. All were keepers!

I had to go downtown to renew my parking permit so I stopped by Saks to check out sale racks. If the reports were to be believed, luxury retailers, hurting to maintain reasonable margins after an especially difficult quarter in an already difficult year, were supposedly slashing and burning prices to enable the overturn of stock. My Pittsburgh Saks was having a private sale that offered 40% off the lowest labeled prices. And I was able to buy two Tibi dresses I coveted desperately for the price of one on the sale pages of bloomingdales.com. I didn't even realize my store carried these particular styles! So I had the added bonus of trying them on prior to purchase which means they were both for keeps!



I wore them both to teach and to wedding events for Michael and China when I was in the Bay area last week! The second photo is in the dressing room, hence the boots and tights that are all wrong with the dress.

Praise be to my fashion efriends! I found affordable, calf-wide boots!

Though the Fryes were beautiful to look at, they didn't look very nice on me. So I sent them back, and continued my quest for decent-looking, reasonably-priced boots that could accommodate ample calf-width. I HATE trying on boots in stores blindly, with no prior knowledge about calf-circumference. In the interest of keeping my epic-calf-related not-so-secret shame a semi-secret, I will only try on boots in person after thorough research and multiple recommendations from fashion epals. It feels so crappy to go through all the steps to prepare oneself to try on boots (finding the size, unstuffing them from their box, taking off your own shoes, etc.) only to find that you can't tug them past your ankles! My calves measure in at 15.5 inches so I needed to find boots that could fit 16 inches (for jeans, cords, etc.).

Thanks to the reviews and recommendations from contributors at http://fashionism.org/, the calf-circumference info and reviews on zappos.com, and a few specific threads on the Ladies Auxiliary, I was armed with three primary wide-calf boot contenders, this boot season:

The Frye Paige Cuff Boots (which were never quite affordable enough for me to buy, but sure are beautiful):
Shown in Dark Brown, from Zappos. With an approx. retail of $400 (eep!)

The Seychelles "At Last" boots:
Also shown in dark brown. Retailing for around $160 or something but on sale for $99 at nordstrom.com.

And the Steven by Steve Madden "Intyce" boots:
Shown in Cognac. Retailed for $199 but available at various Marshalls and TJ Maxx for $99. Or on sale at nordstrom.com for $117.

Between these three options, I was bound to find something to fit my epic calves. So I went searching in store, to try on boots. I found a pair of the Cognac Intyce boots at TJ Maxx in a size 9. I wear an 8 in boots. I bought them anyway to take them home to try with jeans tucked. I returned them. And I bought the boots in Black from nordstrom, in the proper size.

I also bought the Seychelles At Last boots in Dark Brown. The dark brown color looks almost greyish so it matches a range of things. And the calf width is ample. So between these two boots, I feel very prepared for fall and winter. They aren't the most practical snow boots. For messy wintery weather, I will continue to sport my $10 KMart boots from five years ago. But i am happy to have upgraded my collection a bit. And at the end of the day, I spent basically the same amount of money for two pairs of boots that I planned to spend on one pair of Fryes.

Other friends have recommended the wide-calf boots from Torrid.com for inexpensive wide-calf boot options. I have also heard nice things about the J Crew extended calf boots (except by their measurements, they still wouldn't fit me). If you are in my predicament, you can run a search for extended calf boots on zappos, but they haven't aggregated their data by calf measurement. So that search just generates the boots that specifically advertise themselves as wider calf. I wish they would make the search nerdier, so that it could be more useful!

I was grateful to have access to boot recommendations, fit guides, and quality reviews from my epals about boots that were just surprisingly wide in the calf, and not specifically meant to be wide-calf.