In which it all goes together but not exactly

I firmly believe most men don't understand women's clothing. I mean your average man. Not your Project Runway "drapes like an angel" designer guy.

Which is fine; they don't need to. Unless of course they're cross-dressers. In which case, well, honestly, I'm not even sure what to say about that. Anyway. It's fine.

Except that sometimes, I need some help.

This is one of several areas in which I think lesbians have it made. You always have another woman around to help with your outfit. You could wear each other's clothes. It would be great.

But that's also a huge tangent and nowhere near my point.

We don't have a full-length mirror at Nick's, so I never exactly know what I look like till I get to the bathroom at work.

Mostly it's fine. I seem to wear the same things over and over anyway. Or I wear something that goes with black boots or shoes and don't have to worry about color matching.

The only part I sometimes get nervous about is when I venture into trying to match browns, or brown with other colors, and I'm uncertain. Because Nick is color-blind, and so he genuinely can't tell if this goes with that, colorishly speaking.

Plus, I have decided that while he has nice taste, and he's conservative, so I'll never run off to work all tarty, men just can't be trusted when they tell you something looks fine.

And you know how sometimes you're trying to figure out if you can pull something off and you're not sure? It might be cool, but it also might be dumb? It might work really well, but if it doesn't, it really doesn't?

That's where you need a woman. Or a full length mirror.

Because, here's what I did the other day. I bought these grey 3/4 length cuffed pants, quite fitted, at Banana recently. They're cotton and stretch and comfy, but sharp. A good weight for spring, but dark enough grey to be worn with a wool sweater and not look weird. I paired them with a fitted waist-length black sweater set.

And then I was trying to figure out shoes, and since this week was cold, I chose black boots. And since I still have a lot of my clothes at home, I donned the only pair of black boots I had at Nick's. They're flat, with a square toe, and they have two straps on the calf.

I got them in England several years ago, and I call them my Tough Girl boots because I think I totally look like I could kick someone's ass in them. The ass of someone short. And little. But still. (I have been told, incidentally, that I never look like I could kick someone's ass. But if that's what I want to call the boots, that's cool.)

"How does this look?"

"Great!"

Since I liked every piece of the outfit, I felt good walking out the door. Nice pants, conservative sweater, good boots.

We drove into the city, and were almost at the door of his office building when he said, "I really like that look."

"Hey, thanks!"

"It's sort of modern-day girly stormtrooper."

Um?

It turned out he was exactly right.