Summer Essentials: The Perfect Shirt

Everyone has a summer favourite clothes wise. For me this is a voile shirt, preferably in white or blue, worn casually tucked into denim shorts or jeans. Jewelled sandals, pedicured feet, mascara, and you are done. In other words, my version of Ralph Lauren. Sadly though I haven't found my perfect boyfriend shirt since I left India. Either the shirts were too form fitting, too bright (neons not my thing), or in linen. I picked up one from GAP which was good, but it wasn't what I wanted. To cut the long story short, I missed Sarojini Nagar. 

Cut to a few weeks back, I am on a tram in Amsterdam, making my way to the Van Gogh Museum. I pass a lot of stores including Brandy Melville (which is a bloggers paradise right now, every skinny girl out there has a piece of this) and then suddenly I see the most perfect light blue shirt hanging on the display of a swanky store. I immediately get my act together, jump up, press the "open door" button and pop out onto the street. The store turned out to be this one and let me tell you, this ain't cheap. The store gives you a very Scandinavian minimalistic vibe which I find a bit clinical, but oh the shirt. Its a tiny feat of creation: voile, slightly sheer and the perfect shade of blue. In my imaginary life, I would wear this for a girly brunch with Garance Doré, where we will talk about French chic and living in New York. There was one teeny problem, the shirt comes with a huge and I mean HUGE price tag. 

Not to be deterred, I waited for the sale. Turns out this piece of clothing is part of their permanent collection and doesn't go on sale. Bloody hell. By now its been two weeks and my philosophy is if you can't get something out of your head for two weeks, you might as well give in to it. I walked all the way to the store justifying the expense and then wait for it, the shirt is sold out. Let me tell you, I try every week to plough my way through the Economist and all I get is how bad the European economy is. Well somethings tells me that either the ladies of Europe aren't agreeing or the Economist is lying. Or it might well be that I have good taste. Anyways, first step in the right direction was to check out if there were any other outlets and did they have the item in stock. I was sans internet, so I asked the SA for assistance. She wasn't too happy as there was a sale going on. But I can be very patient when it suits me, so she had no choice but to help me. Turns out, there was an outlet nearby, and they did have one piece in stock which they would hold for me. The SA gave me directions which were simple enough but for one things, I can't read maps and she meant left when she said right. 

I always knew I was bad with directions, but after 20 minutes of walking around Leidsplein, it was confirmed, I was a dud without googlemaps. So I did the best thing possible, I went into the nearest store and asked for directions. To make it worse, I forgot the name of the street. But the SA seems to understand but she gave me a most cryptic answer with a smile: "its one behind". Now "one behind" could mean so many things. It could be the shop behind this store (turned out to be a coffee house), or could be the lane behind the store (no, its another canal), or it could be walk to the end of the road, cross the canal bridge, turn left and you'll see the store (It was). So "aal is well" and this bad boy is now sitting pretty in my closet. In fact I am going for a B-B-Q shindig in the evening and mean to rock this with my shorts. That's my summer fashion story, do you have one?