How to Style a Clothes Item You Never Wear with the Thrifty Six: Maxis

I have been welcomed into a wonderful group of fashion and lifestyle bloggers that focuses on styling preloved clothing and accessories in themed monthly posts (third Monday of the month). I hope that this showcase of secondhand items and outfits provides some shopping and style inspiration for anyone who is interested in creating great looks in a way that is sustainable for our planet and our pocketbooks.

Today's topic is Maxis...and I was struggling to figure out how to style an item I don't own when I found that a skirt I was certain I had removed from my wardrobe popped out at my from the back of the closet. Hurray, I had a maxi skirt to wear for this challenge, but it was a maxi skirt that I didn't necessarily like or want to wear (hence I had marked it as gone in my wardrobe spreadsheet, even if I had forgotten to physically remove it from my closet).

Why do I not like this skirt? For reasons both general and specific.

First the general: while I think maxi dresses and skirts can be cute on other people, when I wear one myself, I feel weird because I have a strong association of long dresses/skirts with the old-school prairie dresses worn by certain extremely conservative religious women. Growing up in the 80s/90s, the only women I saw wearing maxi lengths were members of a conservative Christian sect who wore full length ditsy floral prairie dresses and always kept their hair up in buns...and I usually saw them walking at the high school track, where they would finish off this old-fashioned look with chunky white walking shoes for maximum frumpiness (no, I get that it was a practical choice for walking, but the whole thing is definitely not a vibe I aspire to).

Then the specific: this particular skirt felt like it could be versatile due to the neutral coloring, but the angled chevron stripes give it an odd boldness that I have found difficult to work with. (Perhaps on a shorter skirt, it would be fine, but at this length, it's really quite a lot of stripes.) It's bold enough a print/color combination that it clashes with a lot of things, but it's not really bold enough to carry the interest of the look alone. I try it with solid neutrals: boring. I try it with solid accent colors: meh. I try it with prints: too much. And even in the outfits that look boring/meh, the stripes still tend to overwhelm everything else, creating a weird aggressively boring and unbalanced look where all your attention goes to the skirt.

But since our theme this month is Maxis, I knew I needed to create an outfit with it. I figured I'd give it one last wear and then bid it adieu from my wardrobe as part of my summer closet edit.

So how do I style this challenging garment into an outfit that felt more "me" than it did "1980s modest dress vibes"?

I decided to think about the most "me" things in my wardrobe and figure out if any of them could work in the outfit. I truly expected that I'd end up with a colorful top and some of my handmade jewelry, but things went a different direction!

I remembered that in the grey-and-black color palette, I had this Alice in Wonderland themed T-shirt (showing the Alice from the 1951 Disney animated film) that was a gift from my mom. Hmm, promising. Oh yes, and I also had this Alice in Wonderland themed charm bracelet that was also a gift from my mom. Now we're on to something!

When wearing the t-shirt and maxi skirt alone, the dramatic angled stripes were still quite dominant, but when I layered a black cardigan on top, I thought it was much more balanced. The black cardigan against the pale grey background of the t-shirt (and my light skin and hair) has higher contrast than the black stripes against the darker grey background of the skirt (the idea that we can make something look less contrasting by pairing it with something more contrasting is the contrast-contrast illusion/Chubb illusion). Since our eyes are often drawn to higher contrast, this brought attention back up to the top of the outfit instead of leaving it on the skirt. Success!

OOTD 9/14/26

To amp up the top-of-outfit contrast and add another "feels like me" element, I wore a lightweight silky cat scarf made into a braided scarf necklace using Jodie's method. Adding cat motifs to an Alice look feels right to me because Alice's cat Dinah (and later Dinah's two kittens Snowdrop and Kitty) play a role in the books, to say nothing of the Cheshire Cat.

I continued the cat theme with grey and black leopard flats with cute bows. (This combination is pretty far from the "long prairie dress and chunky white sneakers" look of the ultra-conservative women of my youth.)

I wore the Alice charm bracelet shown above on my left wrist. For my right wrist, I pulled together a bracelet stack in my outfit's color palette of black and grey with touches of light blue and white/clear, using silver as my metal of choice. I had to include my black glass bead bracelet with the cat charm to keep with my theme. I also incorporated two stand-alone paper bead bracelets that fit my color scheme. {stretch bracelet tutorial} {bicone paper bead tutorial} {tube paper bead tutorial}

The top paper bead bracelet (3rd bracelet in the stack) started out as a full-page magazine ad in shades of pale bluish grey, darker grey, and taupe that I modified by (1) scribbling over in black marker, making a special effort to cover up the text, and (2) painting over with silver metallic acrylic paint. This created paper with quite a bit of visual texture from the original image on flat paper, the shiny black marker squiggles, and the glowing silver metallic areas. I loved how these beads turned out.

The bottom paper bead bracelet (just above the pearls) was made using this image of a city at night from a magazine. The green, red, and beige areas were not in my color palette, so I made sure to cover them with silver marker on the strips before rolling. Here you can see how glossy the final beads are after two dips through my glazing process.

My earrings are a fun variant on the skinny stack design (see #4 in this post) using flattened bicone disk beads with an off-center drill hole. Because the holes are not in the middle of the beads, when you stack them, they create this cool staggered effect. These earrings remind me of some of the shelf mushrooms in the video game Skyrim. I think you can hardly go wrong with mushrooms in an Alice-themed look given the prominence of the caterpillar and mushrooms in the first book and the 1951 Disney movie.

Outfit details:

-Grey striped maxi skirt (thrifted at Goodwill), $4.49, 3/2019, 4 wears, current CPW $1.12

-Grey Unbirthday/Alice t-shirt (gift), 11/2022, 9 wears

-Black short-sleeved cardigan (thrifted Studio Works), $4.99, 7/2016, 31 wears, current CPW $0.16

-Black cat scarf (retail ?), $12.00, 12/2013, 15 wears, current CPW $0.80

-Grey leopard flats (retail Fergilicious), $14.00, 11/2013, 59 wears, current CPW $0.24

The cost per wear for this outfit (excluding the earrings and bracelets, which I do not track) was $2.32...and nearly half of that was the maxi skirt I have hardly worn. (Granted, this total is artificially low because the t-shirt was a gift.) This is well below my <$5 CPW goal for outfits.

Now let's review the maxi outfits that my thrifty friends have styled...

The Thrifty Six:

• Emma of Style Splash

• Jane of Preloved-Vintage-Handmade

• Jodie of Jodie's Touch of Style

• Nancy of Nancy's Fashion Style

• Sally of Within a World of My Own [me]

• Shelbee of Shelbee on the Edge

Emma of Style Splash

"I did quite well with this outfit as almost all of it is pre-loved! The vintage dress was an eBay purchase several years ago. The shoes were £1 in a charity shop and I bought the crochet bag on Vinted last year for a holiday, but it's quite heavy, so I didn't take in the end. My sparkly ring was a charity shop find too."

Jane of Preloved-Vintage-Handmade

“‘Maxi’ is the T6 theme for September – so I’m bringing maxi-dress, maxi-colour, and maxi-fun!

I got carried away by the playful, child-like print of this genuine 1970’s maxi-dress – I completely forgot myself and jumped on the rocking horse like I was five years old…

…that’s the power of fashion - it lifts your mood - how could I not feel joyful in this outfit!”

Jodie of Jodie's Touch of Style

“I love this maxi skirt that I bought for a holiday party over 10 years ago. And now I love wearing it for casual days. Everything except the polka dot top is thrifted. I knit my purse ages ago.”

Nancy of Nancy's Fashion Style

“I think this was one of the first maxi dresses I bought second-hand, because I wanted to give the style a try. It was a really beautiful dress, red and pink which I think is a perfect combination. But just a little too tight. And since it was lined, it was actually far too warm. Since then, I became a fan of maxi length, but not on dresses. I do love maxi skirts though. They often give a bit of a boho feel and are perfect to wear on long Summer nights outside.”

Shelbee of Shelbee on the Edge

“I recently wore this preloved daisy print dress for a Style Imitating Art challenge, but I wanted to style it in a simpler way to show off how adorable this oversized dress really is. It's by the brand KLOZ which was an early 2000s brand that focused on plus sized clothing with an artsy bohemian vibe. Yes, please! That's definitely for me...vintage, artsy, boho, plus sized, and thrifted! My green bib necklace is also a recently thrifted piece.”

And me...

“This chevron/striped maxi skirt thrifted in 2019 is the most under-utilized piece in my whole wardrobe; I find it hard to style and was actually surprised to see that it was still in my closet! I thought I'd wear it one more time for this challenge, then get rid of it...but I was so pleased with this outfit that I decided to keep it. The secret to styling this skirt that I was meh about? Adding in things I love, like the Alice in Wonderland T and jewelry plus cat print scarf and flats, to me it feel like me.”

Next month's topic is Geometry...squares, circles, triangles, mandalas, stripes, chevrons...so many wonderful options!

In the meantime, visit these lovely bloggers for the details of their thrifted maxi outfits and more style inspiration:

• Emma of Style Splash

• Jane of Preloved-Vintage-Handmade

• Jodie of Jodie's Touch of Style

• Nancy of Nancy's Fashion Style

• Shelbee of Shelbee on the Edge

Do you like to wear maxi skirts or dresses? Do you have a season in which you wear them more frequently? Are there any perfectly fine clothing designs, silhouettes, color combos, etc. that nevertheless feel hard for you to style because of mental associations? What is the least worn piece in your wardrobe?

Blogs I link up with are listed here.