My style rut...

Back in the early 2000s I was sent by my company to do a project for Eve Magazine.  I came from male dominated environment where kindness was considered weakness and time off was for wimps and the unemployed.
Suddenly I was thrown into a world where every thing was lovely.  People brought flowers into work for their desks, the dogs and children came too if the sitters hadn't arrived on time and the permission to work from home was one quick painless, phone call.

I loved everything about the office, how they all supported each other and worked to enhance not just their own lives and positions, but the whole team's. At the beginning the magazine was incredibly successful, I'm not a magazine buyer, I find British Vogue pretty dull (worked there too, very different), and only buy US Vogue September and December editions) and Spanish Vogue December edition.  Everything else I am happy to have edited for me online.  But Eve was different, even though it was thin without the 'thud factor' (200 plus page editions that make a huge bang when you drop them and are full of advertising to support extra editorial pages), I used to read everything in it.  There was always a range of features, mainly based around being happy, being happy with less, being realistic about life, making life beautiful on a budget and having a laugh.  This was the best bit, most glossies take themselves pretty seriously but Eve wanted to make you laugh as well as look nice.

The queen of the Eve tribe was the fashion director, every day I would watch her like a stalker, totally obsessed with her outfits and how she wore them.  I wore suits for work, so the jeans and sequin tops with converse trainers were quite a shock.  She was in her mid 40s, perma tanned with thick waist length dark hair.  She had a definite 'look' of skinny jeans and embroidered/sequin/lace tops with flat shoes or wedges to avoid looking like a Liz Hurley wannabe.

Everyone did a version of the look, some added bootcut jeans or higher heels or more fitted tops, depending on their body shape.  I started to try it on my days off and found that it suited my build, decent legs, big tummy, men's shoulders.  It accentuated the good, and feminised or hid the bad.

There was nothing too show-y off-y about the look, the bags were always just nice leather, understated, no label in sight, day time sequins and floaty silk tops were toned down with minimal accessories and beaten up leather.

The pretty, comfortable, simple style permeated into everything that they did, I would often see the homes of various members of the team featured in the interiors articles and the look was always sunny, natural, pretty and cosy.

Of course there were flowers scattered through out the pages....

 The home makeovers focused on small spaces that could be made special without involving every member of the family or a huge budget to achieve the end result...

 Growing your own veg was always the ultimate luxury and aspiration...

 There were lots of 'how I changed my life' features, people who had left high pressured jobs to run a b and b in France or a pub in the UK, or even just opened a cafe in their local park....

 There wasn't much about expensive luxuries and going out to foodie destinations, it was more about entertaining at home and making simple things beautiful...

It's definitely my style rut and that 2 week period has probably had more influence on my tastes than any other time of my life.  What are your style constants and is there a reason for why you stick to them? Or are you Madonna-style able to cast everything off and start afresh when the time comes?