Women We Love

We all have a style inspiration, someone with a look we think of in the morning as we’re getting dressed, someone we hear in our ear as we’re shopping, someone we try to imagine in our clothes so we can accessorize like they do. We’re fascinated to see what they come up with next. We wonder how they do it. We wish we could be as daring, or as colorful, or as comfortable in high heels or short skirts or large jewelry as they are.

We’re going to try to get in the closets of a few such women, the ones we can’t stop staring at when we see them. Welcome to Women We Love.

The first is Paz: artist and mother of two, with singular style.

What are you thinking about as you get dressed?

It really depends on the day and how I feel, where I am going, how much time I have. Time is always

lacking nowadays because I have two young children, but when there is time I play dress up...I look in

the mirror and I start by paying attention to how I feel at that moment: womanly, girly, androgynous,

luscious, serious, stoic...and then find something in my closet that will project those emotions. I even go

so far as to recreate stories in my head while I am dressing. I have done this all my life, first with my

mother’s clothes and shoes.

How would you describe your style?

Chameleonic. I like to play. I like to be many things: Ambiguous, womanly, a peasant girl, sophisticated,

sexy, flamboyant, invisible...

I am an artist and I look at the body abstractly as a groups of shapes and forms. Clothes are structures

that you add on to dramatize the different parts of the body, but I also look at color, weight, light, and

flow, because dressing is theatrical in nature and there are so many emotions you can communicate by

the way you dress.

Has your style changed as you have gotten older and had children?

I don't have the time to be as creative with the way I dress. So many times I end up just dressing without

much thought, but that has happened to everything in my life, not just clothes. Because my children are still

small I approach every thing in my life in a very utilitarian way.

Also, I have never been much of a trend follower and as I gotten older I have removed myself even further

from trends, and I like this. I wear what I like. Comfort plays a bigger factor now-a-days than when I was

younger. I now think of things like: Is my back going to hurt with those shoes the next day?

But perhaps the biggest and most welcome change that has occurred as I have gotten older is that I now

dress exclusively for myself, because when I was younger dressing was more of an action to get a reaction

from people.

Why is style important to you?

Style is how you present yourself to the world. It is a form of self expression and not only happens

with the clothes you wear, but also how you carry yourself, how you take care of your self, how you

talk, how you cook, how you decorate your house. Style is in everything you do. It is taking things

that by themselves do not have much meaning and creating a story, your story.