High Contrast Brown and Ivory Winter Outfit for SIA Layered Sand

Salazar at 14 Shades of Grey is the curator for this round of Style Imitating Art (SIA), and she selected the "amazingly intricate" layered sand bottles by Iowan artist Andrew Clemens. She thought that the graphic nature of the artwork would make for fun outfit interpretation and that the "deep, rich colors are very suitable for midwinter too." I was impressed to learn that the bottles sold for $5-$7 in his lifetime (the late 1800s) but that recently a bottle sold for $1 million!

Shelbee and Marsha shared in their posts that the artist fell ill with "brain fever" (i.e., encephalitis) when he was 5 years old and became completely deaf and speech impaired as a result. He began creating his layered sand artwork as a young teenager on summer breaks from attending the state school for deaf students. He and his brothers would collect sandstone from Pictured Rocks (a park in the Mississippi River Valley in Iowa), sort them into colors, and grind them into sand for Clemens to use in making his art.

We had a lot of bottle art options to choose from, including miniature portraits, floral motifs, and geometric designs. I chose the mixed geometric designs of this "1882" bottle because I liked the idea of mixing prints in my interpretation.

Source: 14shadesofgrey.wordpress.com

As I was waiting for the reveal of the first artwork of the Style Imitating Art challenge for 2025, I had strongly hoped that I would be able to incorporate something from my end of 2024 clothing purchases/gifts in my interpretation. And this brown/green-olive/rust/ivory/maroon subtle oval print top (a birthday gift from my mom) came in clutch. The warm autumn-tone color palette reflected the natural sand tones the artist used in his creation (though my top has a much darker overall look), and the irregularities in the oval shapes was a good fit for the organic nature of the artwork. It's fun to make this top's debut wear part of the SIA challenge.

Brown/green-olive/rust oval print blouse, CJ Banks, 12/2024, gift, total wears = 1

Because it's winter in Minnesota (right now the sun is shining brightly at -2F), I am not styling blouses as stand-alone pieces; everything is layered, layered, layered. Ideally I would have chosen a brown cardigan for a low-contrast look with the dark brown print top, but "brown cardigan" has been on my shopping list for at least two years with no luck so far. So I wore an ivory cardigan, creating a high-contrast outfit instead.

OOTD 1/8/25

Ivory long-sleeved cardigan, CJ Banks, 5/2020, $17.99, total wears = 20, cost per wear (CPW) = $0.90

In fact, even though I'm on a Clothing No Buy for 2025, I have given myself permission to purchase a brown cardigan if the right one comes along because even when everyone was saying this past fall that brown was a big color for the fashion season, I came up empty. With the lighter, more taupe "Mocha Mousse" as the 2025 Pantone Color of the Year, we might see brown in its various forms more generally this year or we might find dark brown taking a backseat. It's not like I have difficult-to-meet requirements for a dark brown cardigan but I have only been seeing lighter shades of brown (particularly in that camel to medium warm brown range) when I've looked.

Two other 2024 purchased made it into my outfit: my dark rust corduroy skirt and dark cognac ankle boots. I paired them with dark brown tights for a tonally monochromatic bottom half of the outfit. It's easy to think that the skirt, tights, and boots/shoes need to match more exactly, but I think this kind of "variations on a theme" version of coordinating rather than matching adds a lot of richness and interest to an outfit (while not requiring you have 17 closets full of tights and boots to match every skirt in your wardrobe). Taken with the dark brown top, I've created a good semblance of a column of color even though none of the pieces match exactly.

Dark rust corduroy skirt, CJ Banks, 8/2024, $11.61, total wears = 2, CPW = $5.81

Dark cognac ankle boots, Kohls, 12/2024, $14.39 [with Kohls Cash], total wears = 2, CPW = $7.20

I chose a lightweight long rectangular olive scarf to pick up on the splashes of green-olive in the oval print. Again, this is not a dye-lot match to the color in the top but coordinates well. I tied it using method #5 from this post on genuinely easy ways to tie a scarf.

Olive-yellow scarf, thrifted ThredUp, 12/2019, $1.50, total wears = 8, CPW = $0.19

My bracelet of the day is a recent DIY memory wire creation that I made to coordinate with the oval top. This one has 7 strands/rounds of memory wire with beads ranging from 11/0 seed beads up to 10mm beads. I decided on a color order for my beads (olive, cream/ivory, beige, rust, brown, maroon, gold, silver, etc.) and added beads in that color order until I had reached my desired length. I call this my "mélange" design because it results in a delightful mixture of colors (including mixed metals), sizes, materials, and finishes with the color palette acting as the unifying factor. And of course when worn with its inspiration piece as it is here, the outfit as a whole provides an additional level of coordination and intentionality.

I made a pair of earrings for this outfit that have a simple one neutral color (cream) + one metal (gold) palette that means they can be worn in a wide variety of outfits. I used two different styles of cream acrylic with gold print beads that came together in a bead mix. The top round bead has a checkerboard design and the bottom elongated bead has a scroll motif. Rather than stacking them on a single headpin, I let the longer bottom bead dangle from the eye pin used on the round bead. This articulation allows the lower bead to move and swing more freely for a dangly effect. If you like movement in your earrings, this dangle style is a good simple design that you can use again and again. Because I used acrylic beads, the earrings are extremely lightweight and comfortable to wear.

Now for the main event: our Rabbit Imitating Art feature! I decided to pick a rabbit with multiple "natural" colors to reflect the color palette of our inspiration artwork. I was initially thinking a tricolor (white, black, orange) but this soft-toned Harlequin rabbit with the split orange and "blue" colors captured my attention. The "blue" color occurs because the black pigment is "diluted" (i.e., the black pigment is present in a lower density, giving a faded look) due to the rabbit having two recessive genes at the D (diluted) locus. It makes for a really gorgeous fur coloration! This particular bunny has a very nice split of color down the middle of the face, which is considered desirable in this breed. The Harlequin rabbit was first exhibited in Paris in 1887 under the breed name "Japanese" rabbit. Breeds of Rabbits-Their Origins and History from the 1920s explains the confusing name this way: "To Europeans, the orient has an atmosphere of weirdness...The name Japanese was given to the most weirdly marked breed or rabbit known. This breed is strictly of French origin, and has been raised as a common rabbit throughout France."

Although Andrew Clemens has remained obscure as an innovator and artist, even fewer people know that he inspired a very unlikely emulator! Here is the untold story:

In 1887, at the same time Clemens was selling his bottles of layered sand art for a couple dollars each at a grocery store across the street from his dad's wagon shop, a Japanese Harlequin rabbit was disqualified from showing at the French exhibition because his soft orange/"blue" coloration did not fit with the desired bright orange/black coloration of the time. But the rabbit didn't believe that this coloration made him wrong or imperfect; it was his natural fur color. As so many immigrants did before and since, the blue Japanese Harlequin rabbit made his way to the United States in search of a better life.

He settled in Iowa, which was a major farming state that nevertheless didn't have quite as much fruit and vegetable growing available to rabbits as would be ideal. He ventured into the town of McGregor, Iowa, reasoning that he would find Mr. McGregor's vegetable garden there; this garden was thoroughly described in the biographical history The Tale of Peter Rabbit. (This history, which is incorrectly believed to have been written by a human woman in 1893, had already established itself in the European rabbit underground by 1887, even though it was not published by and for humans until 1901/1902.) However, the town was misleadingly named because the famous garden did not exist there. After a time of despondent floppage and increasing hunger spent considering the ridiculousness of human naming habits ("Japanese," "McGregor," etc.), he found a decent patch of grass and ate his fill. This gave him the energy to consider other options for satisfying his veggie cravings.

And so one night he snuck into Henry Goldschmidt's grocery store after closing, and there amid the usual actual food and human food items he found something strange and perplexing: bottles filled with sand that depicted elaborate designs and images. Even more bizarre was the fact that apparently humans would exchange money for these bottles, money that could instead have been spent on carrots! Is there no end to human madness?! But he was intrigued by the possibility that he too could make layered art that humans would trade money for, allowing him to purchase treasured veg.

Keeping himself hidden in the store, the rabbit spent several days listening in on human conversations about these bottles and discovered that a young deaf man created them by meticulously placing individual grains of sand inside the bottles to form patterns from the colors. This was a bit distressing as the rabbit didn't have sand or the hands to arrange it, but he thought about adapting the technique in a way suitable to his bunny self.

The next day he began collecting blades of grass (as the Clemens brothers did sand) and forming compact bricks from them. (Sadly, the details of his method have been lost in the mists of time.) When he had a good supply of grass bricks, which he called "pellets," he layered them gently with his mouth into a dish. This took a LOT of time and effort. But he had a revelation: since all of his pellets were green in color, no one would be able to tell the difference between intentionally layered pellets or a random hodge-podge of pellets! So he dumped the pellets into the dish, thus greatly speeding up his artistic process. Having discovered that Americans were greatly impressed by all things French, he called his randomly layered pellets a "mélange."

He set up shop with his "mélange" dish outside the front of the grocery store and waited for his first customer. But the humans would look at him, look at his full dish, and walk away. Selling art was harder than he thought it would be! As the day wore on, he got hungry and started nibbling on the "pellets" in his dish. By the time the grocery store was getting ready to close up, he'd eaten the artwork in its entirety. But to his great surprise, when Mr. Goldschmidt came out of the shop to lock up for the evening, he looked into the empty dish and said, "Oh, do you not have any food, little fella? I have some produce I can spare." He returned into the shop and came out again with a variety of veggies in his hands, which he placed in the empty dish and then walked away.

The rabbit immediately ate all the veg in the dish and flopped down into a relaxed sphinx position, marveling at what had just occurred. While he wasn't able to sell his artwork in exchange for money to buy carrots, he ended the day having eaten both the grass "pellets" he'd made AND carrots he was given for free by a kind human!

He continued this as a daily practice for the rest of his life...making (and eating) art and receiving produce, conversation, and (with time) pets from the grocer. It didn't take long before he was spending his nights and some of the colder days of the Iowa winter curled up inside the store. (The fact that some customers inquired about the rabbit as if he were food is something Henry made sure the bunny never heard about!) And while no one remembers his name (not even me), and he did not become famous as an artist, the "blue" "Japanese" rabbit made art, and he made a good friend, and he found himself a happy home...which is surely a great success by any measure.

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 14 Shades of Grey.

Do you have the patience for creating art as meticulously as Andrew Clemens did his layered sand pieces? Do you have a preference for high contrast versus low contrast outfits? Would you wear a "tonally monochromatic" column of color in various shades of brown-ish colors? Would you have opted for a floral design or a geometric design for your interpretation of the artwork?

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