I spent the last few days in Seattle (yay!) for a work conference (boo!). It was much less glamorous than it may sound (though in my hotel room the bathroom alone outsized the kitchen in my apartment). If you’ve ever traveled to an exotic land for work purposes, unless your work involves travel adventuring, you are probably on the wrong side (the inside) of a conference room most of the time, as I was. I did get to wander around a very little bit – most of my free time was spent bouncing between Monorail Espresso (apparently the coffee place downtown; or one of the many), and Piroshky Piroshky, a Russian bakery at Pike Place Market, a really wonderful gathering of shops, cafes, farm fresh food and sea fresh seafood vendors, overlooking the bay and with a view of Mt. Rainier (rainier indeed – you can only see the full mountain on the clearest of days, a rarity in Seattle outside of the summer months, though I did get some sun on my face on my last day there).
The indefatigable barista at Monorail Espresso – she always seemed to be there (always wearing something cute); gobs of Russian pastries at Piroshky, Piroshky, at the ready to expand my waistline so I don’t fit into any of my clothes anymore. Note the fun Russian posters in the background.
In Russia, pastries eat YOU!
The rest of the time, I kept myself awake during the less thrilling presentations by – you guessed it – fooling about on my iPhone. When I first got it, back in June, I put loads of apps on it and promptly proceeded to use about three eightieths of them. Among that mostly neglected portion (poor babies!) numbers a fair amount of style apps: blogs, lookbooks, street style, runway shows. Over the course of four days, I became very well acquainted with those previously neglected apps; putting together looks on The Outnet’s app (Laetitia had a fun time with The Outnet earlier this year), checking out pre-fab looks on the Vogue Stylist app, catching up on the latest runways shows on Style.com’s app (and ones from a decade ago – like their website, the app goes back to S/S 2000), soaking up the looks of common folk around the world on Uniqlo’s Uniqlooks app, Lookbook.nu’s app, and Fashism’s app. Alas not every site has an app, but most have mobile versions; I did some of my Mademoiselle Robot and Sartorialist reading during those meetings too.
Fun with Vogue Stylist app.
Fun with Lookbook app.
Fun with Fashism and Uniqlooks apps.
Fun with The Outnet app (seriously I could do this all dayyy lonnnng, and it kind of makes me want to undertake the absolutely insane project of cataloging my wardrobe so I can put my outfits together like this ).
Now, I’m not going to recommend you do as I did, but I would encourage you to be prepared, should a situation arise in which your sanity depends on engaging in illicit smartphone play (all these apps are free, by the by).