Leggings & Leopards

Laurie showed up for a meeting yesterday at Allied Arts wearing this cuuuute leopard print jersey dress with tiers of tab-like ruffles all over--she said she got it at Macy's on one of the "half-off the half-off use your card & get another 15% off sales." (Love it when they're giving stuff away.) Obviously, other shoppers had looked at this dress and said "no way!" because they couldn't figure out what to do with it. It took someone creative like Laurie to come up with the right accessories and give this dress a total look, and that's what I love about it: the black patent sandals, the short-sleeve longish cardigan, the gold medallion hanging on the pearl necklace, and the leggings.

Which brings me to a whole new discussion: LEGGINGS. They're back. They were my wardrobe staple in 1983. My daughter Julie told me that the hard & fast rule here is "If you did the first time, you're too old to do it the second time." What???? Seriously????
Last year I held out on the leggings thing because of that little statement but this year I'm feeling like going all iconoclastic on her and breaking out the leggings. So I bought a pair with brass buttons going down the ankles, and I dug out a beautiful pair of stretch velvet ones I saved from the last time around. (Ha! I knew I was hanging on to them for a reason!)
After all, leggings can be the perfect solution for some problems. Like, your dress is really to short to be a dress any more. Like, you're flying to somewhere warm from somewhere cold: you can wear a cute dress & take the leggings off when you arrive! Like, when you've grown sick of wearing those designer jeans that are so uncomfortable and so low you're always yanking them up and your muffin top is always hanging over. Like when you want to tuck your pants into your boots this winter.
And especially like, when you want to disguise certain figure flaws with a nice long tunic that covers all those areas. After all, the legs are the last to go, why not show them off?
So, thanks Laurie, you've inspired me and I'm going for it. I'm doing the leggings thing and I don't care who knows about it. For now tho, I'm trying to be abstemious and sticking to just basic black. I'll leave any furry leopard print leggings to those Cougarlike ladies I keep hearing about.