In an ideal world, you would never write about anything you hadn’t personally fondled, examining up-close its precious (and not so) fibers, stroking its winky embellishments to see whether they are worth even a minor commitment of time and money. That said, I am, like the rest of you, hardly immune to midnight googling. Which is how, doing a bit of causal research into fall’s plethora of beaded garments, I come upon a pair of decorated pullovers that are either refreshingly irreverent or in spectacularly poor taste: a sweatshirt at Matches in England offering a mother-of-pearl and crystal depiction of a cartoon bird in a coffin under a chandelier (don’t you love Farfetch? How else could you peruse the stock at Concept Store Riga and Gallery Andorra?) and from ASOS, a gray cotton extravagance from the designer Ashish with Shut Up You’re Not My Real Dad shining in bugle beads.
Before moribund pets and teenage misanthropy arrive on the scene, I have already perused bedecked bombshells all over Manhattan, many of which exude a whiff of Dries Van Noten’s current collection, which featured, among other dazzling, spangled suggestions, a heartbreakingly seductive muffler decorated with swirled beads and shots of gold, that, despite a price tag hovering near four figures, is sold out all over the world.
At J.Crew, I fall deeply in love with a pale pullover, whose neck and shoulders are coated in dark beads, and have a brief fantasy of layering this under a vintage dress in a facsimile of the mesmerizing Prada fall 2013 collection, until a colleague brings me back down to earth by pointing out that I never wear pullovers and the likelihood of this look actually succeeding is depressingly slim. Still, if I insist on trying, for $49.95, H&M has a sweater smattered with rhinestones; for $179.20, the Outnet has a dignified N.Peal bead and crystal-encrusted cashmere crewnecks.
An extremely fetching item at Anthropologie called the Sequined Firecracker Shift (it looks the way it sounds) obviates the problem of what to pair with these fancy feasts. (Well, it’s really a nonproblem—assuming you own slim trousers, a plain skirt, or even a pair of jeans.)
But perhaps you are drawn more to the historical roots of this trend—those pretty decorated shrugs meant to lend a bit of unironic, cozy warmth to chilly shoulders more than a half-century ago. If strict adherence to authenticity is important to you, there are currently on eBay over 1,100 beaded vintage sweaters, everything from ivory cardies to ebony shells, variously laden with polka dots and peonies, starbursts and sunflowers. But search as you will, you will not find an item that disses your father, real or presumptive: Behavior that now seems frisky and semi-adorable would have landed you in reform school 60 years ago.
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