I have 1690 unread messages in my inbox, and most of them are either from the Dutch Lotto Commission (don’t ask me why), deposed Nigerian princes (I’m like catnip to them) or PR agents wanting me to promote something or other to you lot.

I tend to be equally suspicious of all three, but particularly of the PR folks. See friends, there is a lot of garbage out there and it’s one of my solemn duties to try to keep you from as much of it as I can.  That being said, occasionally, VERY occasionally a good one slips through, and today I’ve got a good one.

Marina Rinaldi was the first proper fashion group that really took an interest in creating ready-to-wear (as opposed to couture and high-street brands) for plus size women. Thirty years later, they’re still producing some of the best quality stuff available in the plus sizes, plus their clothes are made in Italy so you don’t need to worry about the guilt of wearing something pieced together by some 9 year-old Malaysian girl in a third-world sweatshop.

Ideeli is having a 40 hour invitation-only sale starting at 11:00 a.m. Eastern for 1st row members and noon for 2nd row (i.e., free) members, with prices up to 69% off regular Rinaldi retail.

I’ve only got two visuals from the sale, but it looks like there will be sportswear and some dressier offerings.

(click to shop the sale)

Now here’s where it gets tricky. Ideeli and other invitation-only luxury resellers have been historically gun shy about offering plus-size sales, so they’re trying to drum up a lot of business for this sale to prove to themselves that yes, plus-size luxury IS a marketable niche, worthy of its place next to straight-sized fashions. So everyone complaining there aren’t fashionable, ethically-manufactured high quality clothes available for big gals, here’s a chance to put your money where your mouse is and send a message that plus-size consumers care about quality, cut and construction just as much as our skinny sisters.

Use the code “marina” to get access to the sale without registering and if you do register (I commend it, there are great steals to be had) use the referral email plumcake@shoeblogs.com so they know you’re coming from this blog. I don’t know if those $25 incentive things work with corporate accounts, but if they do and something comes my way, I’ll  do a $25 giveaway to a beloved big girl reader.

If you have never known the joys of open water sailing, I cannot begin to describe it. I don’t mean putting around on a speedboat. Motorboats are all well and good, but when it’s just you and the wind and a whistlefast ship and you’re keeling so hard  you’ve got water slapping the hatch…it’s the closest I ever expect to come to flying in this life.

One of the things that feels so fresh about the nautical-inspired look right now is it’s smart but not tight.

Listen, no one loves a curve-accentuating garment more than your pal Plummy, but I’m just tired of being the same nipped-waist silhouette.

The seafarer look is a chic way to get clothes that fit away from the  body without being schlubby AND once we get over the horizontal stripes bugaboo,  it becomes startlingly easy to put together visually balanced outfits for apples, pears and all you other fruits.

The key is to anchor (see what I did there?) your look with the right pant. A good wide leg trouser is essential. Or crops with a statement shoe.  Tight pants would be death to this look, particularly on a big girl. Linen is an especially nice choice and looks even better when rumpled.

Striped blazer

Navy linen trouser

Navy piped cardigan

Button shoulder tunic

Boxy cardi

Poplin crops

Bateau Breton tunic

White and navy striped tee

Boxy jumper (that’s sweater, y’all)

Wide leg trouser

I’m tired and I’m working on day three of Satan’s own hangover which has assaulted my person despite the fact my total alcoholic consumption (excluding funerals, which don’t count) in the past week consists of one Black Velvet on Saturday morning and two ciders on Saint Patrick’s Day. The weather is gorgeous and I’m taking the rest of the day off.

I’m going to wax my legs, put on my new Lacroix espadrilles which are so fab it makes me want to DIE, and go out to Pork Chop Friday at Perry’s with some members of my very favorite vicious circle until I get myself into a pork coma.

THEN I’m going to go home, remove my Lacroix espadrilles along with every other stitch of clothing on my fine alabaster frame and –after appropriate sunscreen application (except on my tum, because my doctor said so)– am going to loll naked in the glorious Texas sun, unseen by human eye thanks to the Moroccan-style cabana cum casbah I CONSTRUCTED MYSELF (seriously, I drew the schematics and everything!) and have never gotten to properly enjoy.

HOWEVER:

Because I am a good blogger and love you all very much I will leave you with a parting gift. There is an enormous sale going on at Lane Bryant today, and if you use the code 000202077 you get 40% off your purchase over $100 and a whopping 50% off orders over $200. Except for Spanx, but that’s okay because Spanx suck, especially on Pork Chop Friday.

I am particularly fond of:

Fab little sequined skirt you’ll own for a million years

This is what happens. You buy this skirt now, but you think you’ll never wear it. Until you get called for cocktails or a nice reception or have a hot date, and you just grab it and toss on a dead simple ivory cashmere top, or a simple shell and maybe a great colored long cardi and you look fabulous and effortless and you spent about three seconds figuring out to wear. This you will do again and again for the next decade.

Painterly dirndl skirt

This reminds me of the stuff YSL and Prada have been doing the past few summers. There’s been a lot of this dirndl business around lately, and I like it. Granted it’s not the most slimming choice, but it’s not as embiggening as you might think, and besides who cares? If that’s the only thing you worry about then just buy a million black a-line dresses, get them tailored and find another hobby.

Harem-esque pants

I KNOW none of you are going to be on board with this one but I don’t care because I’m going to be so hopped up on porcine goodness that I will suffer the slings and arrows OF YOUR TOTAL WRONGNESS in beatific bliss. If you take a look at the picture of them in olive on the site, you’ll see it’s not really a dropped waist and they have these incredible side pleats on the side for drape without a ton of added fullness. I love them.

Sarong pants

I am admittedly a little less sure about these but I’ve seen them deployed really well and I’m just so curious.This whole Left Bank by way of Malaga, Rossy De Palma in the late 80′s vibe feels so fresh to me right now. I want to wear them with a slim cut gauze top and some really slick caramel leather bracelets.

Algerian blue  swimsuit

Love. It. LOVE IT. This is a broad-shouldered pear’s dream suit as it balances everything out visually and still is interesting, and, Thanks be to God, doesn’t try to suck you in and up and down and every way to Sunday like so many plus size suits. It’s on my very short list of possible swimtogs for an upcoming girls’ weekend in Las Vegas for poolside lounging.

IN CONCLUSION:

Me = naked and happy and full of pork chop
These Clothes = fabulous and on epic sale
You = shopping, possibly also naked and happy and full of pork chop, but the point is, I won’t be here to think or hear about it. I’ll catch you on the flipside.

Francesca has been mulling some of the new offerings at Igigi. (Yes, Francesca knows that their customer service leaves MUCH to be desired, but  there is no getting around the fact that their clothes are distinctive, feminine, and flattering for many “difficult” body shapes.)

What say you about the Ayla colorblock dress? In the back it is all black.

Part of Francesca is thinking “kewl,” and part of her is thinking “that episode of Star Trek.”

Here we have the “Brilliant Ideas” dress in green, which would look superfantastic on the top-heavy or hourglass woman, but is sadly terrible for the woman of apple-ness (the oval-shaped).

Look! The beautiful “Francesca” dress (natch) now comes in a gorgeous shade of purple:

Finally, before we head off for the weekend, what say you about the “Exceptional Ruffle Dress,” shown here in Chocolate?

Francesca loves the belt and thinks this would look terrific in the office, but cannot bring herself to embrace the ruffle.

Ruffles have been showing up with increasing frequency lately on the fashions, and despite her love of lace and feminine styles, Francesca is not excited. “Lacy” and “Frilly” are not the same and do not have to go together like love and marriage.

Anyhow, have a happy weekend! xoxo

When building a wardrobe, it’s important to make sure you’re highly visible in it. By that I don’t necessarily mean bright colors or wildly dramatic cuts. Of course I’m hardly against either of these things, but right now I’m talking about something much, much subtler. What I mean is that your personality should be visible in your clothing choices.  When you find something that makes you feel entirely yourself, that piece has power.

For one woman it might be a brightly colored wrap dress, for another a soft grey turtleneck, and for yet another a pair of amazing leather boots. You are the only one who can identify your power pieces. Whether the thing that makes you feel most like you is a pair of cat’s eye sunglasses, black lace, paisley,  or linen trousers, you need to make room for it in your wardrobe. Don’t pick just any piece that fits the description, though. Shade, cut, proportion, comfort and construction still matter in these pieces. In fact, they may matter even more than usual because this is your calling card.

My calling card? Hats. It all started when I was fifteen with a visit to the Renaissance Faire. Yes, Ren Faire, Plummy. Deal. My mother whipped up an indigo blue Tudor flat cap for me to wear with the amazing early Elizabethan court gown she’d made me for a school play. I fell in love with the Faire, but even more I fell in love with that cap. I started wearing it everywhere. It was the perfect shade of blue to make my eyes sparkle and my skin glow. It was the perfect proportion to make my rather small head with the very flat straight hair look just a touch bigger. It kept my nose from burning when the sun came out, and kept the rain out of my eyes in stormy weather.

I wore it with everything, to every event. I wore it to school, to my job (I had a paper route and washed dishes at a Russian Orthodox Church), to rehearsals for school plays, to concerts, to the grocery store and the mall. It rapidly became a signature.

Eventually the hat died a sad death from overuse. I have mourned it ever since.

By that time, I was the Girl in the Hat. I did the only thing I could imagine: I got more hats. First was a Greek fisherman’s cap and my grandfather’s Homburg. They were both great, but only for casual wear. I picked up a gorgeous winter white beret with a spray of white feathers. By the time I was twenty, I had a collection of wonderful hats. I’d figured out what my best proportions, styles, and colors were. I knew what angles looked best on me and knew to avoid even trying anything too square or entirely brimless.

In short, I found something that spoke to who I was, learned the tricks that made it work on me, and made it my calling card. It’s so much my sartorial thing that there are people who have known me for as much as five years who have never seen me without a hat. When I recently got a dramatically different new haircut, there were friends who didn’t notice it for weeks because I had the hats on.

I have hats for formal and casual wear, hats for sun and hats for rain, subtle colors and bright ones, straw, fabric, felt, heavily ornamented and plain. Believe it or not, I’ve packed all that into less than a dozen hats, bought (and received as gifts) over the course of the last fifteen years or so.

The point of all this? When you find something that makes you feel the most you, it’s worth investing in it. Time, money, thought, and effort are all worth putting into these powerful pieces. In them, you feel good about yourself, and that can open surprising doors in life.

One more note  about operas and fat ladies (see what I did there? With the note? Because it’s like music, get it?)
Soprano Daniela Dessi walked out of the role of Violetta in Verdi’s La Traviata when director Franco Zeffirelli--you’ll remember him from the Romeo and Juliet we all saw in junior high with Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting– said she was too fat to sing one of opera’s most famous consumptives.

THIS is La Dessi (with friends):

What
a
COW.

By the way, that is EXACTLY what I wear each morning as my favorite houseboy attends to my toilette (in my head).

Now for those of you who aren’t familiar with La Traviata or La Dame aux Camélias the Alexandre Dumas fils novel (his daddy wrote The Three Musketeers which incidentally has 30% less fat than other classic French adventure novels) on which the opera was based, it’s your tried-and-true Consumptive Parisian Hooker with a Heart of Gold story à la Moulin Rouge except for, you know, not awful in every conceivable way (I’m sorry it just IS and not even Ewan McGregor’s hotness is going to change the fact that Baz Luhrmann directs like a coked-up housefly with electrodes on his balls.)

Marguerite, renamed Violetta in the opera, was based on courtesan Marie Duplessis with whom Dumas fils had a torrid affair before she died at 23.

She’s seen here wearing a white camellia. Apparently Duplessis wore a white camellia when she was available to entertain guests  and a red one when she was having her Special Lady Time, which I suppose is a lot more elegant than MY tell which involves taking the safety off my .38.

So if Zeffirelli –who has always been for realism in casting– wanted to cast a sickly-thin 23 year old in the role, then why didn’t he? Is his Google finger broken? Because a quick image search showed me exactly what La Dessi looks like.  MAYBE it’s because it’s nearly impossible to find someone that young who can carry a principal with meaning and artistic flair and even LESS likely to find someone capable of singing that role who doesn’t weigh at least a buck fifty.

In fact, the only one I know to have done a credible job –and I’m not saying there aren’t others– is Beverly Sills when she sang Violetta in 1951.  The “youngest prima donna in captivity” was 22 and although she was a good bit slimmer than Dessi, no one was going to confuse Bubbles with a consumptive waif.

Ms Dessi says:

‘I can accept criticism before I put pen to paper but not afterwards. I was working well with the conductor of the orchestra but the problem these days is that theatrical directors have too much say.’

Ms Desi [sic] added: ‘I’m stunned. I still can’t believe what I heard him say. I am 1.60 metres tall, weigh 65 kg and take a size 44. There – that’s the first time I have given my vital statistics in public.’

So basically this woman  is 5’3″ and wears about a size 14, she had the role and had been rehearsing. Then Zeffirelli calls her “too portly to perform” and Dessi walks out, as does her husband who was playing the male principal and the show went on with two lesser voices.

Perfect!

I mean, I’m not super bright, but isn’t a big part of opera the singing? Because I kind of think it is.  Like,  if  it was just a bossy woman with a great rack and interesting taste in headgear  yelling at people for three hours  then I feel like I’d be offered more roles than I am, instead of the current number which is –let me rummage through my datebook– exactly zero.

Shout out to Sarahbyrdd for being the first reader to bring this to my attention!

So I was clicking through Style.com’s “12 Reasons to be Cheerful in 2010” with a bit of fear and loathing. Conde Nast is not historically a friend of the fatly, so I was interested to see three of their reasons –that’s a full 25% in some quarters– had something to do with fashion beyond the double-zeros.

First there was the downer we discussed yesterday, which was all about how Prada refused to design for non-model extras as the costume designer of the Met’s production of Attila. Bah and humbug and, as you may recall, suck it.

Then there was the bit about Mark Fast scoring a line with Topshop.  Fast, if you’ll recall, was the young buck who used to make his clothes only in one size but who sent down three plus-sized models the runway for Spring 2010, causing two of his stylists to quit.

I very much Do Not Love his clothes, but I love Mr Fast for using plus size models as models, not as tokens in his ultra-shredded sexpot show.

Then there was a note –and this is the most hopeful of all– about how models like Lara Stone (a size 4 sometimes 6) and Catherine McNeil –who has been getting a lot of flack for gaining weight and now looks to be a size 4– are getting tons and tons of work as the trend swings away from stick-thin and back to merely very slim.

According to style.com:

“If McNeil, Stone, and Gemma Ward—another reemerging catwalker dealing with negative body-image hype—were the new prototypes for healthier-looking models, we’d be much relieved. For now, there’s always Crystal Renn.”

This is exciting. This is REALLY exciting. Because one size 12 model in a lineup of thirty double-naughts is a gimmick, this is CHANGE. If we can get back to where a size 6 is model-normal, then maybe a size 12 model won’t seem so out of the ordinary. Maybe young girls won’t be so likely to develop eating disorders to starve themselves into a shape they’ll never EVER naturally be.  We’ve been in Waif World for about 15 years now –remember when Kate Moss was the thinnest model on the runway?– and there’s a change in the air. Whee!