Back to School: A Reimagining

Aritzia sweater (similar)
Levi’s jeans
Jonak mules
Celine bag
Zara belt (similar)
Anthropologie beret
Zara sunglasses (similar)
Wolf Circus necklace (similar)
Madewell rings
Urban Outfitters earrings (similar)
Location: Saint Boniface Cathedral – Winnipeg, Manitoba

School was not a place I enjoyed spending five out of every seven days of my childhood. This is something very few people knew and that I didn’t admit until recently. My report cards suggested otherwise, which is why it came as such a shock when I admitted that I hated classrooms and finished university as fast I could so I never had to spend time in one again. I love to learn. But for me, school wasn’t particularly conducive to learning – most of what I know, I picked up in books I read because I wanted to.

(When I was seventeen, my favourite book was the philosophical novel Sophie’s World by Jostein Gaarder. I loved it so much that my own character is Sophie’s namesake. And I learned more from it than I did from all of my teachers combined that year, concepts I still refer to and rely on far more than I ever have on the lessons taught in The Lord of the Flies, which was part of the curriculum in twelfth grade English.)

I digress. The only day of school I truly loved was the first day, because it was the day I got to set my sartorial tone for the rest of the year. Unfortunately, inevitably, on my babysitting budget, my first day of school outfits were always an approximation of what I dreamed of wearing rather than what I really wanted to wear. (Because what I wanted to wear undoubtedly included a pair of designer shoes. Designer anything was both geographically and financially inaccessible to me at the time.) In twelfth grade, I finally felt like I hit the right note: my white one-shoulder tanktop, flared jeans and camel-coloured platform sandals, all pulled together with a pink silk scarf belt, were the perfect mix of sophisticated and bohemian. I never looked more like Sienna Miller, who was the It Girl of the moment back then, than I did that day.

But long, long before twelfth grade, even before I had babysitting money, I devoured copies of Seventeen magazine bought by my best friend’s sister. And I dreamed of back-to-school outfits that included berets and Levi’s jeans. I’m still not convinced that the nineties was a particularly memorable fashion era. But they were my formative years. I developed my first thoughts on personal style in that decade of Doc Martens and non-stretch denim. So today, in honour of the start of fall and of the new school year, I bring you a reimagining of the outfits I dreamed of wearing on the first day of school so many years ago. A time when, in reality, my mom probably still had a significant say in what I actually wound up wearing. (Which to say that most of my first day of school outfits undoubtedly included multiple colours. And at least one print.)

I may not have loved school. But I always loved dressing for it.