Blumarine - an ongoing love story

(Blumarine S/S 2010 - photos from Style.com).

(Bluemarine F 2010 - photos from Style.com).

I remember the exact time and place I fell in love with Blumarine.

I've always been with brightly colored florals and animal prints like a moth to a flame - I have this inexplicable drawing towards anything eyecatching. So when on a trip to Los Angeles in the spring of 2004, I spotted this cute little jersey skirt in Nordstrom, I immediately knew I had to have it:

(While in this picture it's all crumpled from winter storage, come spring and it will be taken to the dry cleaner and put back in perfect order. It clings to the body in all the right places, and slightly flares at the knees.)

As it was the first day of my LA trip, when trying on the skirt in the store I made the jetlagged mistake of not converting dollars to Norwegian kroner. 440 I thought, that's a good price. And so I happily whipped out my credit card and left the store all smiles. It was only when arriving back at the hotel it dawned on me that USD 440 was NOK 3000 at the time. Now that is a wee bit of a difference from NOK 440! I guess I should have known it wouldn't come cheap, after all the Nordstrom store was located in Beverly Hills!

However, by dividing the cost by the number of years I've had it, it hasn't been such an expensive deal after all. Even after 6 years in my wardrobe, I still love it. In fact, I loved everything about it so much that when I came across the same skirt in a different color, I just had to have that one, too!

The second skirt I found on Ebay in October 2007 while I was confined to a week's isolation at the Cancer Centre, after my immune system said thank you and goodbye because of a too strong dose of chemotherapy. Luckily, they had provided a screen next to the bed with Internet access, and I wasted no time putting it to good use.

This second skirt was new with tag, apparently from the well stocked wardrobe of a LA socialite who bought such a huge amounts of clothes every season she regularly had to sell some of it unused through resellers. Knowing the real value of the skirt, I had put in a max bid of around USD 200, but the other bidders gave up somewhere around 80. By the time the doctors decided to release me, it was already waiting in my mail box.

The latest additon to my collection of skirts is another Blumarine Ebay purchase:

The shape is the same, but the jersey is way thicker and it's got velvet detailing, so it's more of a fall and winter skirt. I've seen this in some upmarket online store, and the retail price was USD 525. I paid USD 30 for it. Seeing Blumarine showing a lot of animal prints for Fall 2010, come next winter and I'll be using it with something that has a touch of zebra or python. Most likely not as much as in some of the images from the collection though. I don't wanna look like I just escaped from the zoo, either.