I had the privilege of traveling to France to celebrate my 40th birthday. As a lover of functional fashion, trips are deeply inspirational: travel strips you down to the essentials—what you carry, what you wear, how you feel. You become hyper-aware of every item on your body, and responsible for the weight of every extra thing in your suitcase. What serves you stays. What doesn’t, gets in the way. These are the fashion reflections that rose to the surface.
1. Glamping, but make it French
It’s adventure, not luxury. Our first Airbnb—and maybe traveling in general?—felt a bit like glamping: beautiful, curated, full of charm, but not comfortable in the way home is. No mirror, a bed that’s slightly off, and barely enough toilet paper. You’re either eating a luxurious dinner or you accidentally went twelve hours without food. You hike through your day, everything you might need strapped to your body. In this setting, fashion has to be function first.
2. Packing cubes as order
In the middle of low-grade chaos, packing cubes became my system. One for shoes still caked with trail dust. One for our picnic on the train. One for chargers and loose change. One with my kimono. One for dirty clothes. One for clean ones.
My French market tote became a rotating canvas—each day I dropped in whichever cubes I needed, and set off. Everything had a place. Nothing felt lost.
Preparing to do the laundry - a cube full of dirty clothes.
See my French market tote?
3. Clothes as cocoons
A little uncomfortable most of the time when traveling—my garments made me feel held. My kimono kept me at the right temperature in all kinds of weather, shifting between a chic outer layer (strolling through Paris) and a comforting robe (curled up in an airport waiting on a delayed flight).
One morning, having forgotten umbrellas, we headed to the farmers market. My kimono was soaked in the first few minutes—but the sun came out and I was the first dry, and my silk kimono none the worse for wear. It folds down to nothing, and I kept it packed inside my smallest cube, always ready to unfurl at the first sign of a breeze.
My indigo leaf skirt doubled as a blanket on chilly mornings and a breezy layer on warm afternoons. I wore it on the flight there and back, canoeing in the Dordogne Valley, biking through vineyards in Bordeaux. My clothes became my home. I stayed the right temperature, all the time.
A wet morning turned into a favorite day.
Once dry, we shopped the local market and feasted on oysters!
Returning to Illinois, door to door was 24 hours of travel. My kimono was my home.
I brought the back of my skirt between my legs and tucked it into the front waistband to bike through vineyards in the Bordeaux region. I was literally Lucy stomping grapes.
My belts turned into hair ties and ribbons. A bandana saved me from both bad hair days and strong sun—then, the next day, tied chicly around my neck to match its skirt. My turban wrap kept my hair from flying while adding a sense of polish and ease.
These small scraps of fabric solved an outsized number of problems.
Vacation is glamping. And functional fashion belongs here.
Not just beautiful clothes, but adaptive ones—pieces that carry you, wrap you, warm you. Clothes that offer a kind of shelter when you’re far from home.
Yes, I was inspired by the views, the food, the culture—but more than that, I was inspired as a goer-of-places and a doer-of-things. I design for that woman. So she can move through the world a little more freely, a little more fully—wrapped in pieces that support her every step of the way.
Here are links to what I wore on my trip:
- Indigo Leaf Skirt
- Indigo Leaf Bandana
- Bangladesh Belt Bag
- Piano Stripe Skirt
- Piano Stripe Turban Headscarf
- Packing Cubes
- Marigold Silk Kimono
XO Emily