today i’m taking out the calivintage dress for another spin! i thought it would be the perfect dress for a simple outfit where i really wanted just a few pieces to do all the talking. see, yesterday i got my jessica simpson dany platforms in the mail! for those of you who aren’t familiar with them, they’re a knock off of the charles anastase platforms from spring 2009 (i’m still slightly obsessed with that collection!), only without the insane price tag. they came out last year some time and quickly sold out before people started listing them on ebay for like $200 and up. at which point, i regretted that i didn’t purchase them when i first saw them. so when they were re-released this month, i went ahead and indulged myself. i’ve been wanting a suuuper tall pair of heels for a long while now and these are so fun to wear! and in all honesty, they’re not hard to walk in and are actually one of the more comfortable pairs of heels i own. because of the huge platform in front, they aren’t steep at all. my only concern is that if i were to trip on something, i would probably take a nasty spill. fortunately for me, i’m not very accident prone, so i’ll gladly take the marginal risk.

anyway, knock-offs seem to always be a hot topic within the fashion industry. i remember a while back leproust vintage wrote a post asking her readers for their thoughts on the subject. it reminded me of a video i saw by johanna blakley, lessons from fashion’s free culture. while i don’t agree with everything she has to say, she did make an interesting point that the people who are buying knockoffs aren’t taking any business away from the designers who make the high end pieces because they simply can’t afford those insane price tags. then, for an almost perfect coincidence, this morning there was a post on threadbared about some of the social and cultural judgments made against women who buy cheap clothes. certainly something to think about. and there is certainly much more to the equation that i’m not even getting into. in the meantime, i am having oh so much fun prancing around in my new shoes!

dress: the modcloth calivintage dress
shoes: jessica simpson dany platforms
sunglasses: karen walker
clutch: thrifted vintage woven straw clutch

as promised, today i am sharing a few pictures from my weekend at the russian river. as usual, i brought my camera with high hopes of getting excellent coverage of the weekend and sort of imagined myself documenting things meticulously right down to each meal we ate. but unfortunately, i hardly remembered to pick up the camera! the one time that i did bring my camera was on a canoe trip down the russian river, which in hindsight, was probably the least opportune time to bring it. i’m sure you can imagine my angst at the idea of capsizing and losing it, or my utter horror when i discovered that the people on the shores make a pasttime of shooting passers by in canoes with giant water cannons. it was definitely nice considering the sweltering heat, but after a certain point, i had to wrap my camera in a towel and bury it in a moderately water proof bag for the duration. live and learn!

anyway, we spent our time staying at a cabin in forestville and enjoyed a long and leisurely canoe trip down the russian river. we were all so exhausted from all of the rowing and heat of the sun that we barely had enough energy for an evening bbq! the next day we went on an expedition to one of my favorite bakeries, wild flour, for delicious fougasse, and then did some wandering around sebastopol, guerneville, and healdsburg before finishing up the evening watching the local fireworks show. all in all, it was a nice, relaxing weekend.

view of the front of the canoe.

view of the back of the canoe.

i think cheap beer is mandatory on the river.

almost every single shore was filled with people.

the bus ride back. heat exhaustion!

guerneville.

healdsburg.