Styling Pleated and Flared Silhouettes for SIA: The Mysterious Garden

Shelbee at Shelbee on the Edge is the curator for this round of Style Imitating Art (SIA), and she selected the 1911 watercolor painting "The Mysterious Garden" by British artist Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh. She chose this painting because "the colors, the ethereal symbolism, and the delicate femininity of the work really spoke" to her.

source: https://shelbeeontheedge.com/

Since I do not have a giant billowing melon-shaped dress in my wardrobe to straightforwardly replicate the central figure's look, I started with the colors and the overall idea of high volume in putting my outfit together. I first selected this pleated peplum top in chambray blue with lace/eyelet detailing to invoke the "feminine" vibe that Shelbee mentioned. I added my chambray blazer to create a layered look, and it works well with my take that the figures in the background are wearing white masks and traditional menswear - blue shirts, darker blue ties, and pinstriped suits.

When it came to a higher volume bottom piece, I continued pulling my color palette from the painting with a flared dark grey skirt. I would definitely not have thought to wear the peplum top with this skirt under normal circumstances, so I enjoyed that this style challenge pushed me in a different direction.

OOTD 9/30/2026

My plaid scarf tied together the grey and blue colors together and served as a nod to the figures' neckties. This scarf could be tied as a necktie, but because it's two layers of woven fabric sewn together, that makes for a rather weird and bulky knot, so instead I just looped it once around my neck (method #4 here).

My grey and black leopard wedges were an easy shoe choice because they work well with the color of the skirt and ground the outfit in a way that feels right for the summer to fall transition season we're currently in.

Rather than my usual paper bead bracelet set, I picked out a memory wire bracelet in shades of light blue, white, grey, and silver (previously shown here) that I made as part of my Glacial Glimmer jewelry collection.

The earrings are a pair that I made with a white pearl bead and a DIY paper bead dangling below it (design #7 here) that I made to coordinate with a different scarf in my wardrobe, but I thought they also looked great with this plaid one.

I don't have paper to bead images to share, but I do remember that I made these two 0.5" long bicone beads from the cover of a local artist supply catalog that came in the mail.

Now for my favorite part of every SIA post: revealing our Rabbit Imitating Art selection!

I found the color palette of the painting a little tricky to pin down. Was the woman in the melon-shaped dress wearing blue? Purple? Periwinkle? Is there grey mixed into it? A soft white? Taupe?? Similarly, the "opal" color of rabbit fur is lovely and nuanced. The main color is a soft slate blue with dark blue tips. Each individual hair shaft has a band of fawn color below the blue (which can look more or less prominent depending on how the fur is sitting), which gives the fur an overall mottled look.

When Opal the intern overheard some administrative assistants discussing the lunch, including an amazing salad, being catered for a meeting of the "bored" in the conference room on the top floor, she thought, "Terrific! Hopefully they will quickly become so bored in the meeting that they doze off. Then I can sneak in, snag some food, and run away again without anyone noticing!"

Of course, the "bored" in question was actually the "board"...as in, the members don white painted wooden masks to cover their faces as they make their secretive sinister plans, and unfortunately for Opal, they remain quite alert and engaged throughout this process. (Yes, there are alchemical potions, aka drugs, involved.) So as Opal edged her way into the room, all the members were wide awake.

However, Opal did get lucky in the timing of her entrance! She walked in just as one of the members completed a ritual to summon an enigmatic spirit from a mysterious garden, and as the lady appeared in her huge billowing dress, she obscured Opal from their view.

As it was, the masks were chosen more for their dramatically eerie appearance than their functionality; while wearing them, the members were unable to see very well...including each other, which sort of negated the impact of the secret society "board" masks anyway, but no one has accused them of operating based on logic. They were quickly distracted by a frank exchange of views on whether the correct spirit had been summoned, and no one saw Opal even when she moved out from behind the lady onto the table holding the lunch, including the wonderful salad.

She filled an entire shopping bag with salad vegetables, pulled it down with her off the table, and hopped away merrily to find a hidden corner of a distant room to enjoy her meal in private.

And that was perfectly fine because the impractical "board" masks also kept the members from eating anything. After the meeting was over, the admin assistants took all the leftovers (e.g., all the food from the caterer except the salad) and put it in the break room for other employees to have. With the abundance of sandwiches, pasta, chips, brownies, cookies, and fine aged whiskey available, no one missed the salad at all.

Artwork "improved" with rabbit

Thanks for joining me today for this Style Imitating Art + Rabbit Imitating (and Improving) Art post!

To see other outfit interpretations of this artwork, check out the review on Shelbee on the Edge.

Do you like to wear high volume outfits? Do you have a dress with a billowing silhouette? Do you ever mix two higher volume pieces in one outfit? What color did the mysterious lady's dress look to you?

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